The Crozier revolution needs compromise to conquer habit of greed

Football Association's chief executive has timed initiative to tackle game's financial problems cleverly but 'Rolex culture' will not die easily

Two main difficulties face the Football Association's chief executive, Adam Crozier, in his attempt to co-ordinate a life-giving revolution in the financial organisation of English football.

One is European law on free trade, which is an obvious deterrent to any formal wage ceiling. The other is human nature, or, as Roy Keane, undeterred by his own £90,000-a-week pay packet, puts it in his latest, rather brilliant, and surely block-busting autobiographical rant, "the Rolex culture," which is something that plainly agitated his troubled nature through much of Manchester United's last futile season.

The fact is that even though the man who won the World Cup, Ronaldo, is obliged to accept cheerfully a 10 per-cent wage cut by his club, Internazionale, the Premiership pickings, you have to suspect, have been too rich for too long to permit any instant rejection of the glittering prizes.

Greed is of course a hard habit to shake – and so is the accumulating of power. When Crozier talks, correctly, of the critical need for some form of collective fiscal responsibility in the game, he is not so naïve to believe that the likes of Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool will willingly surrender the power base which comes from their superior financial resources. So what can be done? Pretty much what he proposes – a series of meetings between the organisations who shape the game, the FA, the Premiership, the Football League and the Professional Footballers' Association, and the striking of some common ground on which a route to survival can be agreed. What we are talking about here is not some ascent into purity of spirit, but a rough understanding of the meaning of the word "league".

Says Crozier: "If the will is there, if people can look around sufficiently to see what the problem is, I believe it will happen. We will move in a better, safer direction. People do get to the point when they see that it is sensible to look at things a little differently. I like to think we have got to that point now. Gordon Taylor [the PFA chief executive], for example, knows that he has to think of his members down the line and not just today – he knows that we have to protect our industry. The League Managers' Association is showing a lot more interest in these matters, and I think this is a sign of a widespread recognition that football has to work together as never before."

Certainly the FA's move to install a transfer-clearing office, where deals are to be closely monitored and the activities of maverick agents reined in, is an initiative of great importance. It closes, at least in theory, one of the most outrageous chapters in English football when the sequel to George Graham "bung affair" was a hopelessly protracted Premiership inquiry which, after nearly two years of trawling the byways of football for evidence of widespread corruption, could do no better than pick out an ailing Brian Clough as a scapegoat.

At the time of the Graham episode an official of the American National Football League was appraised of the details. It was explained how an agent had conducted the transfer negotiations, and after a long pause, the NFL man said: "Say what?" The disbelief in his voice has proved unforgettable. He explained how all NFL transfer deals went through a central office, were closely examined by both accountants and lawyers, and that players' agents received their fees directly from their clients. That the oldest football league of them all should operate in any other way was quite beyond his comprehension.

He would also have been stunned by the situation Nottingham Forest found themselves in a few years ago, when the serial contract-breaker Pierre van Hooijdonk was holding up the club for ransom. Forest's then manager, Dave Bassett, made a proposal to the rest of the Premiership that was breathtaking in its simplicity. Why not, he asked, have a league fund in which clubs in Forest's position, could find the means to replace a player who was defying his contract without meekly submitting to his demands.

Bassett soon realised that he would have been wiser to save his breath. He had made the mistake, at a time when the finances of English football were first becoming seriously unglued, of raising the possibility of collective action, to suggest that one club's problem one month would be another's soon enough if a stand was not made against the worst examples of irresponsible player power. In American sport Van Hooijdonk would have been obliged to stay at home – and rot.

Crozier's best hope is that a sense of genuine crisis – the in-depth research project he ordered from the polling organisation Mori reports that finance is the principal worry at every level of the game – will breed a spirit of compromise, and who knows, even fraternity, in a series of meetings with the Premiership, the Football League, and the PFA which will stretch out through the coming weeks and months.

Whatever the results, no one can question the shrewdness of his timing. Greed, after all, is not the king of human nature. Survival can be even more compelling.