Independent voice desperately needed to shape game’s future
ENGLISH football needs divine intervention to save its withered soul. Hence perhaps the suggestion of an all-powerful being to rule over it from on high. The idea put forward by
Gary Neville and his fellow self-appointed saviours of the beautiful game is to put in place an individual who can act as the moral guarantor of its future.
The terminology the group have come up with is a little dry – an ‘independent regulator’ carries with it visions of a lunch box and flask on the desk and dusty files piled high to the ceiling – but the concept is interesting.
It has obvious parallels with the commissioner role common to American sport.
Liverpool’s John W Henry and Manchester United’s Joel Glazer, the architects behind the shortlived and spectacularly divisive Project Big Picture which triggered last week’s latest bout of internecine warfare in the English game, will be familiar with it.
Henry’s Fenway Sports Group owns the Boston Red Sox, the Glazer family the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
In both baseball and American football the commissioner system operates to override the vested interests of the rich men who would otherwise instinctively try to hold sway.
It was baseball that appointed the first commissioner a century ago, a neutral overseer with wide-ranging powers by the name of Kenesaw Mountain Landis, in the wake of the Chicago White Sox gambling scandal.
His brief was to keep the players and owners in line and to represent the public in ensuring an American institution was fit for purpose.
The role has evolved since and TV deals, lawsuits and relations with government are all part of the remit, but owner oversight and the maintenance of a level playing field remain central to the job description.
If any sport is crying out for owner oversight and some semblance of a level playing field it is English club football.
Good commissioners do not come cheap.
Roger Goodell, who harmonises the conflicting priorities of NFL teams large and small, earns north of £30million but then, as Project
Big Picture revealed so nakedly, it is not money but integrity that English football is short of.
The supposedly hard-up Premier League – or at least the Henry/ Glazer-headed faction driving Project Big Profits – were suddenly able to find £250m behind the sofa for the genuinely hard-up English Football League to try to win support for their grubby power grab.
The big six were acting in their own interests in attempting to float Project Big Flop.
And the EFL were acting in their own interests by backing it.
Then the other 14 clubs in the Premier League acted in their own interests by blocking it.
No one was acting in the interests of the game’s greater good.
That should really be the FA’S role but the fingerprints of its chairman
Greg Clarke were all over the original Project Big Picture document, according to the equally conflicted chairman of the EFL, Rick Parry.
THE FA’S neutrality is compromised – everyone’s neutrality is compromised. So the appeal of parachuting in a figure untainted by any involvement in the present cats-ina-bag chaos to steer the direction of travel and shape a better future for the English game is clear.
Would it need to be a football person?
Not necessarily. An outside view can be useful.
The long-serving National Hockey League commissioner Gary Bettman started out at the NBA.
But ideally it would need to be someone who knows the sport and its integral place in English society.
That means someone who understands life down the pyramid as well at the top of it.
A playing background would be helpful, as well as some insight into club ownership.
It would also be advantageous to have a good communicator in the role, maybe someone with experience of the sports broadcasting world as well as the wider commercial world.
So an ex-premier League and England player who has coached at top level, owns something like a League Two club, holds a portfolio of diverse business interests and can talk the hind legs off a donkey.
Hang on a minute. That’s Gary Neville, isn’t it?