Shortly after the bathetic sight of Sam Allardyce slinking out of Wembley without having ever sat in its dugout as England manager, the Football Association’s recently appointed chairman emerged blinking into the flashbulbs for a traditional rite of passage. Greg Clarke spent six years as chair of the diverse, constantly squabbling tribe of 72 clubs that make up the Football League and so is not exactly an ingenue.
Down among the desperate at the sharp end of the domestic game there are all kinds of allegations of sharp practice, dodgy deals, rampant self-interest and dubious land grabs. But the sudden crisis of the past 48 hours has been of a different order of magnitude in terms of the unforgiving spotlight it has placed on the game.
The backdrop may have shifted over the years from Lancaster Gate to Soho Square and now to Wembley’s arch but the startled, slightly punch-drunk expressions of Clarke and his chief executive, Martin Glenn, to another fine mess mirrored those of their predecessors down the ages. Which is part of the problem. Such is the pace of turnover among senior FA executives that they remain doomed to repeat history as farce but, when they spoke, their reasons for letting Allardyce go were well argued. Glenn on Wednesday said that it was the FA’s job as regulator and governing body to uphold the game’s integrity and as such it was impossible for the 61-year-old to continue as England manager.
There is already a range of views – from those who feel the FA was weak in caving in to those who feel it had no other option – but it is hard to argue that it did not act in a swift and reasonable fashion.
The role that Glenn, the former United Biscuits chief executive who entered Wembley in a whirl of restructuring activity, imagined for the FA – a noble upholder of the game’s standards – and led to its decision to cut Allardyce loose is no longer the case, if it ever was. The huge global expansion of the game, lubricated by billions spent by fans and the ambitions of thrusting individuals, companies and entire countries, has ushered in a world that has spun far beyond the FA’s control.
The way the Quest investigation in the middle of the last decade – when Allardyce, who denied wrongdoing, was implicated – was passed around various stakeholders before being kicked into the long grass by Fifa is instructive.
Even the agents themselves agree, even though it would be foolish to necessarily take them at face value and self preservation may be one motivation. “The global move to deregulation has not worked and it has allowed the system to be more open to manipulation and abuse,” said the Association of Football Agents on Wednesday.
In his recent book, First Artist’s Phil Smith wrote of a “lawless world of secret agents”. “There is more money disappearing out of the game through agents operating with impunity, but the authorities do not want the fight,” he claimed.
The real dangers to the integrity of the game come less from the sort of old-fashioned extras referred to in the latest round of newspaper reports than the vast unregulated web of offshore companies, third-party ownership models (supposedly banned, still rampant) that buy and sell portions of players like chattels, the power that has distilled into the hands of a handful of so-called super agents and their associates and so on and on. The game has stayed the same but the methods and sums involved have changed. Brown paper envelopes in service stations are out, complex cross-border transactions and offshore models are in.
We have the illusion of some transparency – the amount spent by clubs on agents’ fees is now published quarterly, for example. Fifa’s Transfer Matching System logs the details of overseas transactions and publishes the huge sums involved once a year. But large amounts of money continue to move around the world in largely unregulated fashion and too much remains unknown about where it ends up. Certainly, football’s governing bodies do not have the tools or the will to police it properly.
In some ways it is a microcosm of the way the globalised, tax averse, opaque world of big business and corporate finance has gone in general. Only occasionally, as with the Panama Papers or the FBI’s Fifa probe, is there a glimpse of one portion of it before the waters close over again. If the FA wants to reassert its long-relinquished position as football’s moral compass, it would do well to unapologetically reclaim its role as the game’s regulator.
Some of this goes back to the dry governance issues that have remained unresolved for decades – making the FA Council more representative, the FA executive more effective, properly separating out its disciplinary function.
If Glenn and Clarke want to show that the FA upholds the standards that apparently led them to conclude that Allardyce had to go, then making a definitive move to at least try to attempt some oversight of the vast sums of money now swilling around the top end of the game might be a good place to start.
