SAMPSON SHOULD HAVE GONE ‘YEARS AGO’
FA CHAIRMAN Greg Clarke last night said the decision to sack Mark Sampson as England women’s manager should have been taken ‘three or four years ago’. Sampson was dismissed last month for having a relationship with one of his players while at Bristol Academy, as revealed by
Sportsmail last week. He was sacked after FA chief executive Martin Glenn re-examined an FA report into Sampson’s behaviour from March 2015 following an investigation which began in March 2014, shortly after his appointment. Clarke told The Daily
Telegraph: ‘When you get to the point where the new chairman and the new chief executive find out something that wasn’t shared with the board a long time ago, do you think — that’s a shame, we’d have done something if we’d known — or do you make a decision? ‘Martin said, “Look, I found this out yesterday”. I said, “Right, what do you think?” He told me, I agreed with him and we had a board conference call. We sent out some papers, we asked some questions about legalities, facts, what happened when. And we made a decision. ‘Now, that’s the sort of decision that should have been made three or four years ago, but you can’t use that as an excuse to duck the decision today.’