Can Vimal Yoganathan blaze a trail for the Sri-Lankan Tamil diaspora in professional football?
It isn't just Tamils, or even Sri-Lankans. South Asians in general remain underrepresented in the professional game in England.
In losing 7-0 to Manchester United in the League Cup with Barnsley on Tuesday night, it probably wasn’t a result that Vimal Yoganathan would have dreamed of while he was a schoolboy playing in the Liverpool youth set-up, but his appearance in that match marked another significant milestone for the first player of Sri-Lankan Tamil descent to play professional football in this country.
Yoganathan joined Barnsley after being released by Liverpool at the age of 16, and his arrival in the first team at Oakwell over the previous thirteen months has marked another waypoint reached on the long journey for a young player who had the ability to able to impress one of the Premier League’s biggest clubs into giving him a chance when he was a child.
Now he’s taken another big step towards building a sustainable professional career in the game. He made his debut for Barnsley in an EFL Trophy match against Manchester United’s under-21s in August 2023 after having previously been an unused substitute in a handful of games, scoring both of their goals in a 3-2 defeat. He’s been creeping into the first team with greater regularity ever since.
It’s certainly been quite a year for this young player. In March he made his debut for the Wales under-19s against Belgium, and he was also included in their squad for international matches at the start of this month. Considering that this team’s alumni includes Gareth Bale, Harry Wilson, Daniel James and Ethan Ampadu, among many others, the sense of opportunity that he must be experiencing at the moment must be quite a feeling.
It’s fair to say that Sri-Lanka isn’t really a football country. As with the rest of South Asia, cricket is by far the dominant sport, with the greatest sporting moment in the island’s history coming in 1996, when they beat Australian by seven wickets in Lahore to win the Cricket World Cup. Football, by comparison, has long been something of a sideshow. The national team is currently ranked 205th out of 210 in FIFA’s world rankings.
Yoganathan certainly isn’t the first player of Sri-Lankan descent to have played professional or semi-professional football in this country. Marvin Hamilton, a midfielder with a seventeen-year long career spent mostly in the English non-league game, made six appearances for Sri-Lankan national team between 2021 and 2022.
More recently still, Sam Durrant, who has an English father and a Sri-Lankan mother, passed through the youth systems at Liverpool, Everton and Blackburn Rovers before joining Sheffield Wednesday in 2022. He made his full League debut for them as a substitute on the final day of the 2022/23 season against Derby County, but was released that summer and joined the League of Ireland club Dundalk, where he has played ever since.
Durrant earned a call-up to the full Sri-Lankan squad for their 2027 AFC Asian Cup Qualifying matches against Cambodia earlier this month. After drawing 0-0 in the first leg in Colombo, an equaliser in stoppage-time at the end of extra-time forced a 2-2 draw in the return match in Phnom Penh and they won the resulting penalty shootout to progress to the next stage of the competition.
There remains a long way to go, if they’re to achieve qualification for the AFC Asian Cup finals. The next round will be played in groups of four over six match days between March 2025 and March 2026 with only group winners qualifying for the finals, which are to be played in Saudi Arabia in January 2027. It’s extremely convoluted and the odds are stacked against them, but you’ve got to be in it to have a chance and, well, they are still in it.
Sri-Lanka’s qualification bid for the 2026 World Cup ended last October with a 4-1 aggregate defeat to Yemen, but just to get a team playing regularly together and getting results is an improvement on some points in their past. They had to withdraw from qualification for the 1978 World Cup, for example, because they couldn’t afford to pay the entrance fee, while their highest ever FIFA ranking is 122nd, in August 1998. To put it another way, this has not been, traditionally speaking, a country with exceptionally high footballing ambitions.
Within the overall population of South Asia, the Tamils are a minority who have in the past been ruthlessly oppressed in both Sri-Lanka and India. They make up around 15% of the population of Sri-Lanka, three million people, with the vast majority of Tamils—around 69 million—living in India, where they make up around 5.7% of the population.
This minority status is also reflected in the broader Sri-Lankan diaspora. According to the 2021 census, there were just 125,000 people of Tamil descent living in the UK or, to put it another way, around the same number of people living in Hastings in East Sussex. Add the dominance of cricket in the sporting culture of South Asia to this and it starts to become apparent why it has taken so long for a player of this particular sub-division of this particular ethnicity to emerge in professional football.
Furthermore, the underrepresentation of South Asians is an issue in English football which stretches beyond the Tamils or Sri-Lankans. It has been estimated that of the 3,700 professional footballers in England, just 22 are of South Asian descent, a remarkably low figure when we consider that there are around five million—7.5% of the population overall—South Asians living in this country.
The first South Asians to play football professionally in this country were the Cother brothers Edwin and John, who played for Watford in 1898. A pub in the town was named after them in 2022. Jimmy Carter and Robert Rosario, also both players of Indian descent, also blazed this trail in the 1980s. Progress has been slow, but it has been made.
Yoganathan, despite his tender years, seems plenty aware of the symbolic importance of making his debut for Barnsley. In an interview with The Guardian’s Will Unwin earlier this week, he said:
I had a friend and we played in the same Sunday League team but other than that I can’t remember coming up against any south Asian background players. I can’t remember any Tamil players growing up, whether that’s even Sunday league and definitely not academy football. I don’t think I met a single Tamil footballer, so it’s definitely a problem that’s all the way through the pyramid.
It seems likely that the Sri-Lankan football association, the Football Federation of Sri-Lanka, will be keeping tabs on his progress with Wales. Yoganathan may already have been capped by the Wales under-19s—he was raised in the small Flintshire village of Trelawnyd and was spotted by Liverpool while playing in the youth set-up at Prestatyn Town—and will continue to hold out hopes of making the full Wales team, but he wouldn’t be prevented from playing for the Sri-Lanka national team under FIFA rules until he has won his first full cap. And even in the event that his career with Barnsley doesn't end up panning out as intended, the opportunity could be there for him to have an international playing career, even should he ultimately slide down football’s employment ladder in this country, as the majority of teenage players do.
But those questions and those decisions are for another day. Vimal Yoganathan is still only setting out on his journey and it’s impossible to say where it will end up. But in representing a minority of a minority of a minority, even at just 18 years of age he is already setting a path which may lead to influencing others to become more involved in professional football in this country as well.
One 7-0 defeat is just a blip in a far broader story, an extremely complex one which touches on the differences between ethnicity and nationality, and of being from more than one place at the same time. Whether he ends up being Welsh or Sri-Lankan in a sporting sense, he will forever be the first Sri-Lankan Tamil to play professional football in this country and that, in and of itself, is something in which he should take a huge amount of pride.