Jonathan Ford pulls up a chair at the Football Association of Wales headquarters in Cardiff and, with a smile, says that all talk of France has been banned. For Wales, it is about looking to the future rather than basking in the past, yet nobody wants to leave behind the memories of Euro 2016, including the chief executive. “A week after the homecoming I took the family on a driving holiday – through France,” says Ford, laughing.
Ford has plenty to be happy about. The national association has never been in a better state of health on and off the pitch. Optimism abounds on the back of those wonderful results in the summer, the FAW’s turnover has more than doubled and there is something special about the relationship between the Wales supporters and the national team, as well as the bond among the players. From a football perspective, it feels as though the nation has come together.
“The factors that define the Welsh identity are driven by two key things, one of them is culture and the other is sport. That is a fundamental thing that we’re able to tap into,” Ford says. “It was brought to life in France by people like Gareth Bale – we didn’t tell Gareth to say: ‘We have more passion, we play with more pride than England,’ but it tapped beautifully into what we’re all about, from the dragon to Gorau Chwarae Cyd Chwarae [Team Play is the Best Play] on the badge. That was also a major shift within the player group mentality, to get them to galvanise people.
“Those players would run through walls for Wales. When they were leaving each other after France there were tears because they’d been with each other for 46 days. You see the players arriving back into camp the other day and they were reporting too early because they can’t wait to get with their mates.”
For Ford, it was vital that the man who has harnessed that spirit and camaraderie to such positive effect remained at the helm to oversee the World Cup qualifying campaign, which begins against Moldova in Cardiff . Chris Coleman has rebuilt his managerial reputation with Wales and the FAW had no intention of granting Hull City permission to speak to the 46-year‑old when the Premier League club approached them last month.
“Chris’s profile was fantastic before France and it was raised even more so after, so understandably people did come knocking,” Ford says. “When the call came [from Hull], I spoke with the president and with others, and at that time we were left with the only option available to us.
“It would have caused us an awful lot of problems to lose the national team manager four weeks before the team’s first match and that was something that we weren’t prepared to entertain, so we expected the contract to be honoured and denied them the opportunity to engage, because saying: ‘Yes, you can talk’, means ‘Yes, you can go.’ And we weren’t prepared to do that. Chris could still break a contract, but there are consequences to that.
“Hull have started OK. But they’ve got a lot of problems. They were struggling with the squad that they had – they’ve brought a few players in now. My prediction would still be that they’re odds-on favourites to be in the relegation zone – we’ll see on that. But I think Chris could do better than Hull.”
As for Ford’s own career, he is entitled to feel a sense of satisfaction when he reflects on how far the FAW have come since his appointment in December 2009. He was 39 at the time and joining an organisation that needed to be dragged into the 21st century. “Credit to the FAW council, they knew that they needed someone who was going to shake the cage and modernise the association,” says Ford, who had spent the best part of a decade working for Coca-Cola and came from a marketing background.
“The strategic plan I inherited, which was the first the FAW had written, wasn’t even written by my predecessor, or by the people within the organisation. He got his predecessor to write it. It was rubbish and it was collecting dust. And they did it because they were forced to do it by the Welsh government and Sport Wales. We fundamentally changed all that. Look at the organisation now – we’re a much younger, dynamic, culturally different organisation to what we were previously.”
Ford acknowledges that it has not been an easy journey. “There are times, like when you have a tragedy like Gary Speed or, on a very different note, when you come away from Serbia with a scoreline like we did [Wales lost 6-1 in 2012], when you think: ‘Oh my God, am I going to make it?’”
Step by step, though, everything has come together in what Ford describes as a purple patch for Welsh football. Reaching the semi-finals of Euro 2016 surpassed all expectations and also vindicated Ford’s decision to push the FAW council to invest every penny of the £6.4m tournament participation fee before a ball had been kicked, to create an environment that gave the players the best chance of making things succeed in France.
No stone will be left unturned in this campaign, yet Ford is not getting carried away and viewing qualification for the World Cup, from a group that includes Serbia, Austria and the Republic of Ireland, as straightforward. “In my mind we do need a good start. But we do need to be careful,” he says. “Expectations need to be managed in and around the camp. Just one Euro success, which was fantastic, cannot be taken as ‘we should expect’.”
Although Wales will play the first three qualification home matches at the Cardiff City Stadium, the venue for the Austria and Republic of Ireland fixtures has yet to be confirmed and raises the question of whether the FAW are considering taking those games to the much larger Principality Stadium, where they have not played since 2011.
“We haven’t made the decision yet,” Ford says. “What we will do is play a match where we think we can get the points. I suppose the question comes: ‘What happens if you don’t need the points at the end?’ If we have already sailed through and qualified, which would be a dream come true, you’d probably want to milk that last game against the Republic of Ireland and go there [to the Principality Stadium].
“You could also turn it around the other way, so that if we’ve got no chance of qualifying and the Republic of Ireland have, then you would take it to the Principality Stadium, which is not necessarily the right thing to do other than on a monetary basis. If we’re both in contention, we’ll take it to the stadium where we’ve got most chance of winning and, atmospherically, that will probably be the Cardiff City Stadium.”
Whatever happens over the course of the next 12 months or so, Ford is determined that Wales keep pushing on. “There’s no sitting back and resting on our laurels, saying France was fantastic,” he says. “We cannot assume that because we were successful we’ll be successful again – Chris and I are absolutely aligned on that. It’s all about what more we can do to take it to the next level.”
