Photos:See photos of young England football stars in their training camp ...Is this about race?

Sometimes, people with similar backgrounds and tastes like to stick together,We naturally gravitate to people we share common bonds with. ie people who we believe understand our culture, backgrounds, families, history, beliefs! We seek comfort in difficult or stressful situations.

It is clear there is no animus between the groups. Indeed, other pictures taken during the tour show the squad training, laughing and joking together with no divisions at all. They are comfortable and happy in each other’s company. And yet as we can see, more than once in social and sporting situations the group seems subconsciously to divide in two.
There is clearly no racism at play here, in either direction, but the pictures illuminate an element of British society that I, as a black Briton, know is too often ignored, not least because in this politically correct age it is deemed taboo.

Look at playgrounds and parks, youth clubs and nightclubs and you will see this pattern repeated time and again. Whites will socialise with whites, blacks with blacks, and Asians with Asians. They effectively segregate themselves.

Shared experiences and habit play a role but, in Britain at least, does part of the reason lie in multiculturalism?

This fashionable dogma is obsessed with instilling respect for diversity and celebrating different groups’ beliefs and traditions. The result has been not, as was hoped, a society in which people of various backgrounds mix freely but one made up too often of separate communities.
Could it be that in the process of respecting the differences between us all, we are inadvertently quietly reinforcing cultural barriers which separate black and white?

That, in my view, is what we are seeing in the football pictures; the result of multiculturalism in microcosm, allied to the natural human impulse to gravitate towards what is familiar and therefore reassuring.

 It is fascinating to see this social divide among young footballers in particular, partly because many of them will have grown up in urban schools where numerous colours and creeds rub along together, but also because the sport has made such efforts to stamp out racism in recent years.