Crozier and the FA take their eyes off the ball

Michael Hart13 April 2012

Adam Crozier's indiscretions will not be on the agenda of today's first meeting of the Wembley review committee but the two issues - Crozier's behaviour and the future of Wembley - are intricately linked.

Crozier, the moderniser brought in to revamp the Football Association, has become closely identified with the plan to rebuild Wembley and perhaps we should ask ourselves what was wrong with the old Wembley and the old FA?

Certainly Wembley was old and in desperate need of serious refurbishment but you'd say the same of anything worth preserving in this country - The Tower of London, St Paul's Cathedral, Wimbledon, Lord's.

For some I suspect the rebuilding of Wembley was largely about personal enhancement and the status that would come to those responsible for a successful bid to stage the World Cup or the Olympic Games.

The proposed new stadium was, after all, part of England's case for hosting the 2006 World Cup. It was enshrined as one of the six reasons why England should host the tournament long before Adam Crozier was invited to modernise the FA.

Crozier inherited the developing Wembley debacle in November 1999 at a time when the Sports Minister Kate Hoey was calling for an independent report into the design of the stadium. She was concerned that capacity would not be sufficient for both football and athletics and would therefore jeopardise a future Olympic Games bid.

During England's illfated attempt to stage the World Cup further problems emerged on a regular basis, encouraging rival bidders to claim that the new Wembley might never happen at all. They may yet be proved right.

Crozier's role in all this has basically been that of the salvage operator. To be fair, it was beginning to look depressingly like another Millennium Dome shambles long before he became the FA's chief executive.

We should remember that he was given the job of revamping the FA because the professional game's big hitters - those who run the Premiership clubs - felt that he had precisely the qualities the sport needed in the new Millennium. "The FA have needed someone like him for a long time," I recall one Premiership chairman telling me.

The county types in blazers, who had run the game for more than a century, were now on the way out. Big-time football needed a new image and, as a successful joint chief executive of Saatchi and Saatchi, Crozier was well equipped to create it. He was told, in essence, to re-invent the FA. His reforms included the appointment of the first foreigner to coach England - Sven-Goran Eriksson. This may yet prove to be an inspired piece of work on his part.

But on the subject of Wembley he has had a hand in a series of owngoals and inexplicable U-turns. The most spectacular of these is his letter to Chris Smith, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, asking for another £150 million of taxpayers' money for the proposed stadium.

Professional football already has more money than it knows what to do with. To suggest that the taxpayer foot the bill for a new stadium is absurd and offensive at a time when hospitals, schools, railways and roads are in constant crisis.

Crozier's suggestion to Smith that any agreement be kept quiet until after the General Election suggests that he was clearly aware of the insensitivity of his proposal. But he could argue, of course, that had the Government found favour with the FA's request they would almost certainly have insisted it be kept quiet until after the election.

So the FA chief executive has shown an extraordinary naivety, but is this a sacking issue? When the FA employed him they knew exactly what they were getting. He was ordered to shake the place up and that is what he's done. They can hardly complain now.

What's wrong at the FA is that they've taken their eye off the ball - and the appointment of Crozier, a man with no football background, demonstrates this.

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