Glenn’s botched handling of this affair shows he will not tackle FA ineptitude
Governing body’s chief executive faces awkward questions over bungled removal of Sampson
So, Martin Glenn would have us believe that Mark Sampson’s sacking is the “most awkward and complicated issue I have ever dealt with”. A classic piece of evasion, this: make a crisis appear unfathomable to all but those with his privileged access to information.
Why not try to flesh it out for us, Martin? For from where we are standing, the only awkwardness or complication lies in the fact that you knew of safeguarding concerns about the England women’s manager as far back as November 2015, but let him continue in post for almost two years before requesting details of the full report. As ever at the Football Association, leadership is conspicuous by its absence.
To trace Glenn’s mangled version of events is to ask why a sackable offence in 2017 did not carry the same penalty in 2015, when he joined the FA a year after alarming accusations about Sampson’s conduct at Bristol Academy – ones that showed he had “overstepped the professional boundaries between player and coach”, according to the FA chief executive – were around.
With its usual lack of transparency in answering this most straightforward question, the game’s governing body gives rise to a suspicion that it was happy to bask in the glory of the women’s team reaching two successive major semi-finals, but neglectful of its duty of care towards the players as a damning report about their manager’s behaviour gathered dust.
It is, as sports minister Tracey Crouch acknowledges, a “mess”, and few have come off worse from the FA’S failure to put its house in order than Eni Aluko. Sampson’s actions at Bristol were deemed so worrying that he was sent away on a behavioural development course, and yet he kept a job of such power and influence that he left Aluko, in her words, “shocked and intimidated” after allegedly saying of her Nigerian relatives: “Make sure they don’t come over with Ebola.”
An appropriate man to lead the national side? Still the FA seemed to think so, having exonerated Sampson – who has denied all the claims against him – in two separate investigations. Glenn clings to the argument that these inquiries were of impeccable probity, even though the Professional Footballers’ Association has decried the first of them as “a sham, designed not to establish the truth but to protect Mark Sampson”. As for the second, it included no interview with Drew Spence, who alleges that the coach asked her, as a mixed-race player on her maiden England call-up, how many times she had been arrested. She intends to convey this claim today to barrister Katharine Newton, in a meeting that should have been arranged many months ago.
The precise timing of Sampson’s dismissal was also horribly misjudged. Glenn received the specifics of the case against Sampson at Bristol last Wednesday, but the FA waited seven days to pull the trigger. When it did so, it announced a Wembley press
One must ask why a sackable offence in 2017 did not carry the same penalty in 2015
conference at two hours’ notice, meaning many reporters could not attend.
Now, there are sometimes legitimate reasons for these snap briefings: a shock resignation, say, or a serious emergency. A heavily spun reference to alleged misdemeanours by a manager whom the FA should have fully investigated three years earlier is not one of them.
It is stark testament to the organisation’s rank incompetence.
With a parliamentary select committee due to summon its senior executives to explain themselves next month, one trusts that MPS show greater engagement with the issue than in February, when a noconfidence motion in the FA’S ability to reform itself was debated by just 30 of them, out of a possible 650. Good governance at the FA, or the lack of it, is a subject absent-mindedly kicked around every so often, without ever reaching the central truth that it is an emasculated institution, eclipsed by the Premier League and displaying such feebleness of due diligence that it lurches from one farrago to the next.
Just take the past 12 months, which began with The Daily Telegraph’s revelation that Sam Allardyce, mere weeks into his duties as England manager, had discussions over a £400,000 speaking engagement with a company that was proposing to enter into third-party ownership of players in breach of Fifa rules. Had the FA satisfied itself that Allardyce was a figure who would not cause it reputational damage? Its progress in a comprehensive review into historical child-abuse cases has not exactly inspired confidence, either. Clive Sheldon QC has promised that his team of lawyers would read and index 9,000 boxes of FA documents dating back to the 1970s but there have, as yet, been precious few specifics about guilty parties, rather undermining FA chairman Greg Clarke’s assertion that “transparency is a wonderful thing”. Sooner or later, the man at the top tends to pay for his organisation acting so opaquely. Brian Cookson found in recent months that his image suffered from the alleged cover-up of a “culture of fear” during his time in charge of British Cycling, and he duly lost his role yesterday as the sport’s global head by a thumping 37-8 margin. Glenn, as it stands, is heading for much the same fate. He can pass the buck to previous regimes all he likes, but his bungled handling of the Sampson affair is the clearest sign yet of a culture of FA ineptitude that he is ill-equipped to put right.