Analysis - Can England 2018 Weather the Storm over Dave Richards' Resignation?

(WFI) In a back room of Doha’s Ritz Carlton two weeks ago, World Football Insider gained a revealing insight into the dynamics of England’s World Cup bid.

Following weeks of crisis and a boardroom reshuffle a day earlier, bid chairman David Triesman came to face down highly critical British journalists who had castigated him and his bid team.

For half an hour, Triesman faced a relentless barrage as he tried to explain the problems the Football Association had encountered securing government funding.

Behind him stood his English Premier League counterpart and fellow bid board member Dave Richards.

As Triesman was harangued and vilified, trying to justify his failure to extract from a recession-hit government the £5 million ($8.3) needed to plug a hole in the bid’s budget, his supposed ally, Richards – who runs the wealthiest league in the world, where a player can easily make that much money in a single year – said not a single word.

If his silence was deafening, it also confirmed to me that the EPL’s support for England 2018 is essentially meaningless. Indeed, one colleague suggested that a World Cup could be the worst thing that ever happened to the EPL.

A World Cup in England would confirm to the world the country’s place as football’s historic and spiritual home. If the EPL was a forward-thinking organization, it would view it as a great marketing tool; but the EPL is too insular and narrow-minded to ever take such a view.

This is because a World Cup in England would strengthen the position of the FA – the English game’s custodians – which is an entirely unedifying prospect to the EPL.

A stronger FA might be able to impose the sort of common sense reform – Michel Platini’s financial fair play proposals; Sepp Blatter’s 6+5 reforms; or a national center of excellence – that the English game so desperately needs. The EPL, which has an extreme l’aissez faire approach to football governance, views such proposals with horror.

At first sight Richards’ maliciously timed resignation from the England bid board on Tuesday had the aspect of a palace coup. The immediate assumption is that it makes Triesman – who has tried to cast himself as a reformer – a lame duck, making his position within both England 2018 and the FA untenable. Certainly it has increased the already vast pressure on Triesman and he may well still walk, although sources within the bid say he is going nowhere.

Richards claims that he will continue to support the bid beyond the boardroom. EPL chief executive Richard Scudamore yesterday phoned the England bid CEO Andy Anson to reaffirm his support.

But beyond such platitudes, Richards’ withdrawal from the bid board gives a more realistic reflection of how it actually operates. The EPL’s tentative support for England’s World Cup bid did not merit a place on the 2018 board; now it no longer has one.

The rise of Sir Dave
Richards rise to the top table of English football remains one of the great mysteries of modern sport.

Despite his prominent role over the last two decades, he seldom speaks to the press and can seem a shadowy figure. Those who know him say he is affable and a consensual figure in football’s committee rooms. In a cliquish football culture where reform is viewed with suspicion, such traits are seen as assets.

He made his money in engineering – although his company Three Stars Engineering went bust in July 2001 with the loss of 120 jobs and debts of £3 million – and was elected to the board of Sheffield Wednesday in October 1989, becoming chairman the following March.

On the field Richards’ chairmanship oversaw Wednesday’s 1991 League Cup win and two unsuccessful cup final appearances in 1993. But Wednesday quickly reverted to their status of also-rans, and, following a succession of poor managerial appointments, they were en route to relegation from the EPL and some £20 million in debt when, in February 2001, Richards accepted the role as EPL chairman.

Sheffield Wednesday went down that year, and were subsequently relegated to English football’s third tier. They have never returned to the top flight and struggled financially through this decade. "The final insult," the club's Independent Supporters Association told the Independent newspaper in 2003, "is that his football career has been left uninterrupted, whilst ours has been a constant fight against relegation."

Richards’ chairmanship of the EPL has witnessed a spectacular growth in TV revenues and gross wealth. Yet the EPL remains an unwieldy beast, riven by contradictions.

Despite its wealth it is also the most indebted league in the world and increasingly reliant on the largesse of foreign businessman and overseas TV viewers to maintain its gargantuan growth rates. As a TV spectacle it’s brilliant, but it’s difficult to argue that it benefits the grassroots of the English game or provides the spectator value for money, especially when compared to Germany's Bundesliga.
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It is also a second rate custodian to English football, as witnessed by the mess unleashed at Portsmouth by its brief owner Sulamain Al-Fahim – who was ordained by the EPL’s ‘fit and proper person’s’ test, one of many fiascoes whose roots lie with the EPL’s weak governance.

Because it casts other leagues as rivals and aggressively fights for market share of global TV markets, beyond its own shores the EPL is the most unpopular league in the world. While it is a potent marketing tool for England 2018 among the world’s football watching masses, among the men who matter on the FIFA Executive Committee it is probably an impediment.

World football’s administrators generally see the Premier League as avaristic, introverted and arrogant.

Flying out in business class to Doha for England’s exhibition friendly against Brazil, Richards and Lord Triesman took their seats behind me, seemingly oblivious to the scribe in their presence. Journalistic discretion prevents me from divulging the details of their conversation, but as the champagne flowed my worst fears about the EPL’s world view were confirmed.

A world without Dave
But what does all the hullabaloo over Richards’ resignation really mean for England 2018, when all the excited tabloid headlines die away?

WFI believes it could be one of two ways.

Either David Triesman will decide he’s had enough and fall on his sword as bid chairman, and quite possibly FA chairman too – if, as he has stated, he genuinely believes the two roles to be intrinsically entwined.

This might usher in a new independent bid chief – perhaps Gary Lineker – but most likely one of the so-called blazers who dominate the corridors of English football, a Geoff Thompson or, more likely, David Dein – the highly connected former Arsenal vice-chairman, who has kept a studied distance from the bid, despite apparently having a role within it.

Or, more likely, Triesman will go it alone, without the EPL’s duplicitous support.

While it won’t appease the English tabloid headline writers, who remain fixated with the self-styled ‘greatness’ of their domestic top flight, oddly, a showdown between the FA and its domestic footballing beast will do England’s World Cup bid team no harm whatsoever. A distance with the EPL helps the FA in its efforts to ally it with its European cousins, who are otherwise ostracized by the league’s arrogance.

Votes from Europe’s FIFA Ex-Comm members will be crucial when it is decided where the 2018 finals will go next year.

England still lead the way
Despite all this domestic breast-beating and infighting, England remain overwhelming favorites to host the 2018 World Cup. Even if it were to happen tomorrow, the existing infrastructure in the birthplace of football is far beyond that of any of its rivals.

The talk of crisis is more a reflection of the English media – which, in the absence of its usual target of an unpopular England manager, is currently gunning for Triesman – than the overall state of the bid campaign.

Take Spain-Portugal, cited by the English tabloids as a formidable challenger. Only last month did it launch its bid campaign, and its joint bid status (in contravention of virtually every utterance by Sepp Blatter on the issue of dual bids) utterly mystifies those in Spain who otherwise think of themselves as legitimate contenders to England. Not only that, but the head of Portugal’s FA, Gilbert Madail, even though he has professed that his country is a junior partner in the bid, seems to be its driving force.

Russia have made headway as a bid country, but vast problems – poor attendances, crowd violence, endemic racism, corruption – in its domestic football structure loom large.

Belgium-Holland were unable to even secure the support of Johann Cruyff, its greatest sporting icon, and they lack the wow factor of their European rivals.

Budgetary constraints limit England to an extent, but even this is overstated. While £15 million is commonly cited as England 2018’s budget, the Iberian bid has acknowledged a budget of €7.8million. Allow for the frail state of sterling and in real terms this is around a third of England’s spend.

A crucial, but largely unheralded addition to England’s team was announced last week in Simon Greenberg.

A former Chelsea PR man, journalist and Harvard graduate, he combines the sharpness, experience and edge desperately needed by a bid team with a soft center. He would have given short shrift to the press mauling suffered by David Triesman in recent weeks.

All is clearly not well in the England 2018 camp, but the race is by no means lost. Indeed they’ve scarcely shed a length in their lead for 2018.

Mauled domestically, England 2018 carry vast presence and pulling power beyond their own shores – a landscape unimaginable to many of its most ardent critics. They have incomparable stadia and among its football-mad people the appetite, passion and backing for a great tournament. The bid team also possess a combination of diligence, long term view and decency – mostly unheralded virtues, but which represent the long-forgotten vision of English football’s founding fathers and which first made football a global sport.

Written by James Corbett

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