FInANCIAL TIMES
FA was right to blow doors off the Italian job
By Mihir Bose
Fabio Capello’s departure goes beyond the all too familiar story of an England football manager failing to satisfy the country’s often unrealistic expectations of its national team. At the heart of this affair is the governance of the sport. Mr Capello, by publicly disagreeing with the Football Association’s decision to strip John Terry of the captaincy, was challenging the authority of his employers.
When Mr Capello went on television last Sunday to express his views, he might as well have said:
“I govern English football, not the FA”. His air was that of a chief executive who had been surprised
by an unforeseen board decision. Mr Capello may have been paid £6m per year, several times the salary Stephen Hester receives to run Royal Bank of Scotland, but he has nothing like Mr Hester’s powers. He was the head of the FA’s most important production unit, not its CEO.
More
ON THIS STORY
FA offers stern defence of its stance with Capello
Simon Kuper Capello’s exit casts England as the loser
Business blog Capello and Hester
Redknapp acquittal raises queries over HMRC case
Capello quits as England manager over captaincy
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Mr Capello’s outburst comes at a particularly critical time. The FA is trying to demonstrate that it can manage its own affairs. For it to shirk the challenge Mr Capello had thrown down would have created the impression that its Italian employee had more power than its board. This was all the more important as the FA is very aware of the chorus of authoritative voices, such as Hugh Robertson, sports minister, describing football as the worst governed sport in the country.
The government has still not recovered from the shock caused last year by the FA’s handling of England’s bid to stage the 2018 World Cup. Both David Cameron and Prince William were persuaded to support a campaign that promised much but gained only two votes from the Fifa executive, one of them from Geoff Thompson, the committee’s English representative.
Since then, the FA has been under pressure to prove its competence. This month David Bernstein, its chairman, will meet Mr Robertson to demonstrate how the organisation is coping with its new governance arrangements. These include the FA board for the first time having two independent directors. One of them, Heather Rabbatts, a Jamaican-born businesswoman, ticks two boxes in a hitherto white, male body: she is a woman and from an ethnic minority.
Yet the situation would probably be very different had Mr Capello’s challenge concerned a less sensitive subject. He thought he was dealing with the question of who appoints the England captain, when in fact the matter was all about racism. English football was until this season confident it had overcome the horrendous problems racism posed to the game in the 1980s and 1990s. In recent years the FA has even provided guidance to other countries on how to deal with it. But the issue has now suddenly resurfaced in a particularly alarming fashion, with several players accused of racist behaviour on the field of play.
What has made this even more tricky is that, since the 1980s, the relationship between sports governing bodies and the authorities has changed. The government is no longer prepared to let the sport manage its own affairs when it comes to possible public order offences. So it was the police who investigated whether Terry racially abused Anton Ferdinand during a match between Chelsea and Queens Park Rangers back in October.
The FA, left on the sidelines, hoped that the whole affair would be done and dusted by March at the latest. It was only when the judge agreed to a request by Chelsea to delay the hearings until after the Euro 2012 tournament that it felt it had to act.
The governing body was aware of a feeling among some players that the captaincy should have been taken away from Terry as soon as he was charged. Clearly, the FA could not let England go to Ukraine and Poland with a captain who would be in the dock upon the team’s return. Its decision was no different to what many employers would do in such a situation: suspend an employee facing charges without in any way suggesting the employee is guilty. The FA has emphasised that they consider Terry innocent until the court decides.
But for Mr Capello this decision made no sense. There is, of course, a great irony here. When he arrived, he was puzzled by the importance the English placed on the role of national football captain, something that would have been peculiar in his native Italy. Now, having accepted this unique cultural trait and having made Terry his standard bearer, Mr Capello fell because he failed to understand that, when bigger issues such as race intervene, the English are ready to stage a sacrifice, even of their football captain.
Should Harry Redknapp, the Tottenham Hotspur manager, succeed Mr Capello, he will have no problems understanding such cultural quirks. His appointment would also mark the moment when the English finally accepted that success is not guaranteed by simply hiring a foreign coach. Mr Redknapp is also well aware that such is the hurt the English feel about their country’s lack of success (just one World Cup win back in 1966, lest anyone forget), that the fans and media can turn vicious, even towards native managers. He will require all his famed man-management skills and his renowned rapport with the media – where his utterances are almost like a tutorial on the modern English game – to avoid the fate of his predecessors.
The writer is author of ‘The Spirit of the Game’
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