Try not to allow yourself to be encouraged by the fact the former FA board member Heather Rabbatts thinks technical director Dan Ashworth’s job is “untenable”. I imagine the FA sees it as very tenable. Tenable is one of those words that technically exists but for which there would obviously be better and more popular substitutes. Making it very like Dan Ashworth, in fact.
Other tenables currently include the FA chief executive, Martin Glenn, and the FA chairman, Greg Clarke, whose performance alongside Ashcroft in front of the culture media and sport select committee last week ranked as a horror show even by the standards of their organisation’s hall of shame. A sort of Dunning-Kruger kabuki performance, the event served primarily as a reminder of the sheer number of working hours that have been devoted by the FA down the years to protecting its more useless employees from self-created crises.
Since then, the FA board has naturally given its full support to Clarke, while the diversity campaigner and former NBA player John Amaechi has alleged that Clarke had privately informed him he wasn’t going to be remotely radical on homophobia. Or as the FA boss apparently put it: “I’m not getting fucking fired for equality.”
The Football Association is now in that most familiar of states for an organisation that has attracted more sensationally incompetent officials than even the least prestigious outposts of the British Raj. Which is to say, keeping its head down. If you were searching for the motto that would best umbrella the FA’s approach to any number of shitstorms down the years, you would settle for the Latin for “if we lie low for a bit I’m sure this will go away”.
And it mostly does. Admittedly, on Monday the sports minister, Tracey Crouch, told the Telegraph she would consider stripping the FA of government funding if they didn’t “get themselves in order”. The government could, she said rather carefully, “sit there and reflect on whether there would be a funding consequence for all that”. This would prevent the FA bidding for the 2021 European Women’s Championship, future Euros and Worlds Cups, and Champions League finals. And perhaps there is the vaguest hope of this level of censure, although Crouch said the same thing last year too. It could conceivably serve as a useful piece of political theatre in a Brexit era in which the government will be desperately seeking cost-free flashy gestures to distract from the real news. But as Clarke himself allegedly put it in his conversation with Amaechi: “They won’t do a fucking thing … we have all the power.”
So here we are. It is a boggling satirical comment on the entire enterprise that Ashworth is now leading the search for the England Women’s manager to replace the one whose disciplinary process he mismanaged, compromised, and ultimately used to wrongly exonerate him, only to go on and “assist” the subsequent independent investigation with such masterstrokes as providing the barrister with the names of 16 people who could help her, none of whom were the alleged victim or even witnesses to the incident in question. So too is the fact the FA can choose to release as little (or indeed none) of the eventual findings of the next independent report – Clive Sheldon QC’s inquiry into child sexual abuse in football, which expects to be delivered in April.
As Clarke observed, they have all the power. How much funding of the game is spent on these other little games is anyone’s guess.
The Best of 2017 (again)
Enormous congratulations to Cristiano Ronaldo for defending his player of the year title at Fifa’s The Best awards, held in London on Monday. Like many people, the Real Madrid forward works in an industry without regular opportunities for winning or losing, or a means of deciding who might be better than who else at the thing that is done. As such, Fifa’s The Best awards are a vital tool for discovering and acknowledging he is extremely good at football. They are, if you will, a way of keeping score.
The only thing I would take issue with is the description of this award as “annual”. I am afraid it is not. I distinctly recall Fifa’s most recent “The Best” awards were held earlier in 2017, just nine months ago.
In many ways I am surprised to have noticed this. Most of these sorts of set pieces in the fluff news calendar could easily come round more than once annually without arousing suspicion. You could get away with holding the fashionistas’ Met Ball once every couple of months, for instance. Organisers may well already be doing so. I am convinced to the point of refusing to check that Celebrity Big Brother now runs at least three times a year. Any awards night described as “the Oscars of our industry” can be assumed to sneak in at least twice a year – and, in the case of journalism, seems to pass off four times every 12 months.
But what does it all mean in Fifa’s case? Perhaps we may assume the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, has formally detached from the Gregorian calendar. There is, of course, no shame in this. At various stages in pre-Columbian Mesoamerican history, the Mayans and the Aztecs ran on 260-day calendars, while one Balinese calendar – the Pawukon – still renews after 210 days, reputedly based on the rice-growing cycle.
Mr Infantino’s clear and studied distaste for football has long signified a desire to move the game away from competitive matches and toward black tie run-offs and 48-team tournaments and so on. The biannual Best Awards are probably just another stage in the journey on which he means to take football, and we must thank him once again for his nine-monthly display of vision.
