As the puffs of white smoke rose from the Soho Square chimney of the Football Association yesterday afternoon, jubilant crowds gathered in town squares across England, embracing wildly as they looked to the future with fresh hope and a new found confidence. Everything was going to be all right after all.
The FA, in its wisdom, has found The One. The One to replace Mark Pallios, the Chief Executive who resigned because of the way the organisation handled the media after news broke of his relationship with an employee.
The One in question is Brian Barwick, a middle aged Liverpudlian with, we are told, a deep-rooted love of the game and , we know for sure, an excellent reputation in sports television across the public and independent sectors.
Of course this being the FA nothing is straightforward and The One was not the unanimous choice of the committee of wise men who had gathered for the selection process. A significant number of them wanted to postpone the whole process because the role of Chief Executive could well be about to be redefined. Instead of The One, they tend to favour the notion of Two Halves. And they may have a point. After all, we are constantly reminded that it s a game of Two Halves.
Anyhow, the quest for The One is over after what seems like an eternity and he now faces the prospect of reuniting the organisation and restoring morale in the knowledge that some of the most influential individuals in the game were opposed to his appointment in the first place. What a start.
We were also reminded this morning by the ‘quality’ press that The One is , at best, The Third best administrator in football, behind Premier League CEO Richard Scudamore and Graham Taylor, head of the Professional Footballers Association. The tone of the report suggested that while Barwick may be a whiz at football on telly and rights negotiations, he would have to be up pretty early to get the better of these two powerful figures when, as is inevitable, they clash over a variety of issues.
All this before the poor guy has been given the keys to the executive bathroom .
And that’s part of the difficulty with the role. In selecting Brian Barwick the FA has not chosen a new Pontiff or a Prince Regent, they’ve chosen a senior manager for a mid-sized company with identity and structural issues. The problem is that, as we’ve said here before, the FA may not have a single shareholder but it probably has more stakeholders than any trading company. As a result the CEO’s every action tends to be scrutinised. When there’s blame to be allocated it will land on the CEO’s desk, when there’s glory to be basked in, there’ll be no shortage of takers for the plaudits.
Brian Barwick has taken on a high profile business role, not ascended the throne of Kingdom and Commonwealth. He deserves time and space to get on with what has to be done, away from the media spotlight which attended his predecessors – the first, one suspects, quite deliberately, the second clearly unwanted.
Barwick also takes the tiller at a time when there are suggestions that football’s popularity is on the wane while club rugby is doing rather nicely.
A report this week shows that attendances for Zurich Premiership games are up 25 per cent to an average of around 9,000. This is not simply a result of England’s World Cup win just over year ago but is a continuation of a pattern of growth since the game went professional.
The most successful club – Leicester Tigers, this week announced plans to share ownership of Leicester City’s 32,000 capacity Walkers Stadium. Tigers regularly sell out Welford Road’s 18,000 capacity and need room to grow.
This is the sort of forward focused, clear thinking that has always been advocated in sports management but, as ever, there may be a stumbling block. Premiership rules apparently require a rugby club to have primacy in any shared facility relationships and the Tigers/ City deal is a straight 50-50 split. It would be a great shame if this difficulty is allowed to get in the way of a move which makes so much sense to all those who can step back from the nostalgia always associated with a sports club’s original home. It’s a situation Leicester City fans have already had to deal with. The club moved to the brand new Walkers Stadium a few years ago.
Other rugby clubs have already discovered the benefits of sharing facilities with soccer clubs. London Irish are at Reading where they established the Premiership’s record attendance of over 22,000 last season. Saracens are at Watford, London Wasps at Wycombe and Sale at Stockport.
The growth in popularity of club rugby must, one suspects, be put down to the skill and determination with which many clubs have approached community marketing programmes.
The growth flies in the face of conventional wisdom that for a sport to build an audience it needs to be seen on free to air television. Club rugby is more or less confined to Sky which, while doing a truly excellent job of presentation, still doesn’t have the reach of the BBC or ITV’s terrestrial channels and audiences for club games on sky are generally in low six figures.
Then, of course, there’s the argument that growth in rugby has been achieved despite rather than because of the rugby authorities. They continue to play league games during World Cups and international weekends, robbing the major teams of their biggest stars. There have been constant rows about promotion and relegation and the gap between the Premiership and League One is far bigger than its soccer equivalent.
Despite all this, rugby appears to be making tremendous progress. If the authorities can get their house in order its frightening to think what they might achieve.
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Ah the magic of those nights of European football! Even though it was a dead rubber, the crowd of little over 6,000 for Italian giants Juventus’ home Champions League game this week was a shocker and might provide food for thought for those working away behind the scenes on plans for European Leagues.
