Football - Parliament Inquiry

GUARDIAN/Owen Gibson

Lord Triesman blames Sir Dave Richards for lack of key FA reforms
• Former chairman hits out at 'really aggresive' Premier League
• Ruling body said to have 'backed out of regulating'

English football will come under renewed political pressure in the wake of a parliamentary inquiry that has heard claims from the former Football Association chairman, Lord Triesman, that the "really aggressive" attitude of the Premier League and its chairman, Sir Dave Richards, had blocked any attempt at reform.

Lord Triesman, who clashed repeatedly with the Premier League before being forced to resign in Many 2010 over a controversial newspaper sting, has broken his silence over his tenure. "There was no appetite for change," he said, blaming the "systemic failure" of English football governance on a lack of will within the game. Apart from the area of onfield discipline, the FA had "backed out from regulating altogether", he said.

Lord Burns, the Channel 4 chairman who delivered a report in 2005 that recommended the introduction of non‑executive directors to break the deadlock on the FA board and reform of the FA Council, criticised the failure to take up his reforms and regretted not being more bold.

"The present board is as if the Financial Services Authority had a controlling interest by the banks who they are regulating. I don't think anybody would regard that as being a satisfactory state of affairs," said Burns. "The FA have struggled to come to terms with the extent of the change in the game and the burdens placed upon them."

Triesman said the FA board, split equally between representatives of the professional and amateur games, was "heavily, deeply conflicted".

It was Richards, said Triesman, who led a move to successfully kill a document that would have set out a new regulatory role for the FA, after it was considered for "a maximum of two minutes".

"The Professional Game Board is led by the most powerful voice in professional football because that controls such a high proportion of the money that flows through the game," said Triesman.

"The point was made by the chairman of the Premier League that this [the FA's submission] should be disregarded from that point on and to simply acknowledge the work done by the Premier League principally and the professional game, and reminding the representatives of the amateur game there where their money came from."Triesman also said a proposal by the former FA chief executive, Ian Watmore – who later quit in frustration at the "vested interests" on the board – to have a group of advisers drawn from more ethnically diverse backgrounds, with more women, was also "dismissed after about two minutes on the grounds that all the talent that was needed was in the room".

Premier League insiders have long argued that Triesman was not a consensual figure and failed to consult properly on his plans, before finally withdrawing them in a fit of pique.

Triesman claimed the divisive Richards, who has been chairman of the Premier League since 1999, was a bullying, domineering presence. "My experience is he will put his point politely in board meetings but discussions outside are extremely aggressive discussions, really aggressive discussions, points are made in a very colourful manner. I wouldn't use that language. This is a very, very macho sport. I think some people have cultivated what they think of as being the language of the dressing room as appropriate everywhere."

The sports minister, Hugh Robertson, who recently called football the "worst-governed sport in this country", is determined that the conclusions of the culture, media and sport select committee will result in firm action.

In the years since Burns delivered his original report, successive Labour ministers attempted to persuade the FA to add non-executives to its board but failed.

However, the coalition government is believed to feel that last year's twin failures, of the England team at the World Cup and the 2018 World Cup bid in Zurich, have given it a mandate to act.

Treisman said that the failure to reform the FA to make it the game's overarching regulator had an impact on all levels of the game, including the national team.

"In terms of our clubs we obviously have fantastic success with the Premier League, it is an amazing example," he said.

"But if we look at England as a country playing international football, the outcomes are very poor. I don't think they are satisfactory for England football fans and if the minister was asking if we have a good system, then we have systemic failure."

The inquiry's recommendations could result in the overdue introduction of non-executive directors to the FA board and reform of the Premier League board, which currently comprises just Richards and the chief executive, Richard Scudamore.

The Premier League has always insisted that it supported the Burns reforms. But with the representatives of the national game reluctant to vote for the introduction of non-executives because it would reduce their influence, the issue has proved intractable.

In the wake of England's failure to host the 2018 World Cup, Lord Triesman, the former chairman of the bid, said it was launched on "a completely false prospectus".

"When we set off there was a huge amount of encouragement from Fifa, who said they weren't sure how the finances from South Africa would work out and how the finances from Brazil would work out. So there was a lot of encouragement for England to go for it," he said. "Had they [Fifa] said at the time that the aim was to break into new territories, I would have advised the FA board not to proceed in the first place."

He said he would return to give evidence on the bidding process and claims of corruption. "There will be a time when the contacts I and others had with members of the Fifa executive should be described in detail, because some of the processes I don't think really stand up to proper scrutiny."


The committee, chaired by John Whittingdale MP, is due to deliver its report later this year. It is expected that the government, understood to be "doing its own thinking" in parallel, will act after the report is published.

www.guardian.co.uk/football/2011/feb/08/lord-triesman-sir-dave-richards-fa


DAVID CONN/The Guardian

Lord Triesman reveals a bullied and impotent FA to Commons inquiryFormer FA chairman tells of a governing body unable to curtail power of 'macho' Premier League


Share4 Comments (29)
David Conn guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 8 February 2011 20.43 GMT Article history
Lord Triesman, the former FA chairman, has delivered a damning verdict on football's governing body. Photograph: Wpa Pool/Getty Images

There was a sense of deja vu in the House of Commons committee room, the winter sun golden outside, as three ghosts of the Football Association's past – Lord Triesman, the former chairman, Graham Kelly, the ex-chief executive, and Lord Burns, who conducted a review six years ago – explained how, in different ways, they tried to wrestle English football into change and why, due to the same entrenched vested interests, it had failed to happen .

It was new and dramatic, though, to have it all out in public, with parliamentary privilege, hearing Triesman talk of the "macho, bullying" conduct of the Premier League chairman, Sir Dave Richards, on the FA board, that the professional game dismissed after "a maximum of two minutes" Triesman's proposals for financial reform, and to introduce more women and ethnic minority people as advisers, with Richards warning the grassroots representatives on the board to "remember where the money comes from".

Triesman, FA chairman from 2008 until he was forced to resign last May, produced the damning verdict from his bruising experience that on the issues which really matter for which the FA, as the game's governing body, is responsible – financial wellbeing, ownership of clubs, treatment of fans, making the national team's success a priority – the FA has "backed out of regulating altogether".

Burns himself acknowledged that the FA has never introduced the two independent directors he recommended in 2005 to break the deadlock on the board of five professional game representatives against five from the amateur game. A former permanent secretary at the Treasury, he said of the FA's inability to govern a game dominated by the Premier League clubs' wealth and power: "It's as if the Financial Services Authority had a controlling interest by the banks whom they are trying to regulate."

Kelly, sitting between them, lamented that the Premier League today is not the one he envisaged, which was to be integrated closely with the FA and reduced to 18 clubs to help the England team, when Kelly helped orchestrate the top clubs' breakaway from the Football League in 1992. Kelly has previously described that decision by the FA, which allowed the top clubs not to share the subsequent multi-billion pound satellite TV bonanza with the league's other three divisions, as "a tremendous, collective lack of vision" by the FA.

Vital though it was to hear this history and detail on the record, laid out before the House of Commons culture, media and sport select committee, the question which roared out of this first public session of its inquiry into football "governance," although left unsaid, was: will anything change this time?


The worst governed sport in the country?

The select committee launched its inquiry in December, after the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government promised in its coalition agreement to "support the co-operative ownership of football clubs by supporters". The committee said it was responding to "broader concerns that current and future generations of football supporters are ill served" by the way the game is run, and that it will "consider the case for strategic government intervention". That question, about whether the government should intervene to help the game manage its problems, and if so, how, will come to dominate the committee's deliberations.

The committee produced a specific list of the game's challenges which it will consider: whether there is too much debt in professional football, the merits of supporters trusts owning stakes in clubs, whether football clubs should be treated differently from other commercial organisations, and whether the FA and leagues, who govern the game, are "fit for purpose".

On that latter point, the sports minister, Hugh Robertson, has left the game, and the nation, in no doubt, deriding football in parliament last month as "the worst-governed sport in the country". The committee's chairman, the Conservative MP John Whittingdale, has explained that Robertson, and the government, will wait to see what the committee recommends after its inquiry, before deciding whether, and how to act.


What main issues have emerged?

The painful reflections by Triesman, Burns and Kelly about the FA's internal weakness which, they all agreed, has led to the governing body, and football itself, being too dominated by the Premier League, came after a broader discussion about the game's financial challenges with two sports industry academics, Sean Hamil of Birkbeck College and Stefan Szymanski of Cass Business School, and the journalist Patrick Collins. Szymanski argued that football and its clubs should be treated as businesses like any other, but Hamil and Collins disagreed, arguing the game is a vital part of national life and culture, and making familiar, pointed criticisms, which drew noticeably little disagreement from the politicians. English football, they said, has grown remarkably successful and rich since the Premier League was formed, yet the financial gap between it and the other three divisions from which its clubs broke away has widened enormously; clubs have fallen insolvent 54 times – including Portsmouth, last season, in the Premier League – too many clubs make losses, so end up for sale to international buyers of variable quality; agents take far too many millions out of football, while ticket prices have risen exponentially so that young adults are priced out of grounds in which the average age of a fan is 43.

The testimony of the former FA grandees served to explain why the FA has failed to address these downsides of the commercial boom. Triesman said "conflicts of interest" on the FA board, the professional game's dominance, enforced by Richards's "macho", threatening style, and the "lack of diversity" in the almost all-white governing body, represented "systemic failure". Burns said he wished he had gone further with his recommendations, arguing that more independence at the FA is crucial. Kelly said the men on the FA's governing council are "too entrenched" in their positions to pursue change.


What solutions were proposed?

All the witnesses were asked to consider what will become the heart of the matter: whether the government should itself intervene to shape the game into change. Szymanski and Burns thought not, arguing the government has no real place or "purchase" in actively reforming football. Hamil pointed out that the last time the government did pass a law affecting the game, the Football Spectators Act, which implemented all-seater stadiums in the top two divisions and a range of safety requirements after the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, it had been overwhelmingly positive.

Triesman, saying he had thought about the issue a great deal, said persuasion is "always best", but "it's pretty hard". He had, he said, concluded that the government could introduce a sports law, as has been done in other European countries, setting out principles sports should follow and embody, and giving governing bodies, like the FA, "clear authority for the regulation of the sport".

The challenge for the committee, and for Robertson once it has reported, is whether to boldly consider legislation, or fall back on yet more urging of the game to change. The politicians will not want to line up in another inquiry themselves, in several years' time, explaining, like Triesman, Burns and Kelly, why their own efforts to reform the national sport failed.
www.guardian.co.uk/football/david-conn-inside-sport-blog/2011/feb/08/lord-triesman-fa-commons-inquiry


Digger/The Guardian - Matt Scott

Lord Burns accuses FA of losing plot over regulation
• Author of structural review gives verdict to select committee
• 'FA has struggled to come to terms with changes in game'


Lord Burns said the FA had allowed the Premier League and Football League to take ownership of the game. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

Six years of silence from Lord Burns since his structural review was prepared for, delivered to and ignored by the Football Association were evidently not due to a fear of putting himself above the parapet.

Breaking his silence before the culture, media and sport select committee and, despite sharing the platform with two of the organisation's recent leaders, he pulled no punches about the FA's regulatory record. It is a pity he did not speak out sooner.

Burns's message was effectively that the game has moved very fast in the past 20 years and those at the top of the FA have not had the wit to keep up, allowing the Premier League and Football League to take ownership of the game.

"My perspective is that the FA have struggled to come to terms with the changes in the game and therefore they have operated a subsidiary model with the management of the leagues," said Burns.

It was a bold statement, particularly given that immediately to his left sat Graham Kelly and Lord Triesman.

Kelly, of course, was the FA chief executive who approved the separation of the top 22 clubs – now 20 – from the rest of the Football League, which was clearly no panacea for football's ills.

Triesman was a man on a mission: that of restoring the FA as the unquestioned authority in English football. But he was unequal to the task.

But perhaps the years have clouded Burns's memory. For he was incorrect in saying that in the past the FA had no responsibility for regulating off‑field matters. It always did; it is just that at that time men such as Kelly were in charge.

Dare not speak his name

Lord Triesman has given a big clue why the Burns review was so swiftly discarded. "After a small while, Terry, I learned I couldn't use your name at the FA headquarters," recalled Triesman when addressing Lord Burns. "I could talk about reforms but if I wanted to scare the children I would quote you." Ironically, the same can be said of Triesman today. When the Football Association set out to find a successor to the former Labour party general secretary, it had only one prerequisite: that the appointee should not be another politician.

www.guardian.co.uk/football/2011/feb/09/lord-burns-fa

So, they are asking "Lord" Triesman what is wrong with English Football ?

Wow, you really couldnt make this stuff up.

Beyond surreal.