FA chief Lord Triesman has two options - fight for his life, or run for the hills

By Martin Lipton in Laptop with Martin Lipton

Published 22:45 24/11/09

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If Lord David Triesman thought politics was a nest of vipers, he now knows that football is an even tougher blood sport.

But while the FA chairman is privately determined to face down the unprecedented challenge to his authority from Sir Dave Richards and the Premier League, it will need the former Foreign Office minister to win a turf war as vicious as any he has witnessed.

That Richard Scudamore and Triesman rarely read the same page, let alone speak from it, is hardly a surprise.

Scudamore’s stewardship of the Premier League has been the ultimate example of unfettered capitalism, meeting the demand for his product by ratcheting up the price from the bidders.

Triesman, by contrast, comes from a very different philosophy and while he was unanimously named - to some surprise - as the FA’s first independent chairman in 2007, it did not take long for the battle lines to be drawn up.

You name the issue and Triesman and the Premier League locked horns, the opening salvo coming in the chairman’s first week in the job.

At Premier League headquarters, it is insisted that Triesman initially voiced his support for the crassly controversial “39th game“ proposals which would have seen an extra round of matches played outside England, before changing his stance completely.

That is fiercely denied but there is no doubt that Triesman’s denunciation of the idea helped kill it stone-dead as he said: “I am determined that our international and domestic relations must be sustained at the highest level, and I will not countenance any damage to those relations.”

Relations between the FA and the League, however, were damaged and when Triesman took the stage at the Leaders in Football Conference in October 2008 to criticise the way clubs were running up “toxic debts”, he had made an enemy for life.

Triesman, who revealed the English game was a staggering £3billion in the red, said: “Transparency lies in an unmarked grave. Nobody has real confidence in what they cannot see.

“The fit and proper persons test does not do the job sufficiently robustly. A review is now inevitable because football clubs are not mere commodities. They are the abiding passion of their supporters. We forget that at our peril.”

For Scudamore, who last night insisted he was still 100 per cent behind the 2018 bid, this was as incendiary as dropping an atomic bomb on League headquarters in Gloucester Place.

Scudamore prides himself on making the Premier League a special product, with the best players in the world and a global television audience to match and to be told, so publicly, that he had overseen a lax regime was a grievous personal attack.

The briefings and murmurings began, with Triesman, who found an ally in former political rival and Football League chairman Lord Mawhinney, refusing to back down.

Whether it was brave or plain foolish is difficult to say. What is clear is that, just as with Scudamore, the FA chairman’s relationship with Richards was becoming increasingly untenable.

For the Premier League, Triesman’s discussions with UEFA chief Michel Platini over his proposal for “Financial Fair Play“ and his outline support for Sepp Blatter’s six plus five policy restricting the number of foreign players any club could field were further grounds for anger.

The League believed Triesman viewed English football’s greatest money-driver as a negative rather than a positive and that his fall-out with the Government in which he had served before leaving Westminster for his initial offices at Soho Square was further proof he had lost the plot.

With the 2018 bid suffering a series of blows, including a ridiculous stand-up spat with Trinidad’s influential Jack Warner, the pressure on Triesman mounted ahead of the recent board re-jig which saw a major streamlining approved.

In the words of one arch-critic, not entirely without malice: “Triesman has the chin of Muhammad Ali - and the self-awareness of Alan Partridge!“

That sums up the virulent anger yet Triesman, by contrast, is understood to feel he is now a target because he refused to roll over and let Scudamore and Co tickle his tummy.

Richards, who understood this month’s shake-up and slimming down of the 2018 bid board would see his role, especially internationally with his close links in Africa and Asia, advanced, bit his tongue despite the personal animosity.

But the subsequent appointment of Chelsea communications director Simon Greenberg - close to Lord Seb Coe - as “chief of staff“ with media and other responsibilities, was the final straw.

Richards plotted and schemed at his home in Sheffield, waiting the time to drop the bomb which landed on Triesman’s desk in the form of his letter of resignation just before yesterday’s 2018 board meeting.

It was a call for action, disguised - thinly - as a principled response to the total breakdown in their personal relationship and leaves Triesman with just two options - fight for his life, or run for the hills.

The signs last night were that he is preparing to do the former, to pick up the gauntlet and throw it back in Richards’ face, even though many will argue a drawn-out struggle will do even further damage to that 2018 bid.

Triesman believes, passionately, that he can not only win the battle but also the biggest prize of all, leading the written-off 2018 bid team to victory in Zurich next December. Surviving to fight for that prize, however, will require him to show nerves of steel now.

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