Eni answers? MPs to quiz Aluko over the Mark Sampson affair
The report that led to the England women’s manager being dismissed years after it was produced remains a mystery. The politicians must find out what is in it
It has been almost four weeks since the most powerful men at the Football Association took a deep breath and walked into a Club Wembley box to announce that the only England women’s team manager to reach a World Cup semi-final was being sacked for “inappropriate” relationships with players.
As to what Mark Sampson’s relationship was with those players in his previous job at Bristol Academy, now Bristol City Women, it would be fair to say that the proverbial hare was running and no one gave it much chance of getting as far as the end of Wembley Way. The question was what in that FA safeguarding report gave the FA chief executive Martin Glenn such a scare that he decided to sack Sampson when he was already being tossed around by allegations made by Eniola Aluko.
Sampson arrived at Bristol in 2008 as a centre of excellence coach in the 16-to-19-year-old age groups, then first-team manager, and left in December 2013 when he was appointed by the FA. Yet as to what happened there – the period the safeguarding report concerned itself with – there has been nothing definitive. It remains a tantalising blank, a crucial part of a wider question, and when the Department for Media Culture and Sport select committee gathers to discuss FA governance on Wednesday, the MPs cannot ignore it.
The challenge facing the select committee members is whether they will ask the FA’s delegation, comprising Glenn, chairman Greg Clarke, technical director Dan Ashworth and human resources director Rachel Brace, one of the key issues at the heart of this. What did Sampson do to get sacked?
Those in charge of Bristol Academy, as it was, have said nothing during the intervening period other than a statement on the day of Sampson’s sacking that it was made aware of the 2014 FA safeguarding investigation. For South Gloucester and Stroud College, under whose auspices Bristol Academy operated during the Sampson era, no official reply has been forthcoming. For the college’s chief executive principal, Kevin Hamblin, and Simon Arnold, the club chairman during that period, this must have been an unsettling time. SGS College was unhappy about the abruptness of the FA’s action over Sampson but since then there has been no public statement on the details of the relationship that took place on their watch. The Telegraph has revealed that SGS College investigated Sampson in 2012 but found no wrongdoing. SGS College is adamant that it followed all safeguarding processes while he was working for its women’s club, which has since been taken over by Bristol City.
Strenuous efforts by this newspaper have been made to contact those who played at Bristol Academy during that period, either in the first team or in development sides. Sampson himself has declined to comment, so too have his assistants Daniel Tanhai and Mark Humphrey. There are no suggestions of wrongdoing on their part.
What is left is an uncomfortable void, locked inside that safeguarding report, now tied up with the troubling allegations that Aluko herself made against Sampson.
The terms of the barrister Katharine Newton’s inquiry, laid out in the second page of her March 2017 report, subsequently published by the FA, were whether Aluko had been “undermined, belittled and at times bullied by Mark Sampson” on the basis of a “negative personal bias … that may have been based on your race”. That investigation cleared Sampson of those allegations, as did the first into her, conducted internally by Ashworth and concluding in September last year.
There are many aspects to Aluko’s complaints which will make life uncomfortable for the FA’s representatives in Parliament. Not least, the FA’s extraordinary decision to investigate her consultancy work for a football agency in August 2016 within three days of telling her that they were launching what would be the first of those two investigations into her allegations against Sampson, both of which would clear him.
Aluko, who will also appear before MPs this week, learned about the investigation into her work even before the FA had concluded its first probe, a month later, into her complaints. She is a lawyer and had been working as a consultant for a football agency in a legal capacity, not as an agent, which would be forbidden under FA rules. At that point she had been doing so for five years and had been celebrated by the FA for combining a successful career as a sports lawyer with being an international footballer. When the investigation into Aluko began, she felt she had no option but to give up that job, which she did in early 2017.
It had all started when she accepted an invitation by the FA to respond to its own cultural review survey, a confidential phone conversation with the independent lawyer Owen Eastwood, which she then followed up with a letter to the FA stating her full concerns. It is important to say that the official grievance procedure was effectively initiated by the FA itself, and not Aluko.
All pure coincidence of course, that the FA should decide to investigate Aluko at around the same time it had received her complaints.
But when the second Newton investigation, with which Aluko refused to cooperate, did not end the growing scandal, then came the shock sacking of Sampson on Sept 20, a decision made on the basis of that revisited March 2015 safeguarding report that would never be permitted to see the light of day.
But it seems that the two sides of the story of Sampson’s decline and fall are inextricably linked.
The FA had a high-profile employee facing serious allegations from a high-profile women’s footballer. Having cleared him twice, but failed to kill the scandal, he was then sacked for a matter that had not caused him to fail a safeguarding process years earlier.
So, what, the MPs are entitled to ask, is the truth?
What happened in Bristol?
What in the safeguarding report gave the FA such a scare?