So, where is the genius who can solve all football’s problems?
THE problem with independent governance is that it depends who is doing the governing. Possibly the poorest decision in the history of English football was made by a committee of independents. They sent Wimbledon to Milton Keynes.
At a Premier League meeting around 1996, struggling financially having earlier sold their Plough Lane home and now playing at Selhurst Park, Wimbledon owner Sam Hammam floated the idea of moving his club to dublin.
He took the rather bemused smiles in the room, not least from Martin Edwards of Manchester United, as tacit approval from his fellow clubs and went ahead with his plan.
Paul McGuinness, the manager of U2, and property developer Owen O’Callaghan were also behind the project. O’Callaghan was going to build a stadium in Clondalkin, south of dublin, that would be Wimbledon’s home.
The switch was estimated to cost roughly £100million including stadium construction, road, rail and security infrastructure, £ 5m for the Football Association of Ireland, £5m for the League of Ireland clubs, and provision for a number of football schools of excellence around the country.
It was believed Shelbourne would lease their Tolka Park ground to Wimbledon until a new home was ready. In 1997, Hammam sold 80 per cent of his shares to an Icelandic group who believed they were buying a club that would soon be playing lucratively in dublin.
A year later the move was dead, rejected by FIFA in support of objections from the FAI. By the time Hammam sold the remaining 20 per cent of his shares to Wimbledon’s new owners, in February 2000, the club was three months from relegation.
So when, in 2001, Wimbledon chairman Charles Koppel announced the intention to move to Milton Keynes, there was a complication. The club was no longer a member of the Premier League, was new to the Football League and Koppel was arguing they were going to go bust if the status quo prevailed.
Pete Winkelman had been trying to persuade a club to relocate to Milton Keynes since 1997 — proposing a giant retail complex with stadium attached.
He had already had discussions with Luton, Barnet, Crystal Palace and Queens Park Rangers. The Football League board unanimously rejected the Wimbledon proposal, saying any new Milton Keynes club would have to earn its place in the pyramid. The FA opposed it, too, but with all the pressure of Koppel’s doom- laden predictions, this became controversial for them. So they appointed an independent commission. The chair was Raj Parker of lawyers Freshfields Bruckhaus deringer, with Steve Stride, operations director of Aston Villa and Alan Turvey, chairman of the Isthmian League. They sat at Freshfields’ offices in Fleet Street from May 14-16, 2002, and again on May 22.
The FA’s statement to the commission was unequivocal. ‘English football is not organised on the basis of a franchise system in which different communities may bid for clubs competing in competitions.
‘If a move effectively involved a break of the links with the community with which the club is traditionally associated and a move to an entirely new community, with an intent to put down new roots and reinvent the club with a new identity and a new set of allegiances, and yet the club did not want to relinquish its place in the pyramid, go down to a lower level and work its way back up, the FA believes that allowing such a move would have a fundamental impact on the organisational framework of the game.’
HAD it been left to the FA, or the Football League, the original Wimbledon would never have become Milton Keynes dons. Yet on May 28, the independent commission ratified the move by 2-1, with Turvey dissenting. All three men were independent of football’s authorities and two came to a decision that an overwhelming majority of fans would never have supported.
So, with independence, it depends who you get.
After the failed treachery of the Super League, calls for independent governance of the game have grown. Yet who bestows this power? The Government? Oliver dowden, who appointed Alex Scott to his renewal taskforce to represent sport last year, when the arts were given captains of
industry and Lord Grade, who had been chair of the BBC and ITV?
Who is this genius with the ability to successfully meld the interests of 20 Premier League clubs, 72 from the Football League and the pyramid below, right down to the lowly parks players of the grassroots game?
Omnipotent governance is not just about putting six clubs back in their box and we did that anyway. A coalition of fans, Government, managers, players, football authorities and media brought down the Super League in two days. No independent regulator could have done it any quicker.
Not without charters and regulations that effectively make it illegal to join a breakaway league. And if those are in place and legally watertight — which they should be after this — what will an independent regulator decide on? How your club spends its money, how your club gets its money? Whose view will be represented?
Consider the Newcastle takeover. The fans are desperate for it. They want their club to be competitive and the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund could make that happen. Yet there is another view, held by the Premier League, around transparent ownership and piracy.
And then there is a third consideration, taking into account global image, the stance of Amnesty International, the feelings of Jamal Khashoggi’s widow. So if that hospital pass was given to the independent regulator, whose perspective would he, or she, feel duty-bound to prioritise?
Well, such a person would be independent. Yes, but so were the commission that decided the best place for Wimbledon Football Club was 80 miles up the M1. Just because you are independent, doesn’t mean you are right.
Also this, if it happens, becomes a political post. The Government, it seems, would very much like to stay tight with the Saudis. So how independent is the independent regulator?
When a player is charged by the FA, he goes before an independent disciplinary panel or an independent regulatory commission. Yet nobody believes these groups are truly independent because their conviction rates are magnificent.
Yet the FA argue this is not so. Indeed, on the rare occasions it has not gone for them, they have appealed against their own independent panellists.
THAT is how Macclesfield came to be relegated last season. An independent arbitration panel upheld the EFL’s appeal against a decision made by its own independent disciplinary commission, which had handed down a softer sanction. The EFL thought it should have been stronger, won the day, and Macclesfield dropped.
Football isn’t perfect but there are independent processes at work already.
Equally, once the threat of a breakaway league has been regulated out of existence, to what extent should football clubs not be allowed to run their own businesses?
Fans on the board are a fine idea but the big calls can only be made by those with financial skin in the game. The supporter representative Tottenham wish to introduce is unlikely to want to sell Harry Kane. Yet he or she isn’t looking at the post- Covid books the way Spurs chairman Daniel Levy is.
When supporters bought York City in 2003, the financial mess they inherited and the desperate need to maximise revenues led, briefly, to ticket prices for National League football being higher than
Blackburn Rovers were charging in the Premier League. That is what a real awareness of football finances can do to even those with the noblest intentions.
Those who formed AFC Wimbledon from the ashes of that dreadful independent commission decision no doubt did so with the firmest belief in principles that would ensure no club was treated with such contempt again. Yet last summer, AFC Wimbledon, now risen to League One, voted to curtail the season, therefore preserving their own status at the expense of Tranmere on points per game.
They did it because there is a great difference between sitting at the helm of a threatened club and making high-minded calls about ethics from afar.
If football was independently governed, Bury would have survived. That is the pitch. Yet is that true? The fairest form of wealth distribution from a lower-league perspective was the 50-25-12.5-12.5 split that existed before the formation of the Premier League. Bury could certainly have got by on their cut of that deal.
YET introduce it in the present climate and half the Premier League folds overnight. Even established gradually, the drop in high-end revenue could lead to a fall in standards and, over time, a reduction in the money trickling down through the pyramid. Football’s eco-system is an incredibly delicate balance of economic interests, far more complex than the populist ‘greedy owners’ trope.
For one person, one group, to assume overall regulatory control would require some real geniuses. Do you see many out there who will want a job where basically anything that goes wrong in football at any level is their fault? Like being the Prime Minister but without the prospect of making millions as a keynote speaker on retirement and with more chance of a bunch of men in balaclavas turning up on your doorstep one evening and setting fire to your dog. But let’s say there was interest. What type of person would this independent regulator be? Someone who knows football, someone who knows business, ideally. And haven’t we already got them?
That’s Rick Parry and Trevor Birch of the EFL, Richard Masters and Gary Hoffman at the Premier League, Mark Bullingham and, previously, Greg Clarke at the FA.
All of the officials at all of football’s major institutions are exactly the type of people that might be put forward as independent regulators.
Unless we involve the political class — and we all know what a boon that would be for our national game. Where politics could do its bit is in establishing a charter that outlaws future breakaways and, through Tracey Crouch and her review of English football, looking again at workable forms of wealth distribution and better communication with supporters through proper channels.
An independent regulator may seem a panacea but the same was said of VAR. In reality, the issues that both innovations purport to solve are massively more complex than they seemed at first glance.
It can’t be any worse than what we have now? Well, that’s the point. Get it wrong — the powers, the remit, the appointment — and it could.
Of course, it can’t be as bad as the call made on Wimbledon 19 years ago, but it takes a special state of independence to come up with one like that.