On April 22, 1993 the black teenager Steven Lawrence was waiting at a bus stop in south London when white youths came up and stabbed him twice. Lawrence ran away up a hill, but soon collapsed and died.

Later that same week, I sat in acrowd of people in a London pub watching England-Holland on TV. Every time England’s black midfielder John Barnes got the ball, one man - in shirtsleeves and a tie, just out of his office - made monkey noises. Every time, his coworkers laughed. If anyone had complained, let alone gone off to find a policeman and asked him to arrest the man, the response would have been: “Where’s your sense of humor?”

Anyone hoping to understand the current hubbub over racism in English football - Luis Suarez’s eight-match ban for abusing Patrice Evra, John Terry’s imminent appearance in court for alleged racism - needs to go back to 1993. Back then, racism in English football was still standard. But partly because of the Lawrence murder, that changed. English football has all but stamped out racism in the stands and on the field; other big leagues lag shamefully. Yet there is another form of racism that silently persists in the Premier League.

When black players first emerged in English football in the 1970s, they were treated to monkey noises and bananas. (As Nick Hornby notes in Fever Pitch, "There may well be attractive, articulate and elegant racists, but they certainly never come to soccer matches.") For a while, neo-Nazi parties even imagined they could lead a revolution from the soccer terraces. Several English teams - notably Liverpool and Everton - remained all-white for much of the 1980s, apparently on tacit principle. John Barnes’s move to Liverpool in 1987 was considered so extraordinary that Dave Hill wrote a book about it, Out of His Skin.

The sports economist Stefan Szymanski (my co-author on Soccernomics) has used wage data to show that many English clubs in the 1980s were still discriminating against black players. These clubs preferred to sign white players rather than equally good but cheaper blacks.

Yet then something changed. Stefan found that around about 1990, clubs stopped discriminating against blacks. Later Lawrence’s murder jolted the British Establishment into action. Initially, an uninterested police force had bungled the hunt for the boy’s attackers. Indeed, only this month, eighteen years after the murder, were two of the killers finally convicted.

But the Lawrence murder helped prompt Britain’s ruling classes to stop accepting overt racism against black and brown people. This became clear in a moving scene in the House of Commons on March 4, 1997. British elections were due within two months. The Conservative prime minister, John Major, seemed certain to lose. Many expected Major to "play the race card": rallying voters by attacking black people. The race card had worked for the Conservatives since 1964, when a local Conservative got elected to parliament under the slogan, "If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour."

That day in 1997, the Conservative MP Nicholas Budgen rose in the Commons and asked Major a question. "Will my right honourable Friend agree," Budgen began in the Commons’s ornate language, "that one of the great successes of the past 18 years has been the strict control of immigration", and he went on to suggest that Labour cuddled black people.   

Budgen was inviting Major to play the race card. But Major refused. "In the past 18 years, we have seen the most extraordinary changes and improvements in race relations in this country," he coldly told Budgen. "I am certainly not going to lend my voice… to anything that would damage that improvement." Major was turning down probably his last chance of staying in power. Here Labour’s leader Tony Blair piped up to say something that opposition leaders never say two months before an election: "The prime minister deserves credit for that answer." The Establishment was uniting against racism.

A year later, Budgen died of liver cancer, his brand of race-baiting history. Of course, another kind of racism still flourishes in British public life: tabloids and politicians still happily bash gypsies, asylum-seekers, and future immigrants. But at least British blacks have become widely accepted as British, and for that football can take some credit.

Whenever England’s black players were abused during a match abroad in the 1990s or 2000s, in Spain or Slovakia or Croatia, their white teammates, often led by David Beckham, complained to the media. The white players weren’t being liberals. They were just standing up for their mates. But in doing so, they were defining racism as a foreign custom. It was a sort of xenophobic anti-racism: "We English are more civilized than you."

The England team helped create a colour-blind Englishness. In David Winner’s book Those Feet: A Sensual History of English Football, a British Asian describes watching an England match in a Luton pub: "The opening bars of 'Three Lions' floated across the bar, and within seconds we were a sea of smiling faces and linked arms. Whites, Asians and blacks joined together, tunelessly and passionately, in this modern anthem to England's dreaming."

Today anyone who uses racist hate speech in public in Britain is in trouble – in more trouble, perhaps, than in any other country. In 2010 almost 40,000 hate crimes were reported in the UK. That is in large part Steven Lawrence’s legacy. So seriously does Britain now take these matters that after Patrice Evra said Luis Suarez had racially abused him during Liverpool-Manchester United last October, an independent commission produced a 115-page report for the Football Association. The report’s conclusion: Suarez had called Evra "negro" seven times. He was banned for eight matches. All this fuss seems to have surprised the player. Indeed, he got vocal support from various fellow-Uruguayans (including Brighton’s manager Gus Poyet) who were obviously not used to racism getting punished.

Warming up before Wigan-Liverpool in December, Liverpool’s players wore Luis Suarez T-shirts in solidarity. The act was widely condemned as foolish. "As an ex-footballer having experienced racist comments throughout my career I was saddened to see Liverpool players wear those T-shirts," twittered Paul McGrath, great black centre-back of the 1980s. "I would have been much happier if they had worn anti-racist T-shirts." Liverpool’s manager Kenny Dalglish castigated the critics with, "They will not divide the football club, no matter how hard they try," as if the whole Suarez affair had been got up as a conspiracy.

Yet Liverpool have no intention of reclaiming their all-white image of the 1980s. They have promised a lifetime ban to the fan or fans (possibly decked out in those same Suarez T-shirts) who racially abused Oldham’s defender Tom Adeyemi in the FA Cup match on January 6. Adeyemi cried on the pitch; other Oldham and Liverpool players, including Dirk Kuijt and Steven Gerrard, comforted him.

English stadiums have stopped being havens for racists. Just after Christmas I sat in the stands of the Emirates for Arsenal-Wolves amid black people, Japanese, Chinese, everybody. That didn’t happen twenty years ago (though even in the bad old days, Arsenal never felt like a racist place). Nobody in British football gets away with racist speech anymore. On February 1 John Terry, captain of England and Chelsea, will appear in west London magistrates’ court charged with racially abusing QPR’s Anton Ferdinand. "I will fight tooth and nail to prove my innocence," Terry has said.

The English reforms are particularly impressive given that no other big league has followed suit. Obviously racism still thrives in eastern European football. More surprisingly, it still thrives in Spain, Italy, France and Holland too. Here are a few of the more noteworthy incidents:

- In Italy: the frequent racist abuse of Mario Balotelli when he played for Inter Milan, and the blithe acceptance of this inside Italian football. Simon Martin’s new book Sport Italia describes how, after Juventus fans chanted "There are no black Italians" during Inter’s visit to Turin in 2009, Italy’s under-21 manager Pierluigi Casiraghi said of Balotelli: "It's his personality that's irritating. It's not racism." Italy's then manager Marcello Lippi told high-school pupils that "cases of racism in football don’t exist in Italy." Perhaps it’s not total coincidence that Italy’s brightest young footballer now plays in the Premier League. I’d love to see Stefan Szymanski research whether wage discrimination still exists in Serie A.

- In Spain: The monkey noises that disappeared from English stadiums in the 1990s continue in Spain. Samuel Eto’o in his Barcelona days was a regular victim. Similarly, after Spain’s manager Luis Aragones called Thierry Henry a “negro de mierda” (“black shit”) in 2004, he simply offered up the classic racist’s defence: "Some of my best friends are black." Aragones was allowed to soldier on merrily, even becoming a national hero after Spain won Euro 2008. This week Espanyol's president gave his team's fans 'a 10' for their behaviour during the derby match against Barcelona, even though they had made monkey noises every time Dani Alves of Barca got the ball."

- In France: In 2010 the national team’s manager Laurent Blanc complained about France’s black players in a private meeting at the French federation. He said, "You have the feeling that we are producing really only one prototype of player: big, strong, fast... and who are the big, strong, fast players? The blacks. That's the way it is." He added, "The Spaniards told me, 'We don’t have a problem. We don’t have any black players.'" Today Blanc soldiers on merrily as France’s manager.

- In the Netherlands: At a board meeting of Ajax Amsterdam last summer, Johan Cruijff, the father of Dutch football, told his fellow board member Edgar Davids: "You’re only here because you’re black." Cruijff later shrugged off the remark: "'The baldie, that squinter, that redhead,' what does it matter? That's spoken language in football." Indeed it is, in most countries. Cruijff soldiers on merrily as Ajax’s guiding light.

- Don’t expect guidance from Fifa’s president Sepp Blatter. Last November he famously said about on-pitch racist abuse: "The one affected by this should say, ‘This is a game’ and shake hands." Blatter soldiers on merrily etc.

However, the English shouldn’t pat themselves on the back just yet. The Cruijff-Davids incident raises an interesting question: where are the black directors of English clubs? It’s hard to think of even one. Nor do you find many blacks in the most powerful post in English football. Trevor Phillips, head of Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission, pointed out to me in 2005: "Loads of black players on the field and none in the dugout."

That’s still true. Only in 2008 did Blackburn make Paul Ince the first black British manager in the Premier League. They sacked him after six months. Not even good results with Newcastle could save the black manager Chris Hughton in 2010: he had won the club promotion to the Premier League the season before, but four months into the new season, with Newcastle safely in eleventh place in the top division, he was sacked. "Regrettably the board now feels that an individual with more managerial experience is needed to take the club forward," the club explained. Newcastle finished the season twelfth.

True, the black managers Ruud Gullit and Jean Tigana got longer stints in the Premier League. Crucially, though, they were foreigners. They were perceived in Britain first of all as Dutch or French, and only secondarily as black. Gullit was cast as a typical sophisticated Dutch manager, not as an untried "black" one. The stereotype in English football still says that black Britons can’t manage. Any club appointing someone who is not a white male ex-player with a conservative haircut must worry about looking foolish if its choice fails. Hiring a black manager feels risky, because as Barnes says, "Black guys haven’t proved themselves as managers." White guys have - or at least some of them appear to have.

In 2003 the NFL of American gridiron football passed the Rooney Rule. This requires teams to interview at least one minority candidate when recruiting a head coach or other senior official. The rule has made quite a difference in the NFL. If English football really wants to eradicate all racism, it needs to follow.