Not An Executive, No Longer A Chief

Not An Executive, No Longer A Chief

Chief executive" sounds like a decent job title. It beats "who writes for", anyway. But it is easy to get confused, and think that the man who is "chief executive" of the Football Association is somehow the chief of football in this country and has great executive power.

Ian Watmore's resignation has caught everyone on the hop, from Lord Triesman downwards. But the consensus on the departure of the FA's latest chief executive is that the former civil servant became frustrated at the way the governing body's splintered organisation prevented him from doing his job as he saw best. The Daily Mail says: "'When he calms down he just wants to do something else with his life,' said one insider last night. 'He neither felt like the chief or the executive.'"

To call Watmore arguably the best qualified man to have held the post may be seen as damning him with faint praise, given that his predecessors include Graham Kelly, Brian Barwick and, in an acting capacity, David Davies. It is with the first of this trio that the roots of the problem lie.

Kelly, who had moved to the FA from the Football League, was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the Premier League in 1992. In the late 80s there had been the threat of a breakaway league, with leading clubs unsatisfied with their levels of income. Kelly commissioned the 1991 Blueprint for Football, which was then adopted and led to the creation of revamped top flight.

There is no doubting the success of the Premier League, but the aim of the Blueprint and the restructuring was the placing the of England team at the pinnacle of the national game. Instead, the new body became a seat of power in its own right as the FA fell away, continuing to labour under its antique arrangements.

Kelly, after nearly 10 years in the job, resigned in 1998 due to a controversy over a loan to the Welsh FA, an affair connected to the bid to host the 2006 World Cup. Geoff Thompson, the FA chairman, also quit. Both was cleared of wrongdoing after his resignation, but the governing body had been undermined. The bid rumbled on, and hurt the reputation of the English game abroad. Yet arguably Kelly's most damaging legacy was the power the leading clubs had gained on his watch, something that was reinforced by his exit and the long search for a replacement.

Adam Crozier, Kelly's eventual successor in January 2000 after the long Davies caretakership, was a controversial and combative figure. The Scot inherited the Wembley project and a national coach called Kevin Keegan. He undoubtedly made mistakes, but took no nonsense over Wembley and acted boldly to replace Keegan when the coach resigned. Crozier was willing, too, to take on the clubs. But his clashes with the emboldened chairmen, who definitively did not want to put England at the pinnacle of anything, in the end those clashes led to his resignation in the autumn of 2002.

After the long drift under Davies (again), Mark Palios and Barwick, last year another driven individual arrived in the post. I was pleasantly surprised to see a man of this calibre apply and get the job: Watmore had been UK chairman of Accenture, and head of the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit. He was quite a catch for Lord Triesman, the FA's first independent chairman.

But though Watmore apparently had a good relationship with Richard Scudamore, it seems that the club bosses with FA positions were less co-operative. Watmore could make progress on the National Football Centre at Burton on Trent, say, but anything that threatened to bolster the FA relative to the clubs was a problem. The frustrations mounted, it seems, and once again we need a new man for the job. The problem will be finding a candidate who is good enough to fulfil the specification but who can tolerate Graham Kelly's legacy: the impotence of great responsibility without matching power.