A GOOD WEEK FOR WOMEN’S FOOTBALL!
The manager sacked in an extraordinary scandal — but, with the FA exposed, it has been...
IN recent years, the FA raised women’s football as if it were their golden child. They lost control of the men’s game to the Premier League a long time ago but the women’s game was something they could shape, control and nurture and they were rightly praised for the great strides it made and the growth they oversaw.
But something changed and the FA didn’t quite get it. The women’s game moved beyond its role as being merely a vehicle for good news. It started to grow up but the FA thought they could still pat it on the head. They thought the women’s game gave them a free pass. They thought their role in the women’s game was still largely exempt from criticism or scrutiny.
Maybe men such as Martin Glenn, the FA’s chief executive, appreciate the irony of what has happened, or maybe they don’t. But it is a measure of the progress that the FA have made in the establishment of the women’s game in this country that they have built the sport up to a point where it is capable of exposing the dysfunction at the heart of the sport’s governing body.
They wanted everyone else to take the women’s game seriously but the facts that have emerged this month, culminating in the firing of the England manager, Mark Sampson, last week, suggest that their latest tragedy is that they did not take the women’s game seriously themselves.
The FA are a well-meaning organisation stranded between modernisation and tradition. They are an organisation beached on a sandbank, gasping out a message that they want to move into clearer waters.
And never was the crying shame of their contradictions more brutally illustrated than in their abject handling of the Sampson Affair. Oh Lord, they meant well. They meant so well that Glenn insisted that a non- white l awyer head up the investigation into Eni Aluko’s complaints of racism against Sampson.
And they meant so well that they even went to great lengths to make sure someone covered up the Super White Army sign that hung at Tranmere Rovers’ Prenton Park ground before England’s game against Russia there on Tuesday night.
Super White Army, of course, was not a statement of racial pride from some rogue Merseyside branch of the Ku Klux Klan, but a nod to the colour of Tranmere’s shirts. Nothing more. The FA, though, were so petrified of it being misconstrued that they obscured the banner.
It was at once the most powerful and the most pathetic symbol of an organisation who have lost their way. Cover up a harmless sign but botch the racism investigation by failing to take evidence from witnesses who could have corroborated or discredited one of Aluko’s key accusations against Sampson.
It started to look like an episode from a Philip Roth novel, an examination of warped English morality seen through the prism of an organisation tortured by the desire to be politically correct in all the wrong places. They sweated the small stuff but they neglected what really mattered.
How else do you explain the cavalier way the FA behaved regarding Sampson’s suitability for the England job once it became apparent that there were concerns over his behaviour towards players when he was the manager of Bristol Academy?
Whatever Sampson did in Bristol raised enough concerns to necessitate sending him on an education course two years ago and yet he was allowed to stay in the highest profile job in the women’s game. I’m sorry but you can’t get much less politically correct than that. Here’s the stark truth: if you need to be sent on an education course to be taught how to behave towards your players, you’re not in the right job. You’re also a public relations time bomb waiting to explode. That the FA failed to realise either of these things is staggering.
Transplant a similar scenario to the men’s game and Sampson’s feet would not have touched the floor on the way out. Sam Allardyce was sacked for less as the manager of the men’s side. Far, far less.
And yet, because it was the women’s game, no one mentioned Sampson’s education course and he was allowed to lead England into the 2015 World Cup, where t hey reached the semi-finals and success wiped everyone’s memories clean for a couple of years.
That the FA did nothing, that they allowed Sampson to continue then, was a dereliction of their duty to the women’s game that has come back to haunt them. They have realised too late that with greater profile comes greater scrutiny and greater responsibility.
The FA cannot have it both ways. They say they didn’t get involved in Sampson’s safeguarding issues because confidentiality is paramount in such cases and they did not want to trample over its sensitivities. But that is at odds with the fact they have smashed that confidentiality to smithereens by firing Sampson and citing his time in charge of Bristol Academy as the reason why. Worse, by withholding details of his misdeeds, they have set the hares running.
WHAT exactly did the England manager get up to at Bristol Academy? In some unchecked i maginings, Bristol in Sampson’s time has already become Sodom and Gomorrah-on-Severn. Whatever happened, it would be fairer to Sampson, his players and the public i f the details were released.
Few come out of this well. Not the FA, who have handled the whole affair like amateurs. Not Sampson, who is beset by questions yet to be answered. And not the England players who ran to mob Sampson when they scored the opening goal against Russia, knowing how much that would hurt Aluko and threaten to undermine her.
Happily, it may be that the women’s game itself is the only winner. The fact that a controversy surrounding it is threatening to bring the FA hierarchy crashing down and that it will be at the heart of a parliamentary inquiry next month shows that it is moving ever more steadily from the margins to the mainstream.
Its main players are even more visible now than they were after they reached the semi-finals of the European Championship in the summer. Toni Duggan will be playing for Barcelona this season, Lucy Bronze will be at the best team in Europe, Olympique Lyonnais, and Aluko will again be appearing for Chelsea Ladies.
The events of the past few weeks may have been a shock to the system for the protagonists of the women’s game but they will not have done the sport any harm. It has gone past the point now where it can be patronised, something the FA have just found out to their cost.