In his book, David Davies writes of the former FA chief executive, Graham Kelly, in scathing terms, asserting that he was seldom in his office when you wanted him and that he arrived early in the morning and left early in the afternoon.
The publication of the luridly titled ‘F.A. Confidential: Sex, Drugs and Penalties’ by David Davies has caused much controversy. If you have never heard of Davies, he is the former television political correspondent who spent years at the Football Association as a senior executive. I know him well. In time gone by, he used to travel straight down the long road from the then Lancaster Gate headquarters of the FA to have coffee and, in his own words, advice at my house in Holland Park. He drank the coffee, but I don’t remember my giving him advice and if I did, he didn’t take it.
The first mystery about his book is why he didn’t write it himself. This when you vividly remember the colossal controversy caused when Glenn Hoddle, then the England manager, published soon after the 1998 World Cup finals an indiscreet and ill-considered diary of that tournament which caused much grief and controversy. Especially in the way it detailed the violent reaction of the maverick Paul Gascoigne when Glenn told him he had been dropped from the World Cup squad. “Wrong, wrong, wrong!” admits Davies in his book.
Well, of course it was and this is a sadly belated repentance. In his senior FA role at the time, it was surely Davies’ duty to pass judgement on such a diary and censor it where it was required, rather than write it himself. His own poor judgement was compounded by the laxity of his superiors, who allowed him to do it.
At which blame must be directed at the then chief executive, Graham Kelly who, as Davies mentions in the book, I nicknamed “Kelly The Jelly.” Davies writes of Kelly in scathing terms, asserting that he was seldom in his office when you wanted him, that Kelly arrived early in the morning and left early in the afternoon. Having in fact been guilty of one of the most disastrous sell-outs in the history of British football, for which he has only very recently been lambasted yet again in a book by the political sketch writer Quentin Letts. For Kelly it was who was largely responsible for the birth of what I at once nicknamed the Greed Is Good League, alias the Premiership. Which at a stroke enriched the clubs, through television rights, of the top division, at the shocking expense of all the rest. So much for the historic mission and duty of the FA to hold the ring in English soccer, to be above the conflict.
Davies writes that when he joined the FA, he was astonished by how old fashioned and anachronistic the set-up was. Maybe but the so called modernisation which followed was, if Davies could only see it, so much worse. Above all, under the flamboyant and spendthrift regime of the new executive, Adam Crozier.
When Crozier came into the frame, I actually expressed to Davies my astonishment that he could be a serious candidate. He had recently been “outed” in a newspaper as having doctored his figures when working in the advertising section of the Daily Telegraph, though they had forgiven him. Davies reassured me that there was a long time before the FA appointment would be made the following January. But then the smoke cleared, and there was Crozier installed in office.
And what, in his profligate way, did he do to rejuvenate the FA? One: he moved them (Davies mentions the move but doesn’t mention Crozier) from Lancaster Gate in Bayswater, opposite Hyde Park, to a vastly more central and hugely expensive quarters in Soho Square in the fashionable heart of London’s West End. And this without the knowledge and the permission of the FA committee meant to deal with such things.
Meanwhile, he sacked numerous long serving officials at the FA who, however unfashionable they may have seemed, largely did know what they were about. Replacing them to a large degree with young “dolly bird” so called market executives, paid £80,000 a year. Improvement?
And if the old FA was something of an anachronism, never did it descend into the sheer moral squalor with which Davies deals in his book. A scandal which in time, would, as he self pityingly tells us, cause him eight months of sheer anguish.
At the centre of it all, a ruthless femme fatale, was his own secretary, Faria Alam. It transpired that she had been having affairs first with Mark Palios, at that time the FA’s chief executive, a financial expert who had once played football somewhat obscurely for Tranmere Rovers, then with the manager of the England team, Sven-Goran Eriksson.
Outrageously, when the story was about to leak out in the notorious Sunday paper the News of the World, Palios tried to do a deal with them, via the chief FA publicist, the ex-journalist Colin Gibson, whereby he would point the finger at Eriksson, provided his own guilt were kept out of it. He failed. But when Davies taxed Eriksson with his role in the scandal, he somewhat feebly accepted Eriksson’s evasive response that it was “nonsense”. Subsequently and illogically, Davies, now proud of it, would defend the hugely overpaid Eriksson, when his managerial role had become a disaster.
But when it eventually came to a tribunal where Alam shamelessly demanded compensation for her dismissal, what did she do but viciously point the finger at the innocent Davies, alleging he had molested her? After long delays, the tribunal met and threw out her accusation. But she had made a huge sum of money in the meantime.
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