He built a safe space when the game wasn’t safe to attend.

Abdul Malik Ahad arrived in England on Christmas Day 1979. He was seven years old. He hid under his auntie’s poncho at Heathrow because he had never felt cold like it.

A few years later, aged ten, he found himself surrounded by football fans near Shore Road in Oldham on a Saturday afternoon before a match. A skinhead put a beer can on his head and smashed it. He ran. That was the backdrop to football for the British Bangladeshi community in Oldham in the early 1980s. You watched from home. You kept the shutters down.

But Abdul didn’t let it stop him. He built something else.

In episode nine of Football for Breakfast, Jim Johnson sits down with Abdul in the greasy spoon café to talk about belonging, community and what football does when the game that’s supposed to bring everyone together isn’t yet safe to attend.

Building from the inside out

They talk about the 5-a-side and 7-a-side tournaments Abdul helped organise for the Bangladeshi Youth Movement – competitions that started as a way of finding a safe space and became fiercer and more meaningful than anyone expected. A community building itself from the inside out because no one else was going to build it for them.

The skills he developed organising those football tournaments are the same skills he uses now as CEO of Steve Biko Housing Association in Liverpool – one of only two Black and Racial Minority housing associations on Merseyside, built on the mission of homes and communities without racism.

The object on the table

He brings a Liverpool Premier League champions t-shirt to the table. The one his community couldn’t celebrate in 2020 because Covid hit. So they waited. Then thirty Bangladeshi Reds got together at a restaurant in Oldham and finally let it out. Two years late. Twice as good.

The result he’ll never get over? Oldham Athletic versus Manchester United. He still hasn’t got over it.

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Also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Football for Breakfast is presented by OSS Security. New episode every Tuesday morning.