Written evidence submitted by the Commission
on the Future of Women's Sport
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
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