The Power of the Premier League: Triesman, the Bid and the Reckoning
The resignation of Lord Triesman was no accident. It was the culmination of a long campaign against a man who dared to question the Premier League's financial recklessness and its disregard for the English game.
A Familiar End
Lord David Triesman is gone, his resignation as FA chairman secured by a secret recording made during a private conversation. The immediate cause was his commentary on England’s rivals for the 2018 World Cup bid, but the roots of his departure run far deeper, stretching back to October 2008 when he first had the nerve to criticise the Premier League.
His crime was to question the mountain of debt its member clubs had accumulated in their relentless pursuit of success. In the months that followed, a steady campaign began. Stories appeared, strategically placed in the national media, designed to paint the FA chairman in an unflattering light. His past as a communist and his present in ‘New’ Labour were dredged up. More inventive attacks followed: a diary column detailed his supposed self-importance for not immediately returning a raffle prize won at an FA function.
Another story attempted to blame him for a funding dispute between the English and Jamaican FAs, an issue that not only predated his time at the FA but one he had actually helped to resolve.
It is a depressingly familiar pattern. A decade ago, a bright moderniser at the FA named Adam Crozier found himself subjected to a similar war of attrition. He was trying to position the Football Association as the true heart of the English game, to act as if it genuinely ran things. Soon, stories appeared about his supposed obsession with style over substance and the FA’s rising salary costs - critiques that sat oddly coming from a world defined by the excesses of professional football clubs. As David Conn detailed in his 2005 book The Beautiful Game, it all ended in tears for Crozier and his outlandish idea that the FA might actually be the game’s governing body.
The Real Target
The Mail on Sunday and the ‘grubby Melissa Jacobs’ were merely the tools for the job this time around. While their motives might be questioned, their interest in the success or failure of the World Cup bid is not immediately obvious. The Premier League, on the other hand, had a clear motive. Triesman was a critic, a threat to its assumption that it should run English football.
His removal serves the league’s interests, even if it comes at the cost of irreparably damaging England’s 2018 bid.
This episode exposes the hollowness of any claim from the Premier League that it cares for the ‘good of the game’. Its only concern is the financial health of its members, an objective it pursues with a single-mindedness that tolerates no dissent. The league was formed to hoard money, allowing mere fractions to trickle down to lower leagues on the condition they comply with its minimal and ineffective regulations.
A League Apart
The Premier League’s ambition knows few bounds. It wants to run an England team for which most of its players are ineligible, while any English player from any league is eligible to play. When Triesman stood in the way, he had to be removed. Briefed against, smeared, and ultimately entrapped, his fate was sealed not by what he said in a private conversation, but by his challenge to the established power.
It is hard to argue that hosting a World Cup would not be good for football in this country. But that good is of no concern to the Premier League if it cannot be monetised for its clubs. The bid did not serve that purpose. Triesman did not serve that purpose. Both were disposable.
It stinks.