FA leaders left floundering on shameful day for 'beautiful game' in Grim room

After a four-hour manure typhoon in the Grimond Room – or just Grim, for short – there was a need to distinguish between the inept and the downright cruel. The Football Association has served up plenty of chaos over the decades, but there was a requirement this time to pick out the lives damaged, the hopes unjustly dashed.

When it was over, Greg Clarke, the FA chairman, shook hands and chatted with Eni Aluko, who stood vindicated in her claim that Mark Sampson made racially charged comments to her. The simplest conclusion from that particular imbroglio is: don’t employ idiots, and don’t then fail to work out that people are idiots when non-idiots draw attention to it. This all started really when Sampson made so-called jokes about Ebola and the arrest records of black footballers.

For that, in a statement full of anomalies, the FA finally agreed that Sampson had made “discriminatory remarks” contrary to the Equality Act of 2010 but also called them “ill-judged attempts at humour”. You would have thought the League Managers Association’s disastrous attempt to explain the former Cardiff manager Malky Mackay’s odious litany of bigoted texts as “banter” gone wrong would have precluded any mention of “humour” in future official statements.

At the same time, the FA said, there was no evidence that Aluko was “subjected to a course of bullying and discriminatory conduct” by Sampson.

There are contradictions in those conclusions – but a rough summary of their position would be: the England Women manager made racially unacceptable comments to his players while trying to be funny but is not a bully or a racist.

To reach that point, the FA made most of the mistakes you could possibly imagine: and paid a high price for them in front of the digital, culture, media and sport select committee, whose questioning was high on moral outrage but surprisingly low on lawyerly nous. It seemed as intent on humiliating the four FA executives as it was in blowing holes in their answers. As Lianne Sanderson, Aluko’s former England team-mate, observed of her time as a “Lioness” (that cuddly concept now looks dead): “It started going in a weird direction.” 

We heard a scathing attack by Clarke on the reported £3.37 million salary paid to Gordon Taylor of the Professional Footballers’ Association, an organisation he also accused of stopping counselling payments to a victim of child sex abuse. For good measure, Clarke even said he had been told of the existence of a gay Premier League footballer, who would be the first, officially, if he confirmed himself to be so.

One of the most damning aspects of a mortifying afternoon was the sense that the original inquiry into Sampson’s conduct was indeed, as the PFA alleged, weighted towards clearing Sampson. Dan Ashworth, the FA technical director, whose position looks untenable, led an inquiry which failed to consult possible witnesses to Aluko’s allegations, and to which he made complimentary comments about Sampson – a clear conflict of interest. Floundering even more was Martin Glenn, the chief executive, whose combativeness could not conceal his cock-ups.

The FA was cast as a body that failed to do due diligence – on Sampson’s time at Bristol – failed to read its own reports, and failed to seek out witnesses in the Aluko case until forced to do so.

“I’m not here to tell you this is the FA’s finest hour” said Clarke, who caused a fuss by referring to allegations of endemic racism and bullying as “fluff”.

Again, a vital task is to look past the bleak comedy and ask: who was hurt, who lost out? These were not victimless events. Aluko and Sanderson lost their England careers. Speaking out ultimately cast Aluko as a nuisance or agitator. The FA fired Sampson (who is considering suing for wrongful dismissal) after going back to a document that now prompts Ashworth to tell MPs: “I wasn’t shown a report.”

This kind of institutional chaos is dangerous. It allows people in positions of responsibility to damage the lives of others and then disappear into the bureaucratic fog. The FA’s hiding days are over.