Intoxicated by a poisoned chalice
He has no end of problems filling up his in tray, but new SFA chief Maxwell says he is ready to lead from the front
AMONGST friends and colleagues, Ian Maxwell’s appointment as chief executive of the SFA prompted a common response. Congratulations were offered, followed by the verbal equivalent of a question mark.
‘I must have shaken a thousand hands over the past week,’ he joked yesterday. ‘Then everyone says: “Congratulations?!”
The misgivings of the people who felt commiserations might be more appropriate were understandable.
Maxwell arrives at a difficult time for the SFA. He will spend his days on Hampden’s sixth floor sipping coffee from a poisoned chalice.
‘It’s a big job — I’m under no illusions,’ he stressed. ‘I don’t think you’re going to understand the level until you’ve been doing it for 18 months or two years.
‘I think I’m as prepared as I can be and we’ll see how the next few years unfurl.’
A decision on the future of Hampden is due by August or September. The SFA are torn between remaining at the spiritual, historic home of Scottish football or taking the national team and cup finals along the M8 to Murrayfield, the home of Scottish rugby.
An offer has already been made to buy the old place from owners Queen’s Park. If Queen’s accept, hopes of the SFA remaining at the national stadium increase.
Refuse and they will move to Murrayfield, leaving the League Two side to repay £16million of loans from debenture holders and central government funding. Repayment would be impossible and, as a former Spiders player, the notion of a member club plunging into administration is one Maxwell would rather avoid.
Yet his new responsibilities make difficult decisions unavoidable.
Queen’s Park are irked by an offer from the SFA they regard as ‘derisory’, but find themselves in no position to quibble. For Maxwell, sentiment cannot be allowed to cloud harsh financial realities.
‘I played at Queen’s Park and started my career there,’ he said. ‘So I’ve got a lot of fondness for Queen’s Park but my job is now to make a decision based on the full membership (of the SFA) and for the benefit of Scottish football.
‘It’s not about me wanting Queen’s Park to do well or us to stay at Hampden.
‘The board will make the right decision at the right time.’
There is, he insists, no question of the heart being allowed to rule the head, adding: ‘Absolutely not. It can’t. That’s not for the best interests of Scottish football. It’s not what my heart thinks. It’s what my head thinks.’
A rational decision of the head might have prevented him taking the SFA job in the first place.
Yet Maxwell is a personable, likeable figure. It would be unwise to mistake his blokish persona for a footballing stereotype.
Some felt the job of the SFA CEO should have gone to a captain of industry. Studying for an MBA at Strathclyde University, however, the former defender combines a solid head for business with unique experience of the professional game as a player, coach and chief executive.
For clubs irked by predecessor Stewart Regan’s aloofness and his willingness to fly Scotland’s national team halfway round the world to act as a World Cup warm-up act for Peru and Mexico at the end of a long season, he ticks the boxes.
‘Friendlies at this time of year are always difficult,’ he said with masterful understatement. ‘When a season is finishing, there is player recovery. We have clubs that are in European competition really early on. It’s a fantastic opportunity.
‘There are various reasons why games are taken. I don’t know the detail of it. You need to look at it at the time and say: “Is it the right thing for us?”
‘We have got the games. There is no point in getting into whether I would have taken them or not. It doesn’t really matter. We are here and we have got them.’
There’s no secret to why Regan (below) took the games on. Vauxhall have withdrawn their sponsorship of the Home Nations, while Sky Sports won’t renew an agreement to broadcast the William Hill Scottish Cup. The SFA need the money.
‘We obviously have challenges in terms of sponsorship, TV deals, all that,’ acknowledged Maxwell.
‘It’s urgent. Any time you get to the end of a sponsorship contract and you don’t have a renewal, then it’s urgent.
‘It’s an opportunity, as well. There is a feeling of freshness around it.
‘The commercial income is massively affected by performance on the pitch because that drives a lot of the football business. So there are opportunities there to tweak things and do things slightly differently and look at how we bring in, what we bring in, why we bring it in and ways we can supplement that.’ Of all the issues in need of careful handling, a notice of complaint against Rangers over the award of a licence to play in Europe back in 2011/12 has the potential to be the most flammable. The Ibrox club had until yesterday to respond to charges they failed to declare a crystallised tax liability in March 2011. Fully declared, it might have prevented them playing in the UEFA Champions League. In a stronglyworded statement last week, Rangers vowed to ‘fiercely resist’ the charges, accusing the SFA of being ‘intent on harming the game’. ‘We had communication from them (Rangers) on Monday which the compliance officer is dealing with and that will just go through the process,’ said Maxwell.
‘I can’t really comment on anything other than the notice has gone out and it’s working through the judicial panel.’
Awkwardly, Maxwell was critical of the SFA’s Project Brave in his time at Partick Thistle, although he is adopting a more circumspect stance now he is in charge of the blueprint for youth football.
‘Project Brave is here, clubs have hired staff, clubs have made changes and are down the road with that,’ he said.
‘There’s no way I am going to say: “Back to the start”. But what we will do is look at how things work over the next few years and what tweaks we can make to enhance it.
‘One of the fundamentals is that we have to get it to work.’
He was talking about Project Brave. The new man at the helm of the SFA could, however, have been talking about Scottish football as a whole.