PICKING SCOTT FOR TASK FORCE NOT STRICTLY THE SMARTEST MOVE
TO SHOW it is taking sport’s return seriously, the Government have wasted no time getting Alex Scott in. Maybe they think football cannot take place without her — it would certainly seem so. Oliver Dowden, the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, has included Scott as a member of his renewal task force made up of the ‘brightest and best from the creative, tech and sport worlds’. This brains trust includes Tamara Rojo, artistic director of the English National Ballet, Sir Nicholas Serota, chair of Arts Council England, former BBC and ITV chair Lord Grade, Baroness Lane-Fox, founder of lastminute.com and Mark Cornell, chief executive of the Ambassador Theatre Group, which runs 50 venues worldwide. The aim is to help football and other sports bounce back, so presumably an intimate, multi-layered knowledge of the industry is required. Yet Scott’s expertise in football is purely as a footballer. She has never owned a club, run a club or brokered a major commercial deal. She has never managed a venue or explored the logistics of football’s business. She has latterly forged a good career in the television studio and been on Strictly Come Dancing. That’s not the same as expertise. Nothing against Scott, but she isn’t exactly Richard Scudamore. Just being on television talking about football isn’t the same as organising a sport — certainly not at a time when so much of it is in financial jeopardy. Culture and the arts have been awarded a deep list of serious players to consider the future. Sport has a right back turned-TV personality. It smacks of the time Loyd Grossman was charged with improving hospital food because he had his face on a jar of supermarket sauces. Unsurprisingly, not a great deal happened. Not a great deal ever does.