Why the next FA chairman should be the only man who has kept England's 2018 bid afloat

By Martin Lipton in Laptop with Martin Lipton

Published 12:11 30/11/10

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The next 48 hours or so will decide whether England gets the right to host the 2018 World Cup.

That decision will be made by 23 men in a darkened room just a stone's throw from Zurich Zoo, on Thursday afternoon, and announced to the planet soon afterwards.

But while hosting the greatest show on earth or not will make a massive difference to the way English football looks at itself, the bigger decision, perhaps, is the one that English football itself has to make.

Since Lord Triesman paid the price for his dining table indiscretions - and in the light of what we know about FIFA now, perhaps those who castigated Triesman will accept he might not have been too wide of the mark after all - the leadership of the Football Association has been more like a vacuum.

Acting chairman Roger Burden - riding solo after a pretty swift evisceration of David Sheepshanks - initially insisted he was not interested in the job, only to change his mind and begin a lobbying campaign.

Yet while Burden has done his Invisible Man act for months, illustrating that he remains far more of a mortgage advisor than a leader in waiting, the man who should be the next full-time FA chairman has been doing as much as anybody could to bring the 2018 World Cup home.

David Dein has his enemies. No question about that.

At Arsenal, where he will never be forgiven for the crime of introducing the man now lauded by the board, at other clubs, within the offices and committee room of Wembley as well.

Some of them are influential. Too influential.

He has not always helped himself, either. Too clubby, too self-assured, too, well.... too Dein.

But nobody else would have travelled the globe in the way Dein has done since being asked to join the bid team. Nobody else would have worked a room like Dein does. Nobody else could have put in the work that ensured England's bid leaders travelled to Zurich in charge of a campaign that was not merely on life support.

And, if we are being honest, if the FA councillors and placemen are being true to themselves, there would be nobody better equipped and placed to take on the burdens of leadership than the former Arsenal vice-chairman.

If there is a suit who everybody in world football recognises, it is Dein.

True, it helps that, unlike so many in this country, he is a polyglot. He speaks French like a native, has a natural facility for making people, football people, feel at home in his company.

And, crucially, he knows everybody.

Triesman was criticised for being too much of a politician, trying to inject himself into an alien world.

Burden has never even breathed the atmosphere of that world. He is, very much, a representative of the amateur game - and that does not always sit easily in the professional world.

For Dein, though, that world is his natural environment, home from home.

That being evicted from Arsenal in a boardroom putsch three years ago hurt is one of the great understatements. It was a massive blow in the solar plexus, a source of anguish, leaving a huge void in his life.

Arsenal have suffered, too. Arsene Wenger trusted Dein implicitly. They had disagreements but both knew they were working in a common cause.

Dein was the interlocutor, the link between the manager and the board, the man who would argue for the extra £5,000 per week to bring the players Wenger wanted to the club.

Becoming, overnight, persona non grata at the club he loved was hard for Dein to bear.

Three other Premier League clubs, including Everton, offered him a job. But when you are an Arsenal man, born and bred, you cannot change your shirt that easily.

Dein suffered, plotted, hoped for a return. After all, having paid the boardroom price for making the initial overtures to Stan Kroenke, watching the American given the red carpet treatment by the same people who had made the former vice-chairman an outcast for trying to get investment from him must have hurt.

It explains why he sold his shares to Alisher Usmanov. The £75million softened the blow but Dein was looking for a way back.

It did not come and for three years he was lost to the game. No matter how much money you have, how great your lifestyle, you need something to make it fulfilled.

For Dein, that was football, and when the call came from the 2018 team last year nobody could have grasped it with more alacrity.

It was almost as if Dein had been handed a second chance to make his first impression and he has relished the opportunity to meet his friends on equal terms again, becoming the front man of the bid.

That may not prove enough. The joint campaign from Spain and Portugal may end up emerging triumphant on Thursday but if England fail, Dein would not deserve any of the brickbats that will come the way of the FA.

He deserves, only, reward. The reward of the FA riding roughshod over the objections of Sir Dave Richards and his acolytes, of ignoring the claims of the Quiet Man, Burden, and asking him to be the next chairman.

The FA needs a man football knows. David Dein.

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