As the last rites were being performed over North Queensland Fury last week and angry football supporters raged over the state of the A-League and Football Federation Australia’s role in it, one comment stood out for not being mere diatribe.

“Where is the glorious post-Crawford Report future we all hoped for? How can there be so much mismanagement, misjudgment and so many mistakes?”

Good questions.

Where are football’s dividends from implementing Crawford’s recommendations?

After all, wasn’t David Crawford famous for designing mechanisms that eliminated conflicts of interest and kept governors accountable to stakeholders so an organisation could achieve its full potential?

Indeed, isn’t Crawford the same bloke who designed the AFL Commission, the corporate governance miracle that transformed an all-but-insolvent Victorian Football League into the all-conquering AFL?

All these years later, corners of the football community are still waiting for their post-Crawford diviidends, unaware there won’t be any. An opportunistic deal sealed some six years ago between Lowy’s regime and what Lowy himself would call “old soccer” saw to that.

David Crawford looks to have seen it coming back in 2002.

As Crawford’s report says in its first breath, “In making our recommendations, the Committee acknowledges that some may find the recommendations confronting. Effecting change will require the resolve of all, including federal, state and territory governments.”

Unfortunately, there has been no resolve from governments or the football community. Despite what Frank Lowy, FFA, state federations, the federal government and a colour-by-numbers media keep telling us, Crawford’s key recommendations were not and never will be implemented.

On the face of it, it makes no sense for the AFL to live in a mansion while we sleep in a hole in the ground.

Are footy people smarter than us? Is footy a better game than ours? Australians obviously aren’t anti-football—supposedly we’ve got more players than the other codes. Governments, millionaire owners, supporters and hundreds of thousands of junior players paying huge club fees collectively pump nearly as much money into football as footy, perhaps even more.

Delve deeper though, beyond the myths about Lowy’s reign and the Crawford report’s role in it, and it’s all quite logical.

Many AFL supporters recall the 1989 VFL grand final as the best in living memory.

Few recall that it was nearly the last grand final.

The VFL and most of its clubs were in such dire financial straits at the time they were looking at either insolvency or taking up soccer. If a few of the stronger clubs survived, but who would they play anyway? If the VFL went under, there could be no coming back from that — it surely would have been beginning of the end for Australian rules football.

Enter David Crawford.

Looking after one’s club and looking after a sport are different things, and often diametrically opposite things.

That’s not an exclusive David Crawford observation — it’s an argument that’s raged for a hundred years around sports whose governors are drawn from delegates who are ultimately accountable to clubs, which includes most team sports.

Many sports would like to be run by an independent commission but few will ever get the opportunity. The incumbent club-accountable powerbrokers’ attitude is invariably yes, an independent commission is good idea — “sometime in the future”.

That is, the power will only be reclaimed from their dead hands. The blazer brigade always looks after itself first. Their filing cabinets are stuffed with shelved reports, David Crawford’s among them.

Twenty years later after his footy intervention, Crawford has presided over several inquiries into Australian sport, football included, and the main thing to know about those is that Crawford’s recommendations frighten the life out of reigning powerbrokers.

Crawford often identifies them and their lack of accountability to the rank-and-file as part of the problem – at which point they turn on him and question his knowledge of their particular sport. It’s an old song.

Imminent extinction must focus the mind though because the VFL not only sought Crawford’s advice, it actually followed it. Their backs firmly against the wall, the gnarly VFL club powerbrokers reluctantly handed their sport’s steering wheel over to the Commissioners, none of whom had played 300 games.

Crikey, there were even women among them! The footy clubs’ powerbrokers said it would be a disaster.

It wasn’t: the big men kept flying, higher and further than ever.

Fast forward to 2003 and Frank Lowy, backed by the Howard government’s sports minister, Rod Kemp, and armed with football’s very own Crawford report, overthrows Soccer Australia and takes control.

Lowy’s mission was simple – invade, form an interim government to implement Crawford’s reforms to the letter and get out again. Frank promised he would; said he was going to build football a mansion just like the AFL’s.

Crawford’s blueprint for football had a stairwell that ran from the ground floor to the penthouse.

Players, coaches and referees voted for the state representatives who would ultimately form FFA. It was a fundamentally different dynamic to one driven by club agendas.

Under Crawford’s participant-based electoral structure, federation members would know what the majority of punters were thinking and represent them, or the punters would turf them out for someone who did. The trend would be towards better representation, greater accountability and better governance.

At first, the club troglodytes at state level were happy with Crawford’s advice, so long as it was someone else being turfed out and not them.

That tune changed when their turn came though. Now they had all sorts of problems with Crawford’s philosophies.

“Either they’ll embrace it or they’re out,” Lowy said. “It is an absolute condition of the government funding [$15 million] that we implement the Crawford Report. Because a few people don’t go along with it, what are we going to do, bankrupt the game?”

The club troglodytes’ had Lowy snookered. To get his hands on the $15 million of taxpayers’ money, Lowy and the states had to present a united front agreeing to Crawford’s reforms.

If not, Rod Kemp would hang on to the dough and football’s problems were all its own.

Lowy and the states presented a united front, said the reforms were a fait accompli and gathered up the money from Kemp’s table.

Three years later, at the end of 2006, Rod Kemp announced his retirement from politics and stepped down from the sports ministry.

A few months later, in mid-2007, Lowy’s regime wheeled out football’s shiny new democratic constitutions. Somewhat surprisingly given Crawford’s unequivocal recommendations, club appointees has somehow found themselves back in the driver’s seat.

Under Crawford’s blueprint, club representatives would have commanded three (10 per cent ) of the 30 state federation votes.

Under Lowy’s “new football” constitutions, the ones in operation now, clubs control 27 (90 per cent) of the 30 votes.

The “new football” politicians’ claim to legitimacy is their “new football” democracy.

What kind of democracy is it?

Well, Football Federation Victoria held its 2009 elections like the other state federations, post-season when its clubs were in recess.

In Victoria, 18 candidates nominated for 24 seats. Only one seat was contested. Seven vacancies remain to this day.

The election was held and the clubs voted. According to FFV insiders, a grand total of four votes were cast, a number FFV refuses to confirm or deny. The election returns have never been published, only the names of the successful candidates.

There are over 50,000 participants and nearly 700 clubs in Victoria.

Four votes.

The club powerbrokers who put the squeeze on Lowy obviously didn’t even want the vote – they just couldn’t live with the idea of “outsiders” — anyone but them — having a say in who runs “their” game. Presumably, and probably rightly, they think that given a choice, the punters would elect someone other than club powerbrokers.

Lowy is of a similar mindset. He’s brooked no interference from “outsiders”; the only opinion that’s counted is his. It’s been a condition of his tenure at FFA that he has a free reign unencumbered by elections. It’s Frank’s way or the highway.

Unsurprisingly, Lowy, like Mr Gaddafi and the Burmese army, is seen by some as a little out of touch. But if the punters can’t vote you out, what option do they have to get their message across but rebel?

To get at anyone, or just get their ear, they have to damage the game first.

Crawford’s solution was a representative, accountable democracy that would save football from the division and bloodletting that had blighted its past. Unfortunately, Lowy thought he knew better.

Lowy’s predecessors didn’t want anyone getting in their way, and they learned the hard way they were out of touch too.

No doubt many football supporters reading this are of similar mindsets—they think there are too many fools and knaves around this game to be giving them a vote. Heck, those idiots might turn it into netball! Just leave it to me …

In the meantime, the football community grizzles about the game’s leadership being unaccountable and out of touch with majority opinion, as if that were the fault of the individuals involved, as if they were stupid for not knowing what others are thinking.

How could they possibly know? To get elected they need the nod of a club powerbroker — the rank-and-file’s opinions don’t even come in to it.

But this apparently is the electoral system the football community has endorsed – one where no elected representative has any claim to legitimacy; one where given Solomon’s choice, the game’s “leadership” would opt for a dead game ahead of one that thrives under someone else’s care. Why? Because that’s their job description — they are there to look after the clubs that put them there, not the game.

The Australian Football League is a very lucky organisation.

Like they say, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and footy came back from its near-death experience very strong indeed.

You can’t kill Association Football though — it’s immortal, everyone knows that. Snuff it out here, it will live on elsewhere and spawn here again. So why not play fast and loose with its health? Why not just use it as a vehicle for personal aggrandisement?

With hindsight, it’s hard not to draw parallels between reports of WMDs in Iraq and Lowy’s use of Crawford report – just a concocted excuse to invade someone else’s territory.

The real fun begins when Lowy’s occupying force withdraws and leaves the football community to its own devices under this dysfunctional electoral system. That will be Frank Lowy’s most lasting legacy to football and it isn’t worth tuppence.

Nb … Crawford’s instructions for the national league were predicated on existing clubs. There is nothing in the Crawford report about privately owned franchises. That was all Lowy’s idea too, cutting former NSL clubs out of the action. Crawford’s main thrust was unification and greater accountability — not more division and businesses dressed up as football clubs that don’t even give their own members a vote.