Pat Nevin: Here's a radical plan - let the leaders lead and let the blazers get on with designing camels

Published on Saturday 28 February 2009 18:55

MODERN LIFE in big towns is very different from just a generation ago. These days it is not unusual to know very few people in your own street, and people living in the same tenement are often little more than strangers on nodding terms with each other. While people vigorously defend their own little area of ownership there seems to be a growing fear of contact and a distrust of communication, The eyes say it all: 'Why are you talking to me, what do you want?'

I sometimes wonder if the same attitude pervades Hampden Park. The SFA, SPL and SFL are based in the same corridors and yet the ability to communicate seems to have been almost totally lost. This week, as SPL2 became the focus of attention after it finally found its way out of the legal process, the three bodies issued various pronouncements on the subject. The common ground seems to have been that none know what they actually want and will have to go back and consult with their members.

If there are major problems in the Scottish game then surely bold decisions have to be made quickly by the best people, and hopefully they are the very people currently charged to be the chairmen and chief executives of these organisations. It may sound autocratic, but the need to take every decision back to boards, councils and a plethora of committees means that Scottish football moves in tectonic time. By the time Lex Gold, Gordon Smith and David Longmuir consult with every party, most good ideas will have either passed their sell-by date or have been watered down to such a level as to be pretty pointless anyway.

I have sat in some interminably long committee meetings in my time but my first meeting at the annual SFA Council took the biscuit (actually there were cream cakes). I had looked forward to being part of the process that made the real decisions in Scottish football but in reality most of the time was spent debating which Highland League club should be closest to the top table at the pre-Scottish Cup final gala dinner. Youth football got a cursory 10 minutes at the end.

It is often said that a camel is a horse designed by committee but I suspect the SFA committee system would have produced a duck-billed platypus given the same original specifications. It is time to let the men elected to lead the operations make some decisions, otherwise why have they been appointed in the first place? Does this sound undemocratic and could it possibly work in the real world of top-level football? Well yes actually on both counts; it is and it has worked in England for years.

In my time as PFA chairman in England I was part of the Professional Footballers Negotiating and Consultative Committee (PFNCC). It is such a long-winded name and so vague sounding it hardly registers with anyone in the game, even down south. In actual fact it is a forum that meets throughout the year when the CEOs and the chairmen of the PFA, the FA, the FA Premier League and the Football League gather to make decisions about the direction of the game. There were decisions made on the day at these meetings which would have taken months or years of interminable wrangling if they were allowed anywhere near the general blazerati. (If we had a similar structure in Scotland there would even be a ready-made place for Henry McLeish as impartial chairman.)

Football changes quickly. The world, particularly the financial world, is moving at a frightening rate, yet Scottish football still makes decisions based on ideas that are years old, ideas that are often in danger of being out of date by the time they are implemented.

SPL2 might be a great idea, who knows? But if it is now then it probably was two years ago as well.

It is time to let the football governors govern and if they get it wrong, shunt them and get better ones in. They could start by sauntering down the corridor and organising a little meeting with each other and if they can't even do that maybe they are in the wrong job. Happily I doubt we will have to reward them with a 650K per annum pension for their troubles if they do make a mess of it.