FA's day of reckoning at Westminster drags organisation's reputation further through the dirt

You can say Mark Sampson used racially discriminatory language. You can say he made racially-charged comments to Eni Aluko about her family bringing Ebola with them to Wembley, or to Drew Spence about whether she had ever been arrested. You can say he was in contravention of the Equality Act, and that he should go on racial awareness training. But according to barrister Katharine Newton’s latest report into the Football Association’s serial incompetence, you can’t call him a racist. Because that would be unfair, you see.

A similar style of semantic ballet was visible in Parliament on Wednesday, as four high-ranking members of the FA were interrogated by a committee of MPs on l’affaire Aluko, l’affaire Sampson and much else besides. Simply put, a lot of things had gone wrong, yet conveniently most of those things were a long way in the past. And yes, they were all very sorry, but curiously not for things they had actually done. And yes, people had to be made accountable, but conveniently none of those people were actually in the room at the time.

“There certainly were systemic failures which contributed to the current mess,” said chairman Greg Clarke, although he insisted that the current lot were best placed to sort them. “A failure to consider the wider conduct issues emanating from that report,” said chief executive Martin Glenn on the issue of why Sampson remained in the job despite concerns over his behaviour being flagged up in 2015, but he insisted that things were different now. “We did the best we could,” said human resources director Rachel Brace of the shambolic initial investigation that cleared Sampson of making the comment to Spence without interviewing any of the players in the room at the time.

Meanwhile Dan Ashworth, the FA’s technical director, said very little of anything at all. Ashworth is probably best known for being the architect of the fabled “England DNA”, which urges English footballers to be bold, proactive, fluent and dictate terms. By contrast, you could argue that his contribution to the committee today - curt, stifled, almost heartbreaking in its lack of verve - was a far better analogue for the current side than anything the St George's Park marketing department could rustle up.

Clarke tried a different tack. In politics they talk of the “dead cat” strategy, a means of distracting voters from the more pressing issue by giving them something more noteworthy to gawp at. And whether it was his astonishing attack on the Professional Footballers’ Association, the incessant tangents on Grenfell, Les Ferdinand and his council estate upbringing, or the frequent and increasingly cynical references to his role in the FA’s historic child abuse investigation, Clarke produced not just one dead cat, but an entire pet cemetery.

And even as the car-crash revelations piled up, the indignities snowballed, and MPs gleefully tore into their prey - “I’ve never heard such shambolic evidence,” MP Jo Stevens said at one point - it was possible to feel not vindicated or titillated, but just despondent.

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The four FA staff will be fine. They are not accountable to us, or the committee, or indeed anybody but their own board. Even if they fall on their swords, there will be other lucrative jobs for them to take. The MPs were getting paid for their time, and even managed to bag some free television exposure into the bargain. And to anyone who reckons Sampson’s career is finished, two words: Malky Mackay.

But somebody did have to face the consequences, and she was sitting just a few feet behind in the front row, shaking her head sadly. There is no such thing as an alternative England career. Earlier, Aluko had respectfully and articulately given her side of the story. She has lost her England place, sacrificed months and years of her life and countless reserves of emotional energy, been traduced and abused, doubted and slandered. While Sampson was waved out of the door with nine months’ salary, to this day the FA continue to withhold a settlement payment from Aluko because she had the temerity to speak out. Asked whether the payment would now be made, Glenn replied simply: “We will reflect on it.” At one point, Clarke was invited to turn around and apologise to Aluko’s face. He refused.

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It was not just Aluko, either. Her erstwhile team-mate Lianne Sanderson also told a compelling tale about how she was frozen out of the setup after expressing her sadness that her 50th cap had been entirely forgotten by the FA. “There’s a lot of bias, there’s a lot of ignorance in that environment,” she said. “We want change. We don’t want someone to go through this again.”

So let’s sum up the main issues here. The FA failed to conduct due diligence when they appointed Sampson. They failed to investigate his racist comments properly when they came to light, and then they failed to act on them. They failed in their duty of care to Aluko, failed to respond to her complaint properly, failed to pay her all the money they owed her and failed even to look at her when asked to do so. They failed to put a complaints procedure in place, they failed to explain why Sanderson’s England career was inexplicably cut short, and they failed to answer the accusations that current goalkeeping coach Lee Kendall used to address Aluko in a fake Caribbean accent.

They have failed, in fact, by almost every conceivable measure. But remember, we can’t call them failures. Because that would be unfair.