So, after 155 years, have they made the right call?

THE dream that football would, finally, be coming ‘home’ last summer was wonderful while it lasted, but Skinner and Baddiel’s anthem rubbed some people up the wrong way. Ex-Croatia boss Slaven Bilic branded it ‘arrogant’. It might be just a feel-good song, that also mocks how long it has been since England actually won anything, but there’s a uniquely English arrogance about it too. England has not been the ‘home’ of football for a long time. Those at the top of the English FA, as they will be known, deserve credit for trying to rid English football of its superiority complex. England manager Gareth Southgate has won plaudits for reconnecting the senior team with fans and this is a welcome extension of that. The FA may have come first, but a lot has changed since 1863. It’s time the FA changed, too. Don’t worry, we will still have the FA Cup, but this proposal is a bold and refreshing recognition that English football is prepared to adapt and move with the times. And if it can help to bring a World Cup here in 2030, it will have proved to be a brilliant decision. THE FA think foreigners view us as arrogant to assume our FA is the one and only FA. But it is not arrogance. It is a product of historical fact. The FA was the only FA. Founded by Ebenezer Morley in 1863, it started ‘organised football’, just one of England’s many sporting gifts to the world. Then came the FA Cup and that, as the great football writer Geoffrey Green observed, was ‘the spark that lit the whole bonfire of football’. But here we have chairman Greg Clarke and chief executive Martin Glenn — a transitory administrator who is soon to depart — planning to toss away an English birthright just as readily as he tried, and failed, to sell Wembley. What next? The English FA Cup? They say not, but can we believe these identity-crisis junkies? The proposed change is aimed at us winning a World Cup bid, making us more palatable to the voters, supposedly. But there is no assurance of that. There is no certainty that FIFA’s stables have been swept clean enough for it to make any difference. No, the renaming will make no odds other than allowing a few modernisers to pat themselves on the back. And that’s what counts... after 155 years.