FA Chief Exec resigns

[readingbedding]

Can't say much more off the record.
But he's gone.

[SpaceCruiser]

Any reason why?
And what do you think of it?

[readingbedding]

Please read again samehead.

[SpaceCruiser]

Please read again samehead.

It doesn't say anything.

[Maquisard]

http://www.sportinglife.com/football/ne ... _Snap.html

Football Association chief executive Ian Watmore has resigned.

More to follow...

More resignations

I know this won't seem so funny when sportinglife update the story later

Gaach, they already have

[Baines]

Reading this thread so that you don't have to.

Can't say much more

Say more

Can't say much more

Say more

[papereyes]

It doesn't say anything.

Levels and levels of truth

[Franchise FC]

Incredibly, someone I know (that I've worked with) has been approached already as a potential successor. Given that he's a particularly nice bloke, I hope he doesn't get it, although it would be a pretty good situation when we reach the play-off final.

[Sarah Star]

:shock:

Incredibly, someone I know (that I've worked with) has been approached already as a potential successor. Given that he's a particularly nice bloke, I hope he doesn't get it, although it would be a pretty good situation when we reach the play-off final.

Is it Dirk?

[Dirk Gently]

:shock:

Incredibly, someone I know (that I've worked with) has been approached already as a potential successor. Given that he's a particularly nice bloke, I hope he doesn't get it, although it would be a pretty good situation when we reach the play-off final.

Is it Dirk?

it's not a job that I'd take. It's clear that Ian realised it's a poison chalice, as the power all lies with the professional game people and the PL, and there's no prospect of that changing without radical reform, which would have to come from within. And when they tried to do that before the Burns review got considerably watered down.

As Watmore goes back a long way with Dave Triesman in lots of roles, so it's a shock to see him go, and it proves that things must be really bad for him to give up so quickly.

A bad bad days as there were a lot of hopes resting on him.

[Row Z Royal]

Ian, eh?



La.

Di.

Da.

[Dirk Gently]

Sorry! Mr Watmore, if you prefer!

[Dirk Gently]

As usual - David Conn hits the nail squarely on the head.

HERE
but worth quoting in full for those too lazy to click a link.

Cut through the spin and forest of recent detail which will follow the chief executive's resignation at so divided and hamstrung an organisation as the Football Association, and, to make sense of it, proceed to one central truth. Ian Watmore, generally recognised to be a talented and competent latest occupant of that notorious ejector seat, has left leaderless what is supposed to be the governing body of English football, just when the need for leadership is being publicly recognised more widely than ever.

That is no coincidence. His sudden resignation, more dramatic and challenging to football and the government than the three preceding exits of Adam Crozier, Mark Palios and Brian Barwick, neatly concludes a decade in which the FA has been serially beaten up by the game, principally the Premier League, over its role.

For those who work in the FA, and it is now clear, for Watmore, the organisation means nothing if reduced to ceremonials; it needs to govern a game whose excesses are currently in the public's face. The alternative view, pressed home for years with relentless, strategic force by the Premier League, is that the clubs, all-powerful and rolling in TV cash, can run themselves, and the FA should be reduced to its devalued Cup, administer the England team with due deference to the clubs, supply referees and do the fines and suspensions.

When,19 years ago, the FA made the fateful blunder of supporting the First Division clubs to break away from sharing money with the other three divisions, the FA bosses, in its wisdom, believed it would control, even run, the new "Superleague." It could hardly have been more wrong. Even though the Premier League clubs – and their owners – dished out their Sky TV bonanzas, still they have sought over time to diminish the FA.

Public opinion has now been galvanised more strongly than ever to believe something central is amiss in the great, glittering game watched for excitement around the world. The new year revelations that Manchester United are indeed £716m in debt, loaded on purely to pay for the takeover by the Glazer family who have been paid £22.9m by the club, has prompted the green and gold Old Trafford outpouring and questions around the world. Portsmouth's administration - even though 53 Football League clubs have been insolvent since that 1992 breakaway - has shocked the nation, who have seen 85 ordinary staff laid off in a league paying players £160,000 a week.

Yet now, with the football public becoming keenly aware of more enlightened, less cash-obsessed, supporter-owned ways of running football elsewhere, the governing body here is hobbled. Attempts to make the peace have led to the current board composition of five from the professional game, five from the grass roots "national game," which was supposed to constitute balance but which most FA insiders lament as dysfunctional.

When Andy Burnham, then the culture secretary, asked the football authorities in 2008 to "reassess their relationship with money" and asked for a response to seven significant questions, the FA's was in effect an admission that it had no power. It was a brief document, which wholly referred the government to the responses of the Premier League and Football League.

Interpreted as a "cry for help" by FA and government insiders, it was a statement by the FA's first independent chairman, Lord Triesman, that he had no independence from the professional game. The line being used about Watmore last night, the chief executive who worked closely with Triesman in government, that he could not stomach being neither a chief nor an executive, makes the same case.

The truth about the FA's response is that Watmore and Triesman had worked diligently to produce a detailed response for the government, about how the FA could rise to the challenge of financially regulating a game in which the controls lag years behind the amounts of money washing around. The proposals went up to the board and were crushed. The professional representatives argued there had been insufficient consultation – with them – and the national game board members opted out, deciding it had nothing to do with them. Triesman scrapped the ideas and sent his unsubtle surrender message instead.

Within the last two weeks, insiders say, Watmore proposed again a more robust role for the FA in financially regulating the flagship clubs, and was again shot down. That is not the role which the Premier League chief executive, Richard Scudamore, chairman Sir Dave Richards or the club owners have in mind for the FA.

So, in the time of arguably greatest need for a strong governing body for football, there are only vested interests, and Watmore's resignation, said to be due to his frustration at the inability to make any progress, exposes that vacuum.

It is a challenge to football, and to the government too, which has cared about the game for the last twelve years, but always steered away from imposing regulation; believing, mistakenly, that the game could be trusted to govern itself.

[Seal]

Very surprising...and disappointing - he was one of the good guys.

Not good for the World Cup bid either, which was there to win, but we seem to be doing all that we possibly can to lose it.

[PieEater]

The radio was trying to make out it was because they were going to play rugby at Wembley

[Ian Royal]

Arse it.

[Dirk Gently]

The radio was trying to make out it was because they were going to play rugby at Wembley

Don't believe it for a minute! Much more down to the struggle for control with the PL and Sir Dave Richards in particular. The worst kind of self-serving PL lackey!

[Sarah Star]

Doesn't bode well for the future of the FA, does it?

[Seal]

I've heard Richards is surprised that he's gone. He assumed that their arguing was just normal football politicking and he should man up.

Seemed like a good guy, but maybe just a little to soft / thinned skinned in the end.

Also was extremely p1ssed off about a leaked email over the weekend, which removed any chance of a reconciliation.

[Dirk Gently]

Doesn't bode well for the future of the FA, does it?

Nope, lots o hopes were resting on the Triesman/Watmore combination.

I've heard Richards is surprised that he's gone. He assumed that their arguing was just normal football politicking and he should man up.

Well, he would say that, wouldn't he?

Also was extremely p1ssed off about a leaked email over the weekend, which removed any chance of a reconciliation.

Yep, I've heard about that too - I agree.