David Conn: Supporters' chance to change face of game

Football's money men dug the game's image further into the mire this week, when the Premier League, in an official statement, trashed the record of the Football Association's outgoing chief executive, Adam Crozier, thereby contradicting the half-hearted attempt at a dignified exit cobbled together by the FA chairman, Geoff Thompson, last week.

While Thompson, chair of the FA's board on which four Premier League members sit, praised Crozier's "tremendous vision and drive", saying Crozier chose to resign, "based on two key principles" – a difference of opinion on how the FA should be run and – bizarrely – that his strategy was "coming to a natural end" – the Premiership chairmen surprised nobody by unanimously undermining that spin, condemning Crozier for allegedly failing to provide "proper and effective consultation" on issues – sponsorship deals – which affected their bottom lines.

Few believed last week's flannel, but this week's statement left nobody in any doubt that the Premiership chairmen, joined by the two FA board members from the Football League, wanted Crozier out and, following a vicious, personalised press campaign, the chief executive of what is supposed to be the governing body duly resigned.

In the same statement, the Premiership repeated its insistence – a very important marker in the current turmoil – that, contrary to Crozier's view and the fear of many in the FA, they are not seeking more of the FA's money for themselves. All 20 chairmen said the Premiership fully supported the FA "sharing net income equally between the national and professional game. There is absolutely no intention of reducing or threatening the proportion of income that is so vital in sustaining grass roots football in this country". That is a promise which must be long remembered and to which the Premier League must be held – and it is to be hoped there is no devil lurking in the detail of what constitutes "net" income.

Sooner or later, the dealmakers and hirers and firers will surely calm down after all the excitement and get back to the humdrum business of actually running the game which, in case anybody has forgotten, is currently in a spot of financial bother. Thursday's Premiership meeting was so pumped up with the Crozier post mortem there was no time to discuss the so-called "rescue fund", which Football League clubs, stripped of their ITV Digital deal, have been desperately seeking for over two months.

Before Crozier's exit, the League, led determinedly in the absence of a chief executive by its operations director, Andy Williamson, had been sympathetically heard by the FA, Premier League and Professional Footballers' Association, in essentially an earnest request for help. The bones of a proposal were there: £30m over two years, to be paid equally by the FA and the Premiership, some of it in straight donations, some in soft loans. The League will work hard to press that home despite Crozier's exit.

And, amid all the gloom, an intriguing possibility has opened up, being strongly advocated by the Government-backed initiative Supporters Direct, that the bail-out should not go to the current owners, but that shares be issued to democratic, mutual supporters' trusts, which would elect a director on the board, with a duty to see that the clubs spend the money responsibly.

"The clubs should not simply get hand-outs," said Andy Burnham, the Labour MP for Leigh, formerly the administrator of the Government's Football Task Force and now the chairman of Supporters Direct. "If money is to be made available, there is a strong case for it to be invested via not-for-profit supporters' trusts. That would secure the public interest and ensure that the ultimate beneficiaries are the community and the supporters."

Some chairmen may will not be leaping ecstatically at this prospect, but supporters' trusts are emerging into a standard feature of the football landscape, constituted at 44 English professional clubs, from Arsenal to Carlisle, Manchester United to Mansfield. Some 10 Football League clubs have a supporters representative elected on to the board, and they will surely have no problem with the idea of expanding this principle in return for hard cash.

The Premier League is understood to be insisting on two key financial reforms, to ensure the new money will not simply be poured into excessive players' wages. The first is that players' packages should be proportionately reduced if their club is relegated. The second is the knottier issue of a wage cap, with which the League is now grappling for the first serious time in English football. A seven-man working party, chaired by the Queen's Park Rangers chief executive, David Davies, will present proposals to all Football League clubs at a meeting at Oxford United on 28 November. Davies told me this week that the options were likely to range from a blanket figure imposed on all clubs in a division, to something similar to that adopted by Europe's rich G-14 clubs this week, a limit on the proportion of income spent on wages, or a combination of the two.

"We will ask the clubs to give us a mandate, to say they are genuinely interested in pursuing this principle. We can then move to the detail, of what kind of cap, the nuances for individual clubs, and implementation, including the question of penalties if clubs breach them."

A relief though it is to see the League finally addressing such fundamentals, it is hard to ignore the irony of the Premier League insisting on them. Wage restraint and a step down for players' wages on relegation are still foreign concepts to most of the chairman gathered feverishly round the boardroom table on Thursday. The largest football insolvencies so far, at Bradford and the £50m collapse of Leicester, have been the result of Premier League clubs paying players excessively and failing to include "step down" clauses in their contracts. When the clubs were relegated, they went bust.

The discussions over the rescue fund have themselves highlighted the fact that the Premiership clubs have effectively spent all of their income from the £1.5bn television deals. The £15m share of the rescue fund represents only one per cent of the Premiership's TV deal, but it is understood there is no TV money left, because it is immediately dished out to the clubs, which have committed it in costs, mostly players' wages.

The Premiership has turned to the £17m it provides to the PFA and, most controversially, to the £20m given to the Football Foundation, the football charity dedicated to halting the decline in grass roots football facilities and participation. The Foundation is a charity, so its funds cannot be used for ailing professional clubs, which has left as the most likely option that money will be diverted from the Football Stadium Improvement Fund, which provides grants to lower division and semi-professional clubs to improve their grounds.

The FA's £15m – to match the Premiership's contribution – is to come from reserves and cash not spent, including players' bonuses set aside this summer in case England progressed to win the World Cup. The diversion of that money to bail out 72 Football League clubs in financial crisis seems to sum up neatly the current cockeyed state of the national game.

The money will be paid in proportion to clubs' individual losses after Carlton and Granada pulled ITV Digital's plug. First Division clubs, hardest hit, are in line for around £800,000 each. The idea that this should not simply be doled out, but paid via supporters' trusts, is gaining currency within football. While at the Task Force, Burnham was instrumental in establishing the Foundation, extracting the Premier League's pledge to apply five per cent of their 2001-04 TV money to the grass roots, when the Premiership was facing a court challenge from the Office of Fair Trading. Here again, he is seeing in a crisis the opportunity for progress, making clubs more accountable to supporters and with a democratic element on the boards.

"This is a watershed for football, and surely we should use it, and the money the clubs are asking for, to encourage clubs to become much closer to their supporters, for the benefit of the whole community. It is difficult to argue the money should just go to the black holes and the people who own the clubs now, without reform."

Such talk was radical even a couple of years ago, but is becoming mainstream supporters' thinking. Chairmen's views are not always in harmony with them, but here the chairmen are asking for money, and so must be more disposed to accepting progressive conditions attached. Another way to put it would be that beggars can't be choosers, but that might be cruel.

davidconn@independent.co.uk