David Bernstein leaves Greg Dyke an FA still in conflict with top clubs | David Conn

[Guest]

The new chairman inherits a governing body that lacks independence and is at odds with the Premier League
• Greg Dyke's in-tray at the FA

Greg Dyke's accession this weekend to replace David Bernstein as chairman of the Football Association, which is still undergoing a prolonged identity crisis, is a glint of historical mischief. As a tiggerishly ambitious ITV executive in 1990, Dyke promised crucial financial backing to the top clubs in their secret plot to break away from sharing their TV money with the three other divisions of the Football League.

Happy after their dinner with Dyke that ITV would lucratively buy the TV rights of a Premier League, the big clubs deputed David Dein of Arsenal and Noel White of Liverpool to talk the FA into supporting their breakaway.

That the FA did so, in its 1991 Blueprint for the Future of Football, its stated purpose an FA-backed breakaway league of 18 clubs all for the benefit of the England team, is near-universally recognised to have been a cataclysmic mistake. Reflecting on it later, Graham Kelly, the FA chief executive responsible, lamented that the FA's decision-makers had not kept football together and had been guilty of "a tremendous, collective lack of vision".

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