FA looking in wrong place for their few good men

PREMIER LEAGUE: Recruitment policy is one of the areas where the Premier League's lead should be followed

FOOTBALL WILL never be completely free from politics, the one consolation was that it has always been relatively clear of politicians. Well, those halcyon days are over. Last week, the English Football Association decided to appoint Ian Watmore, the current British Permanent Secretary for the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills – three words which surely never belong in the same sentence, let alone the same building – as its new chief executive.

Given England 2018 Limited, the board set up to try to win the right to host the 2018 World Cup, features four former or serving ministers, including the FA chairman Lord David Triesman who was appointed to the House of Lords by Tony Blair, there are currently more New Labourites working in positions of power in English football than the British government.

This is a problem. Fixing your flag to a politician is fine, provided they are in vogue. On that basis, the FA might have thought about asking Barack Obama to have a quiet word with Jack Warner, the magnificently corrupt but highly-influential president of CONCACAF, in a bid to snaffle an extra vote or two.

But with Gordon Brown’s government now irredeemably linked to war, recession and sleaze – something of an unholy trinity in the political world, I would have thought – the FA might come to rue their decision to place so much trust in figures drawn almost exclusively from the red half of Westminster.

Triesman might as well have filled his executive positions with investment bankers and hedge fund managers.

Being allied to political deadbeats does little for the FA’s credibility in the eyes of the general public and even less with Fifa, who, perhaps oddly, given the Macciavellian plotting which routinely takes place in the darkened corners of Sepp Blatter’s Swiss powerbase, is inherently mistrusting of outside interference in sporting projects.

Perhaps world football’s governing body still feels guilty at permitting Argentina’s military junta to stage – and, indeed, stage-manage – the 1978 World Cup; more plausibly, the power-hungry Blatter probably resents having to deal with people who wield more influence than he ever could. Either way, the FA’s penchant for grey-suited mandarins is unlikely to have gone down well in Nyon.

Fifa’s suspicion of all things political typifies a wider trend in football, an industry which remains resolutely dismissive of anyone whose CV cannot be measured in appearances, trophies or, ideally, both.

Exasperated pundits routinely begin their dissection of some hot topic by dismissing the views of anyone who hasn’t “played the game” or who isn’t deemed a “football person” – a particularly loathsome phrase – but, while they might have a point when it comes to spotting some subtle infringement committed by a sneaky centre-half, surely even the most blinkered analyst can appreciate that, sometimes, only an outsider can offer a truly clear-sighted perspective.

Ironically, politics has led the way on this front. Gone are the days when cabinets came flat-packed from the closed shop of parliamentary parties: now, we have “teams of talents”, governments stuffed full of business leaders, entrepreneurs, charity heads and ecology experts, all boasting the necessary niche knowledge to make a success of their brief. The results are not guaranteed, of course, but the theory is surely sound.

Such thinking is apparently beyond the FA, although not all of football’s governing bodies are so blinkered. The Premier League, for all its myriad faults, has never been slow in recognising the need for specialist talents in this ferociously competitive commercial age, when every sport has to justify its existence to television companies and sponsors, who have never had more options on where to get bangs for their bucks.

That, presumably, is why they chose Richard Scudamore as their chief executive. Scudamore is a Bristol City fan but there was nothing in his employment background which screamed football before his appointment in November 1999. Instead, he had spent the majority of his working life in the marketing and media sectors, which presumably was far more useful when it came to negotiating multi-million-pound broadcasting rights packages and sponsorship deals.

The effect of this realpolitik approach is a new TV rights deal which has, somehow, weighed in at more than €1 billion, despite the world being in the grip of its worst recession in living memory, and a product which could not be more polished if it was sponsored by Mr Sheen.

The FA could learn much from their younger, bolshier rival but, of course, they won’t. The two bodies might be divided by just three stops on London’s Central Line but they are oceans apart in their thinking: one, streamlined, cash-rich and ruthlessly focused; the other as bloated, profligate and incoherent as an MP who has spent too much time and money at the House of Commons private bar.