Post by QPR Report on Sept 7, 2009 6:48:04 GMT
I wonder how QPR would have fared if its' various Chairmen and Board members had been thoroughly vetted before being permitted...[
b]Guardian -
chairman Lord Triesman wants to regulate Premier League 'fit and proper persons' test• Lord Triesman congratulates Premier League on tougher criteria
• Leagues and FA currently administer separate tests[/b]
Lord Triesman, the chairman of the Football Association, has said he wants his organisation to regulate a new 'fit and proper persons' test covering both the Premier League and Football League.
"I have thought the whole way through that the regulatory authority of the national association in any sport needs to be clear-cut and it needs to be able to answer the questions about fit and proper persons as much as any other body," Triesman said.
It was not practical that the existing tests on whether potential investors in football clubs were 'fit and proper persons' were administered separately by the Premier League, Football League and the FA, he said.
"Not everyone shares the same view but my feeling is that it would be a good deal more efficient if we all administered one system. It's a system made for partnership," Triesman told The Independent.
Earlier this year, the Premier League announced tougher criteria for any club director with a stake of 30% or more, after pressure from Andy Burnham, then the Culture Secretary.
"What I do regard as progress are the efforts made in the Premier League to strengthen their processes. They have all gone in the direction which I think they need to go in. I think there are potential gains in efficiency by towrking together rather than everyone running a different system."
"It [the fit and proper persons test] has become a good deal more robust," Triesman said.
Last year, Triesman criticised the high levels of debt carried by many clubs and said there was not enough transparency. The economic downturn has now forced clubs to take his warning seriously.
"It's no longer something that can't be talked about properly and that's good and it is a great credit to the clubs - I take my hat off to them," Triesman said. "It is important that with big clubs in Europe, let alone in England, a new assessment is being made of the level of risk and that's got to be healthy."
www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/sep/07/lord-triesman-football-association-premier-league
Independent/Sam Wallace
Triesman draws battle lines on ownership test
FA chairman wants governing body – not the Premier League – to rule on 'fit and proper persons'
Monday, 7 September 2009
Triesman told The Independent that he believed that the FA should be the ultimate authority when it came to the delicate decisions on whether certain investors should be able to own English football clubs.
The Football Association chairman Lord Triesman wants his organisation at the head of a new "fit and proper persons test", instead of the Premier League, to investigate the finances and backgrounds of potential investors in English football clubs.
Triesman told The Independent that he believed that the FA should be the ultimate authority when it came to the delicate decisions on whether certain investors should be able to own English football clubs. Triesman said: "I have thought the whole way through that the regulatory authority of the national association in any sport needs to be clear cut and it needs to be able to answer the questions about fit and proper persons as much as any other body."
The remarks by Triesman, in a wide-ranging interview, are likely to raise eyebrows at the Premier League who made a great play in May of tightening up their fit and proper person's test after pressure from the then-Culture Secretary Andy Burnham. The Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore announced tougher criteria for any club director with a stake of 30 per cent or more.
The FA's first independent chairman said it was not practical that the existing "fit and proper persons" tests were administered separately by the FA, the Premier League and the Football League. Conceding that his view might be regarded as "controversial" in some quarters, Triesman said: "Not everybody shares the same view but my feeling is that it would be a good deal more efficient if we all administered one system. It's a system made for partnership.
"What I do regard as progress are the efforts made in the Premier League to strengthen their processes. They have all gone in the direction which I think they need to go in. I think there are potential gains in efficiency by working together rather than everyone running a different system." Triesman added: "It [the fit and proper persons test] has become a good deal more robust."
Scudamore and Triesman have clashed before, most notably when the FA chairman made an explosive speech in October criticising the debt in English football clubs and warning that they were not transparent enough about finances. Triesman told The Independent that he still believed he was right to make that speech and that clubs had changed their attitudes. "What's most important is that everyone is much more careful about risk," he said.
With England's qualification for the World Cup imminent – they could seal it on Wednesday with a win over Croatia or next month in their three remaining qualifiers – Triesman said that he expected the approach to be different in South Africa. In 2006, there was embarrassment at the FA at how the WAG phenomenon among the players' families staying in nearby Baden-Baden, in south-west Germany, was permitted to take over.
Triesman said: "Fabio [Capello] will set the standards and I'll back him. I see a group of people working around him who are dedicated to the players' athleticism, their fitness, their health and that's great to see. There is nothing else buzzing round the edges. That's what they are doing."
As well as the FA, Triesman is also chairman of England's 2018 World Cup bid board charged with persuading the 24 all-powerful Fifa executive committee [ExCo] members to vote for England. With some ExCo members facing allegations of profiting from ticket scandals – Jack Warner – or taking bribes – Nicolas Leoz – Triesman said he had trust in the process.
"We'll earn it [trust] from them [the ExCo] and we will play it straight," he said. "I have set out my stall about this in the past. We will publish accounts and play it completely straight. I think it is there to be won and I really hope it is England."
It will be Fifa whom England need to impress over the next year, and who on Thursday made the decision to ban Chelsea for two transfer windows for their conduct in the Gaël Kakuta affair. Triesman said his organisation was "closely monitoring the ruling".
"When one of our leading clubs has such a penalty imposed on it by world football's governing body, it is important that as the national association we fully understand the details of the case and the penalty. I don't have all the details, and as Chelsea have confirmed they intend to appeal the decision, I am not in a position to debate the case further."
On the fit and proper persons test, a spokesman for the Premier League said last night: "There is a very clear reason the Premier League and Football League devised different tests because it is important the test comes in at an appropriate level for clubs playing in their competition."
www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news-and-comment/triesman-draws-battle-lines-on-ownership-test-1782952.html
Independent - Lord Triesman: 'Clubs could have gone bust. I can't be indifferent to it'
A year ago, Lord Triesman, the FA chairman, caused a major stir by questioning debt levels in the Premier League. Now, he tells Sam Wallace, events have vindicated his stance and the English game is starting to listen
Monday, 7 September 2009
As an economist by trade, Lord Triesman, the chairman of the Football Association, has identified a major change in attitude in English football in the last 12 months towards debt, the most crucial financial factor in the game. That, finally, the clubs with vast borrowings, or leveraged buyouts are starting to discuss how they will protect their futures.
"It is no longer something that can't be talked about properly and that's good and it is a great credit to the clubs, I take my hat off to them," Triesman says. "Leaders of English football like [Chelsea's] Peter Kenyon and David Gill [of Manchester United] are taking part in these big European discussions." To the extent that when Michel Platini, the president of Uefa, last month floated new stringent measures to punish clubs with excessive borrowing by banning them from the Champions League, he could even claim the backing of Roman Abramovich.
The question of debt in English football has been a major factor in the 20-month reign of Lord Triesman of Tottenham as the FA's first independent chairman. In October last year he delivered his keynote speech at a football conference at Stamford Bridge. He talked of the £3bn debt that English clubs were saddled with, and the contention that, as far as the probity of accounting was concerned, "transparency lies in an unmarked grave".
The temptation was to call it football's "rivers of blood" speech but as a former member of the Communist Party – latterly a New Labour convert – Triesman is at the other end of the political spectrum to Enoch Powell. The speech blindsided the Premier League and their chief executive Richard Scudamore and you get the impression that certain people in that organisation have never forgiven Triesman.
Of course, the worst did not come to pass. The global recession is yet to claim a Premier League club, although it came perilously close with Portsmouth. Triesman, 65, did deliver some pretty unpalatable truths which, 11 months on, have not gone away. Manchester United's debt to the banks for the Glazer takeover is £699m; Chelsea owe Abramovich £701m; Liverpool under their American ownership owe £280m and Arsenal £410m.
"It is important that with big clubs in Europe, let alone in England, a new assessment is being made of the level of risk and that's got to be healthy," Triesman says. "I am an economist and I thought we were getting into a difficult period economically. I expressed that view. I think there is now a wider appreciation of just how difficult the economic world is. If you go back [to the time of the speech] curiously enough some people in the City said there was not going to be any kind of a problem or a crisis. Well, two months later they were saying something very different.
"We should share an objective to shore up the financial stability of the whole of the game. When I said that at Stamford Bridge I was quite concerned with some of the clubs further down the pyramid; I had the likes of Rotherham in mind. This is a club that has been in existence 139 years, very central to the life of the town. Does a vast amount of stuff with local kids. It could have gone out of existence altogether and I cannot be indifferent to that. The circumstances have made people more cautious."
In fact, when Triesman made the speech in October he underestimated how deep English football clubs were in the red. He put football's entire debt, including the FA's, at £3bn; accounts for the year ending July 2008 that were released this year showed that Premier League clubs alone owe £3.1bn.
"In all periods where there is less financial stability, a couple of people start the debate and it is a matter of chance as to who it is and when it is," Triesman says. "What's most important is that everyone is much more careful about risk and although I don't take any credit for it I think I was right to say it.
"I do know from my political time, particularly in the Foreign Office, it was necessary to say things I felt over some troubled places in Africa. I tried to do it as judiciously as I could. Not everyone agreed immediately and I wasn't always right but if you think something is significant and you sit on it and say afterwards 'I always knew that was an issue, I don't think people take you seriously."
Platini, who is a friend of Triesman, has proposed some radical measures for financial fair play. These include a ban from the Champions League for those clubs whose debt is disproportionate to income. "I don't know whether we are close to it," Triesman adds. "What I do know is that he has started a dialogue which the clubs have responded to very well. That's great. That is very important."
Is Platini as anti-English as the perception suggests? "He is not hostile to English football. He is like other people you meet in the world of football, he would like to think that we are taking part in the international football family. He is entitled to have that kind of expectation with a big football nation [England]. It's not a bad expectation."
A former London senior referee, who officiated in games in the preliminary rounds of the FA Cup, Triesman can claim an affiliation with the grass-roots of football. He is also proud of the FA's "Respect" campaign to improve behaviour at all levels of the game but it is the thorny issue of debt in football that he is determined not to back down on.
"I would far rather take part in these discussions and have some impact on them than sit outside, it is like Bonnie Prince Charlie sitting on a foreign shore waiting for a missive he might not like," he says. "What we now have are big clubs engaged and I would rather be engaged in the discussion than a recipient of the news."
Different ball game: Lord's life before football
*Born 30 October, 1943
*Education Attended Stationers' Company School in London before joining the University of Essex. Suspended in 1968 after disrupting a meeting addressed by a defence industry scientist, later reinstated. Attended King's College, Cambridge. Became lecturer and visiting fellow.
*Politics Resigned from Labour in 1970, 10 years after joining at the age of 17. Joined Communist Party, before returning to Labour in 1977.
*Became union official at NATFHE in 1984. General secretary of Association of University Teachers in 1993 and then of the Labour Party in 2001. Made Life Peer in January 2004 as Baron Triesman of Tottenham.
*Made Parliamentary Under Secretary in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office before taking post of Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills.
*Appointed first independent chairman of the FA in 2008.
Comrade Dave: Triesman's Communist past
Lord Triesman's seven-year membership of the Communist Party between 1970 and 1977 is an unusual feature on the CV of a man appointed to run the intensely conservative, 146-year-old Football Association. Of that period of his life Triesman said: "At the time the people on the radical side of life – Jack Straw, me, Charles Clarke, John Reid – were interested in what was needed to make changes rather than make speeches. Most of us came to be involved in Tony Blair's [New Labour] project.
"Then if you had asked them why, they would have said: 'Well, actually it's the mainstream. Go and ask someone who is doing something very different'. It is hard to convey the feeling of an age. People were very interested in experimental theatre, new wave film, design and cultural changes. There were revolutionary breakthroughs in science. It was a period in which there were monumental changes."
Triesman said he has never discussed politics with the England manager, Fabio Capello, whose views are thought to be rather further to the right. ......... Sam Wallace
www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news-and-comment/lord-triesman-clubs-could-have-gone-bust-i-cant-be-indifferent-to-it-1782960.html
b]Guardian -
chairman Lord Triesman wants to regulate Premier League 'fit and proper persons' test• Lord Triesman congratulates Premier League on tougher criteria
• Leagues and FA currently administer separate tests[/b]
Lord Triesman, the chairman of the Football Association, has said he wants his organisation to regulate a new 'fit and proper persons' test covering both the Premier League and Football League.
"I have thought the whole way through that the regulatory authority of the national association in any sport needs to be clear-cut and it needs to be able to answer the questions about fit and proper persons as much as any other body," Triesman said.
It was not practical that the existing tests on whether potential investors in football clubs were 'fit and proper persons' were administered separately by the Premier League, Football League and the FA, he said.
"Not everyone shares the same view but my feeling is that it would be a good deal more efficient if we all administered one system. It's a system made for partnership," Triesman told The Independent.
Earlier this year, the Premier League announced tougher criteria for any club director with a stake of 30% or more, after pressure from Andy Burnham, then the Culture Secretary.
"What I do regard as progress are the efforts made in the Premier League to strengthen their processes. They have all gone in the direction which I think they need to go in. I think there are potential gains in efficiency by towrking together rather than everyone running a different system."
"It [the fit and proper persons test] has become a good deal more robust," Triesman said.
Last year, Triesman criticised the high levels of debt carried by many clubs and said there was not enough transparency. The economic downturn has now forced clubs to take his warning seriously.
"It's no longer something that can't be talked about properly and that's good and it is a great credit to the clubs - I take my hat off to them," Triesman said. "It is important that with big clubs in Europe, let alone in England, a new assessment is being made of the level of risk and that's got to be healthy."
www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/sep/07/lord-triesman-football-association-premier-league
Independent/Sam Wallace
Triesman draws battle lines on ownership test
FA chairman wants governing body – not the Premier League – to rule on 'fit and proper persons'
Monday, 7 September 2009
Triesman told The Independent that he believed that the FA should be the ultimate authority when it came to the delicate decisions on whether certain investors should be able to own English football clubs.
The Football Association chairman Lord Triesman wants his organisation at the head of a new "fit and proper persons test", instead of the Premier League, to investigate the finances and backgrounds of potential investors in English football clubs.
Triesman told The Independent that he believed that the FA should be the ultimate authority when it came to the delicate decisions on whether certain investors should be able to own English football clubs. Triesman said: "I have thought the whole way through that the regulatory authority of the national association in any sport needs to be clear cut and it needs to be able to answer the questions about fit and proper persons as much as any other body."
The remarks by Triesman, in a wide-ranging interview, are likely to raise eyebrows at the Premier League who made a great play in May of tightening up their fit and proper person's test after pressure from the then-Culture Secretary Andy Burnham. The Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore announced tougher criteria for any club director with a stake of 30 per cent or more.
The FA's first independent chairman said it was not practical that the existing "fit and proper persons" tests were administered separately by the FA, the Premier League and the Football League. Conceding that his view might be regarded as "controversial" in some quarters, Triesman said: "Not everybody shares the same view but my feeling is that it would be a good deal more efficient if we all administered one system. It's a system made for partnership.
"What I do regard as progress are the efforts made in the Premier League to strengthen their processes. They have all gone in the direction which I think they need to go in. I think there are potential gains in efficiency by working together rather than everyone running a different system." Triesman added: "It [the fit and proper persons test] has become a good deal more robust."
Scudamore and Triesman have clashed before, most notably when the FA chairman made an explosive speech in October criticising the debt in English football clubs and warning that they were not transparent enough about finances. Triesman told The Independent that he still believed he was right to make that speech and that clubs had changed their attitudes. "What's most important is that everyone is much more careful about risk," he said.
With England's qualification for the World Cup imminent – they could seal it on Wednesday with a win over Croatia or next month in their three remaining qualifiers – Triesman said that he expected the approach to be different in South Africa. In 2006, there was embarrassment at the FA at how the WAG phenomenon among the players' families staying in nearby Baden-Baden, in south-west Germany, was permitted to take over.
Triesman said: "Fabio [Capello] will set the standards and I'll back him. I see a group of people working around him who are dedicated to the players' athleticism, their fitness, their health and that's great to see. There is nothing else buzzing round the edges. That's what they are doing."
As well as the FA, Triesman is also chairman of England's 2018 World Cup bid board charged with persuading the 24 all-powerful Fifa executive committee [ExCo] members to vote for England. With some ExCo members facing allegations of profiting from ticket scandals – Jack Warner – or taking bribes – Nicolas Leoz – Triesman said he had trust in the process.
"We'll earn it [trust] from them [the ExCo] and we will play it straight," he said. "I have set out my stall about this in the past. We will publish accounts and play it completely straight. I think it is there to be won and I really hope it is England."
It will be Fifa whom England need to impress over the next year, and who on Thursday made the decision to ban Chelsea for two transfer windows for their conduct in the Gaël Kakuta affair. Triesman said his organisation was "closely monitoring the ruling".
"When one of our leading clubs has such a penalty imposed on it by world football's governing body, it is important that as the national association we fully understand the details of the case and the penalty. I don't have all the details, and as Chelsea have confirmed they intend to appeal the decision, I am not in a position to debate the case further."
On the fit and proper persons test, a spokesman for the Premier League said last night: "There is a very clear reason the Premier League and Football League devised different tests because it is important the test comes in at an appropriate level for clubs playing in their competition."
www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news-and-comment/triesman-draws-battle-lines-on-ownership-test-1782952.html
Independent - Lord Triesman: 'Clubs could have gone bust. I can't be indifferent to it'
A year ago, Lord Triesman, the FA chairman, caused a major stir by questioning debt levels in the Premier League. Now, he tells Sam Wallace, events have vindicated his stance and the English game is starting to listen
Monday, 7 September 2009
As an economist by trade, Lord Triesman, the chairman of the Football Association, has identified a major change in attitude in English football in the last 12 months towards debt, the most crucial financial factor in the game. That, finally, the clubs with vast borrowings, or leveraged buyouts are starting to discuss how they will protect their futures.
"It is no longer something that can't be talked about properly and that's good and it is a great credit to the clubs, I take my hat off to them," Triesman says. "Leaders of English football like [Chelsea's] Peter Kenyon and David Gill [of Manchester United] are taking part in these big European discussions." To the extent that when Michel Platini, the president of Uefa, last month floated new stringent measures to punish clubs with excessive borrowing by banning them from the Champions League, he could even claim the backing of Roman Abramovich.
The question of debt in English football has been a major factor in the 20-month reign of Lord Triesman of Tottenham as the FA's first independent chairman. In October last year he delivered his keynote speech at a football conference at Stamford Bridge. He talked of the £3bn debt that English clubs were saddled with, and the contention that, as far as the probity of accounting was concerned, "transparency lies in an unmarked grave".
The temptation was to call it football's "rivers of blood" speech but as a former member of the Communist Party – latterly a New Labour convert – Triesman is at the other end of the political spectrum to Enoch Powell. The speech blindsided the Premier League and their chief executive Richard Scudamore and you get the impression that certain people in that organisation have never forgiven Triesman.
Of course, the worst did not come to pass. The global recession is yet to claim a Premier League club, although it came perilously close with Portsmouth. Triesman, 65, did deliver some pretty unpalatable truths which, 11 months on, have not gone away. Manchester United's debt to the banks for the Glazer takeover is £699m; Chelsea owe Abramovich £701m; Liverpool under their American ownership owe £280m and Arsenal £410m.
"It is important that with big clubs in Europe, let alone in England, a new assessment is being made of the level of risk and that's got to be healthy," Triesman says. "I am an economist and I thought we were getting into a difficult period economically. I expressed that view. I think there is now a wider appreciation of just how difficult the economic world is. If you go back [to the time of the speech] curiously enough some people in the City said there was not going to be any kind of a problem or a crisis. Well, two months later they were saying something very different.
"We should share an objective to shore up the financial stability of the whole of the game. When I said that at Stamford Bridge I was quite concerned with some of the clubs further down the pyramid; I had the likes of Rotherham in mind. This is a club that has been in existence 139 years, very central to the life of the town. Does a vast amount of stuff with local kids. It could have gone out of existence altogether and I cannot be indifferent to that. The circumstances have made people more cautious."
In fact, when Triesman made the speech in October he underestimated how deep English football clubs were in the red. He put football's entire debt, including the FA's, at £3bn; accounts for the year ending July 2008 that were released this year showed that Premier League clubs alone owe £3.1bn.
"In all periods where there is less financial stability, a couple of people start the debate and it is a matter of chance as to who it is and when it is," Triesman says. "What's most important is that everyone is much more careful about risk and although I don't take any credit for it I think I was right to say it.
"I do know from my political time, particularly in the Foreign Office, it was necessary to say things I felt over some troubled places in Africa. I tried to do it as judiciously as I could. Not everyone agreed immediately and I wasn't always right but if you think something is significant and you sit on it and say afterwards 'I always knew that was an issue, I don't think people take you seriously."
Platini, who is a friend of Triesman, has proposed some radical measures for financial fair play. These include a ban from the Champions League for those clubs whose debt is disproportionate to income. "I don't know whether we are close to it," Triesman adds. "What I do know is that he has started a dialogue which the clubs have responded to very well. That's great. That is very important."
Is Platini as anti-English as the perception suggests? "He is not hostile to English football. He is like other people you meet in the world of football, he would like to think that we are taking part in the international football family. He is entitled to have that kind of expectation with a big football nation [England]. It's not a bad expectation."
A former London senior referee, who officiated in games in the preliminary rounds of the FA Cup, Triesman can claim an affiliation with the grass-roots of football. He is also proud of the FA's "Respect" campaign to improve behaviour at all levels of the game but it is the thorny issue of debt in football that he is determined not to back down on.
"I would far rather take part in these discussions and have some impact on them than sit outside, it is like Bonnie Prince Charlie sitting on a foreign shore waiting for a missive he might not like," he says. "What we now have are big clubs engaged and I would rather be engaged in the discussion than a recipient of the news."
Different ball game: Lord's life before football
*Born 30 October, 1943
*Education Attended Stationers' Company School in London before joining the University of Essex. Suspended in 1968 after disrupting a meeting addressed by a defence industry scientist, later reinstated. Attended King's College, Cambridge. Became lecturer and visiting fellow.
*Politics Resigned from Labour in 1970, 10 years after joining at the age of 17. Joined Communist Party, before returning to Labour in 1977.
*Became union official at NATFHE in 1984. General secretary of Association of University Teachers in 1993 and then of the Labour Party in 2001. Made Life Peer in January 2004 as Baron Triesman of Tottenham.
*Made Parliamentary Under Secretary in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office before taking post of Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills.
*Appointed first independent chairman of the FA in 2008.
Comrade Dave: Triesman's Communist past
Lord Triesman's seven-year membership of the Communist Party between 1970 and 1977 is an unusual feature on the CV of a man appointed to run the intensely conservative, 146-year-old Football Association. Of that period of his life Triesman said: "At the time the people on the radical side of life – Jack Straw, me, Charles Clarke, John Reid – were interested in what was needed to make changes rather than make speeches. Most of us came to be involved in Tony Blair's [New Labour] project.
"Then if you had asked them why, they would have said: 'Well, actually it's the mainstream. Go and ask someone who is doing something very different'. It is hard to convey the feeling of an age. People were very interested in experimental theatre, new wave film, design and cultural changes. There were revolutionary breakthroughs in science. It was a period in which there were monumental changes."
Triesman said he has never discussed politics with the England manager, Fabio Capello, whose views are thought to be rather further to the right. ......... Sam Wallace
www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news-and-comment/lord-triesman-clubs-could-have-gone-bust-i-cant-be-indifferent-to-it-1782960.html