James Lawton: Crozier faces the sack for daring to do job properly

They have the temerity to seek the dismissal of a man who in two years has dragged the FA first into 20th century and then the 21st

Something that in the real world might have been deemed to be extremely fortuitous happened to Adam Crozier yesterday as he fought for his life as the chief executive of the Football Association. He was attacked by Ken Bates.

The problem for Crozier is that battling for survival at the FA is not really a matter of logic – how else could it be that the likes of Bates and some of his allies were not laughed out of the governance of the national game some years ago? – but the making of alliances and the shuffling of preferment on this committee or another and the endless massaging of egos.

Crozier is plainly not very good at such vital business. Bates offered a breathtaking example of this in The Times, revealing: "Board members were initially refused entry cards to Soho Square [the FA's new office] and left to stand outside, sometimes in the rain, while 17-year-old office girls breezed in." The scandal did not end there. Crozier recommended the end of the annual summer conference, "which," according to Bates, "enabled the councillors to get together as reward for their unacknowledged hard work." Translation: on no account cancel a free piss-up.

Still another example of shocking administration under Crozier, who was head-hunted for the job two years ago and in that time has brought a 300 per cent improvement in the FA's income (to around £140m a year, of which £55m goes straight back into the game), is that at some committee meetings key members of staff were away on business – presumably nudging up those new earning levels.

Before examining too closely the origins of the big push to oust the 38-year-old Crozier, who was formerly the head of the world's No 1 advertising agency, it might be useful to dredge up the odd revealing nugget from the FA's somewhat ill-starred history.

Maybe we could start with the fact that the FA did not deign to enter the World Cup until 1950 – 20 years after the great tournament's inception in Uruguay, and then sent a team selected not by the manager, Walter Winterbottom, but various FA councillors. Perhaps it should not have been too much of a surprise when England were promptly kicked out by a team of amateurs from the United States. Sixteen years later, when England won under the professional control of Sir Alf Ramsey, the players were given a bonus of £1,000 each or, it was believed, roughly 10 times less than the beaten Germans. The FA, however, was happy enough to pay the government a quarter of a million pounds of corporate tax, most of the payment created by incompetently submitted forms.

Then there was the appointment of a technical director who had no experience of the professional game, who preached the gospel of POMO – position of maximum opportunity – which was a declaration of war on the value of creative midfield play. This gentleman then coolly announced the Brazilians had got it wrong.

We could progress along these dismal lines for quite some time, but maybe it is enough to say that Crozier was appointed immediately after his predecessor, Graham Kelly, and the FA chairman, Keith Wiseman, were forced to resign for offering a loan to the Welsh FA that was perceived to be in exchange for voting support in Fifa elections. At this time there was also the misadventure of the failed bid to host the 2006 World Cup, a campaign that was catastrophically conceived and based on a cool reneging of a gentleman's agreement with Germany.

Through all these lurchings one of the FA's chief critics was Bates. Now he is allied with Peter Ridsdale of Leeds and Dave Richards, the chairman of the Premiership, in the effort to remove a man who in such a brief time has utterly transformed the approach of an organisation which for so long was a travesty of business administration.

The former Labour chancellor Dennis Healey once said that being attacked by his Tory shadow Geoffrey Howe was like being savaged by a dead sheep. Crozier does well to stifle such a thought when he runs his eye over the track record of his chief persecutors. Bates was removed from the stewardship of the Wembley Stadium fiasco – which Crozier inherited and eventually managed to turn around while having his back turned into a pin-cushion – and now presides over financial mayhem at Chelsea. Ridsdale was in charge of spending at Leeds United which left the club with huge debt and the need to sell off key players. Richards resigned as chairman of Sheffield Wednesday when the club was on the brink of a relegation from the Premiership which led to debts of around £16m. As well as this his own business folded.

These three now have the temerity to seek the dismissal of a man who in two years has magnificently met his mandate to drag the Football Association into first the 20th century and then the 21st.

If the debate was underpinned by common sense and a touch of morality, the joke of it would be evident enough. This truth, however, is accessible enough once you engage the basic issue. It is that the FA, having floundered for so long, has now achieved a style of operation and focus which makes the old committee culture seem like a bad memory. But the cost is too much for the old discredited power brokers, and at a time when the finances of the professional game groan under the weight of excess, of skyrocketing wages and manipulation by agents, the greed of the professional wing of the game is being dressed up as some kind of desire for a return to "old values".

The only value embraced by the Premiership – which was created by the old FA in another points-scoring exercise against the old Football League – is the turning of a profit and it is of course no accident that the issue which has so inflamed the anti-Crozier forces is his success in negotiating an England players' pool which is expected to generate as much as £200m, of which 77 per cent will be fed into the grassroots of the game.

But the Premiership, which devours television income and seeks to profit at every turn from its purchase of its players' image rights, is demanding a share of money generated by those players when they represent their country. The fact that the FA generates profit but is not profit-making, that it is responsible for the running and the re-seeding of the game, is being given the same weight as the Premiership attached to the role of the Professional Footballers Association when it tried to chisel that body out of a legitimate share of television revenue.

Bates, the former hammer of the old buffers of the shires, concluded his case against Crozier thus: "He has achieved so much and that must be applauded. But his management style has upset too many people. He has forgotten his role as an employee and not an employer. It gives me no pleasure to write this. I campaigned for Geoff Thompson [the FA chairman who is now apparently on the point of washing his hands of the chief executive] to become chairman and I gave my wholehearted support to Crozier when he first arrived with his crusading zeal, but he is now hopelessly out of control. The power must return to the trustees of the game – the FA Council. It is interested only in the integrity of the game and its future, despite receiving little recognition or appreciation."

Apart from anything else, this is the most appalling humbug. Bates was ferocious in his criticism of the FA Council – more or less right up to the moment of his own appointment. What has changed? Let us be very sure about this. Power has moved away from the committee room. It is, on a working basis, in the hands of a young man of impressive achievement.

In its panic of two years ago, the FA did what every self-respecting major league in the world would have done. It went out and signed administrative talent from the top drawer. It is what baseball did in the United States when it hired the brilliant Harvard graduate Peter Ueberroth, who went on to save the Olympic Games. Crozier brought no such guarantee when he took over the chaos of English football two years ago, but even Bates agrees he has already made striking inroads into the huge problems he inherited. Now his fate is being shaped by men whose own administrative records do not bear serious scrutiny – and a chairman whose previous occupation was secretary of the Sheffield and Hallamshire Football Association.

If Crozier does go to the wall – and the strong indicators are that he will – anyone who cares about the future of the national game will be entitled to ask why with some ferocity. Will it be because he was not up to the job? Or because he challenged the power – and the vanities – of men who could never forgive him for belonging to a different, and palpably superior, league?

The merest skimming of the books of the Football Association provides an unequivocal answer. When folly and bombast reigns, it is of course career folly to be wise.