‘The truth is that football cannot change itself ’

If the Sam Allardyce affair produces real change in the way football is run in England then it will have delivered something positive and unprecedented. For there are a few home truths here that all of us who care about football have to recognise. We cannot go on like this indefinitely.

The present many-layered administration of the game – including the Football Association, Premier League and the English Football League – cannot provide corporate governance fit for the 21st century. To make changes you need majorities in all these organisations, yet the intransigence of individuals in each makes that nigh-on impossible.

They all have their own priorities. The FA does. The Premier League does. The EFL does. But those aims do not cohere. So there are no agreed priorities in English football, no set direction, no concrete governance aims.

Inevitably, then, the way the game is financed still demands more regulation, even after decades of those at the top of the game knowing something must be done. There are still amazing conflicts of interest in football. How can it be otherwise when everybody comes from somewhere, when everyone who cares has a club they support?

The truth is that clearly football cannot change itself. Administrators, and I include myself, have failed to force through significant and needed reforms. Many have tried – but even very senior people such as Lord Terry Burns and former FA chairman David Bernstein have been frustrated by resistance to their efforts.

So we need significantly more people independent of the game on the board of the FA. They need to be visible in the Premier League, too. The best impartial people will not be kicked around by vested interests.

We must also have younger people coming through in football administration, so there need to be age limits and defined terms of office for those in charge. A much more diverse FA board and council are required.

Even so, there is only so much reform the sport’s bosses can introduce. The Government has to step in to drive real change. It has some power of sanction, to cut money off to the game’s grassroots. That would have a powerful impact. It would drive anger of those at the bottom of the game toward those at the top.

Ultimately, that’s the only way you will create real change: internal pressure, external pressure and timing. This scandal could provide the catalyst. But I fear it will take something even bigger. So we will probably have to brace ourselves for worse to come.

When it does come, real reform would see a streamlining of football’s administrative bodies. It would also see genuine enforcement of the laws that exist by an ethics and integrity committee with real teeth. Because the rules, in many cases, are already in place. We don’t need laws against corruption, fraud and bribery. They exist. What we need is a culture where those laws are obeyed, and robustly enforced if they’re ignored.

The FA, of course, is not a police force. But it is clear that it has not been a sufficiently good regulator, either. In that respect, it remains unfit for purpose.

In my experience, a succession of chairmen and executives at the FA have all come to similar conclusions abut where the problems are and what needs to change. They need to speak out and they need to speak out now.

David Davies was executive director of the Football Association until 2006