Football Governance

Written evidence submitted by the Commission on the Future of Women’s Sport (FG 11)

1. Our response concentrates on one particular aspect of your review, whether the FA is fit for purpose.

2. As you know, the Commission on the Future of Women’s Sport (full membership listed below) has published two reports into the need for governance reform in sport. Trophy Women? and Trophy Women? 2010 both demonstrate that many sports, including football, are suffering by not having a diverse leadership. The FA in particular, has no women on their Board and very few in senior executive positions.

3. We recognise that your current investigation is primarily concerned with professional football clubs, but we believe that the lack of diversity (specifically the lack of women) at the top of the FA is damaging its ability to take the sport forward, and damaging its ability to properly regulate the professional clubs.

4. It is incredibly difficult to fathom out who controls the FA. It remains a myriad of Boards and Committees all representing different (and often competing) interests which ensure that proposals for reform and progress are quashed at every opportunity. For instance, last year the 1,120 FA Shareholders managed to overturn the will of the FA Executive and the FA Council and block the removal of an antiquated ban on mixed football up to the age of 14. (http://www.thefa.com/TheFA/RulesandRegulations/NewsAndFeatures/2010/MixedFootball)

5. When even seemingly uncontroversial and well backed proposals such as this are blocked, it is easy to understand why the FA struggles to control the many powerful interests within the professional game.

6. The Commission believes that to ensure that the FA is fit for purpose; it needs to radically modernise its own governance structure. Many of the representative committees need to be abolished and the main Board needs streamlining with a strong injection of independent Members from outside the sport. These new Board Members should be appointed following an open recruitment process against defined role descriptions. We believe that if these new Members included women, then the FA would benefit from more informed decision making and higher quality decisions.

7. You will be aware that we are not the first body to call for these reforms, but we urge the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee to do all it can to ensure that the FA adopt them.

January 2011