Football chiefs plan revolution to save the game

FA aims to take control of all transfers. Clubs may have to cap players' salaries

The Football Association is planning a revolution for the national game with much tighter rules governing players' wages, transfer dealing and the activities of agents.

The measures will be announced in the next few weeks and come as the game is facing unprecedented financial problems. They follow a large-scale survey by Mori commissioned by Adam Crozier, the FA's chief executive, soon after his appointment two-and-a-half years ago.

The survey, involving thousands of interviews at all levels of the game, delivers the chilling verdict that only a dramatic – and draconian – restructuring of the game's finances can head off a disastrous decline in its role as a cornerstone of national life.

The first result of the Mori findings will be the setting up of an American-style clearing house to monitor and supervise all transfer deals. It will also monitor the role of players' agents, who have over recent years been driving up the wages of individual players while often flouting the terms and the spirit of existing contracts.

There will be discussions between the Premiership, Football League, the FA and the Professional Footballers' Association on the pressing need to cap salaries and general budgets, which is a concept long accepted in the multi-million-dollar professional sports industry in the United States.

In an exclusive interview, Mr Crozier told The Independent: "Football has gone through a period of monumental growth and it has to be recognised that no business can ever keep going like that. It has to level off at some point. The trick is to sort yourself out before it does."

Ironically, the Mori report, which in essence tells football to change its financial thinking or die, arrived at the FA's Soho Square offices just before the collapse of ITV Digital, which is costing Football League clubs about £140m of largely mortgaged income and threatening the survival of at least half of them.

Mr Crozier added: "This whole survey took nine months and it leaves no doubt that one issue, whether you are a Sunday morning player or someone right at the top, stands above all – it is finance and its effect on football.

"It has confirmed our belief that the long-term viability of the game has to be at the top of our priorities. There are lots of people in football who want it to work and what we have to do is get together with all elements in the game and find a way that works for everybody.

"Maybe this won't be in the way everyone envisages, and certainly not the way it has always been, but life is changing for everyone these days and football cannot hope to be an exception.

"We have to start this whole exercise from the position that football is the national game and people love it. So we have got to make it work in new conditions. The instinct here at the FA is to create a sense of controlled change. Rather than seeing the need for change as a bad thing, it has to be embraced by everybody who grasps that football matters so much to so many people. We should know now that in a few short weeks only God knows how many things can happen in football.

"We can't just sit around saying we want everything to stay the same. That's just not going to happen. It can't happen."

Mr Crozier, the former chief executive of the Saatchi & Saatchi advertising company, recognises that he faces his biggest challenge. He has to lead the fight to rationalise the wild economics of English football.