What organisations and what people really have the power in football?

By Tony Attwood

Power in football – now that is an interesting topic and I am obliged to the Daily Telegraph by thinking about writing an article on it.

It is a bit of a tough read because there is so much puffing up of themselves and all their collective work in coming up with the list, but the idea is still a good one.

Before reading the article I thought I would try and do my own top ten – or at least top five – and then see how it compared with the newspapers.   And at once I hit what throughout the contemplation of this article seemed to me to be the big issue.

For the Telegraph presented “The 50 most powerful people in English football” and I immediately wanted to change this to the “50 most important sources of power” because I wanted to include organisations.  And in doing that I ended up with organisations dominating my top list…

Of course I would love to have included Untold, but I know our influence is so tiny compared to some of the monstrosities in the list you’d need a microscope to see it, but even so, we have highlighted the issue of refs, explained why England fail (our explanation written years before anyone else tried it is now moving into the mainstream), exposing the way transfers really work, exposing how stories such as “Arsenal have the most injuries” and its early 20th century rival “Arsenal have the dirtiest team”) were total myths but became mainstream beliefs, right down to how last week the Guardian has nicked our Tax Payers Stadium name and used it as their name for WHU.   So there are tiny hints that we are quite widely read, but influence?   I think I’d be kidding myself.

In the end organisations rather than people did dominate my top list…

1: PGMO.   Their decision to run refereeing on a model adopted by Italy during its corruption crisis is just about the biggest there has been in football in the last five years.

2: The FA.  Not because they do much but they do one thing – they support Fifa and that warps the whole of football in England.  By supporting the FA it means all of English football supports corruption and we are forever stopped from moving on.

3: Successive Sports Ministers in the UK government who could have cut off FA funding and so started the journey to reform, but who have each said, one after the other, “Make no mistake, I will not hesitate to… blah blah blah.

4. The media en masse for perpetuating their story about what football is and “what the fans want”, and for supporting Fifa.

5.  Members of all the FA sub-committees who have for 50 years successfully stopped all change in football.

6.  Arsene Wenger who not only transformed Arsenal, but the whole approach to the way football can be played, and who has stopped the media sniggering every time a football manager says a word with more than one syllable in it.

7.  Fifa, the most corrupt sporting body in a world of corrupt sporting bodies

8.  Sky TV who have set the approach for football coverage, decided what is to be shown and what must not, and then so dominated the market that the other broadcasters have failed to challenge it in any meaningful way.

9.  The national press, desperately trying to hang on in the era of social media and so endlessly running round in circles trying to find what will bring readers in.   And occasionally, they do it.  Although mostly they lead us down false trails.

10.  Social media, which has been the hunting ground for the aaa and the post-truth mob.

It is however interesting that PGMO does get a mention in the Telegraph’s list, with, at number 43 Mike Riley being listed.  Of him they say,

The Telegraph’s top man is Richard Scudamore who runs the Premier League.  After that we have Pep Guardiola for inventing tiki-taka and then super-agent Jorge Mendes followed by Jose Mourinho presumably nominated for the triple achievement of taking Chelsea out of the Champions League, making Chelsea the laughing stock by picking a pathetic fight with the club doctor, and being a bit of a prat.