Football: Sampson gets the chop

In football, sacking people is never an easy task, said Sam Wallace in The Daily Telegraph. There’s always the question of what behaviour is inappropriate enough to warrant it. The Football Association concluded that Glenn Hoddle had crossed a line, as England manager, with his claim that disabled people were being punished for their sins in a previous life. It made the same call about John Terry, sacking him as England captain for sleeping with the girlfriend of his teammate and friend Wayne Bridge. Those sackings were messy and embarrassing. But they don’t compare to the mess the FA has made of sacking the manager of the England women’s team, Mark Sampson.

Sampson should never have been appointed in the first place, said Martin Samuel in the Daily Mail. In his previous job, at Bristol Academy, he was said to have become “inappropriately” close to a number of female players. It may have been consensual, but it was enough to spark an inquiry at the club. Everyone in the game knew how Sampson behaved with female players – yet, despite being warned about him, the FA still made him England manager, in 2013. Soon after taking the job, the old accusations resurfaced, so the FA investigated Sampson for a year – before concluding in 2015 that nothing illegal had taken place, and simply sending him on an education scheme. But it didn’t end there, said Daniel Taylor in The Guardian. Over the past year, Sampson has faced new complaints, this time of racial abuse and bullying. He allegedly asked one unnamed mixed-race player how many times she had been arrested; and is said to have told another player, Eni Aluko, to make sure her Nigerian relatives did not bring the Ebola virus to a match they were attending. After Aluko complained of bullying, the FA paid her a settlement of £80,000 – which now looks like hush money.

Yet the accusations didn’t go away, and last week the FA finally decided to get rid of Sampson, said Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times. The weird thing is, they didn’t sack him because of his alleged comments or bullying. They sacked him for “something called ‘inappropriate relationships’” at Bristol Academy – “charges of which he’d already, twice before, been cleared”. The “PC brigade” had already decided that Sampson had to go – and the FA, lacking “the guts to stand by him”, simply threw him under the bus. Whichever way you look at it, the FA comes out of this terribly, said Barney Ronay in The Guardian. Remarkably, Martin Glenn, its chief executive, hadn’t previously bothered to read the 2015 report on Sampson, yet he has now used it to justify the sacking. How, then, can he possibly “remain in charge”? Having got rid of Sampson, Glenn should now “offer his own resignation”.