Can Arbib make us the Barcelona of governance?

The absence of another Frank Lowy waiting in the wings to push this Frank Lowy aside might account for the soccer commentariat’s relatively ho-hum reception of Warwick Smith’s forthcoming review, as if it has none of the Crawford report’s potential for upheaval.

After Lowy’s appointment the upheaval was confined to the visible tip of the iceberg. Crawford’s key recommendations that would have made the game’s politicians accountable to rank-and-file participants and supporters never were implemented and club powerbrokers are still running the show.

Crawford’s review was no Royal Commission; its brief acknowledged the political realities involved in lifting the lid on a sport loaded up with ethnic powerbrokers in both major political parties and Crawford was told to look forward, not back – don’t dwell on the past, don’t apportion blame, just give us a blueprint and Lowy will build it.

Mark Arbib will be asking Warwick Smith to look into essentially the same issues Rod Kemp asked David Crawford to look at.

It’s a different equation for Arbib though – throwing a personality cult at it won’t break the circuit this time.

Like Blatter’s, Lowy’s trust-me-I’m-good assurances don’t inspire the confidence they once did.

The crucial issue is more sharply defined than it was in 2003 now FIFA, FFA and a couple of hundred other of football’s club-agenda-driven governing bodies have been seen to be out of touch with what football players and supporters really want.

For there to be change, football’s governors need to be accountable to rank-and-file participants and supporters on the ground floor as Crawford wanted, not the club powerbrokers on the first floor who are the logicians beneath FIFA.

Unless Arbib is yet another grandstander using soccer to raise their profile – it has to be a possibility – he will do what he says Australia ought to do and show the world some leadership in reforming football’s governance, in which case Lowy’s ultimatum will be to either oversee the constitutional reforms that will make the governors accountable to the punters or FFA will go without taxpayer funding, which is the only direct intervention Arbib has available to him.

Governments can’t force change; thankfully that is a matter of law and not public opinion. If democratic governments’ hands weren’t tied and it were okay for them to smash sporting or religious institutions deemed unpopular with more than half the population there’d be none left.

In situations where a community outfit goes off the rails, the best a government can do is hope the affected punters twig to the nature of the problem themselves.

The worst the affected punters can do is to leave it to governments to fix it.

All a government can do is make noises. It’s up to the stakeholders of those organisations to get the message and wise up to what’s going on, and for the weight of numbers to stop going along with whatever it is they have been going along that’s been maintaining the status quo.

FIFA isn’t an unrepresentative organisation – the members are actually voted in by someone, they’re just the wrong someone – and to effect genuine reform it has to be done from the bottom up and not the top down.

Despite the smoking ruins surrounding them, football governors the world over maintain that the game’s governors ought to be accountable to club powerbrokers and not the rank-and-file. Being accountable to clubs as they are, that’s to be expected.

If Arbib were able to get through the clubs’ stonewalling despite the limitations of government, he’s a fighting chance for commemorative statues at the entrances to sports stadiums everywhere; the Lily the Pink of world football.

The solution to FIFA isn’t in Zurich, it’s in the 2003 Crawford report and it will be reiterated by the Smith review – get club powerbrokers out of governance by making the base-level governors directly accountable to grassroots’ participants and club members and the rest will follow.

With FFA in financial straits and keen on public money, Arbib might just be able to cajole it into becoming the first of football’s national governing bodies to leave the nineteenth-century behind and leap straight into the twenty-first.

That would have a far greater impact globally than anything Australia or any other since football federation can do at FIFA.

Just as Barcelona has demonstrated that a football club directly accountable to its rank-and-file members can compete with the monarchical wealthy-owner club model, Australia would be the evidence that refuted the universal club official’s old song about no one knowing football like they know football.

Of course, if the kind of root-and-branch reform Lowy will be expected to oversee were easily achieved, he would have done it by now.

Lowy avoided that fight last time around by over-riding Crawford and erecting a partition between the A-League and “old soccer”, with him looking after the national league and the big end of town. FFA appeased the frozen-out old-guard club-powerbrokers by over-riding Crawford yet again and leaving the state federations in their hands.

To see the theory of independent governance in practice – independent of club influence, not independent of the sport’s stakeholders – one needs to look at the AFL Commission and sports’ peak bodies in the United States – the successful sports anyway – that have been blessed at some point in their histories with club-accountable governors who’ve had the courage to vote themselves out of office for the good of their sports.

If history is any guide the club-accountable incumbent governors will just reject those working examples the way they always do; like water off a duck’s thick head. Aspersions cast upon their abject lack of accountability will be portrayed as veiled attacks upon football the game by ethnic-cleansers with oval dreams or some such nonsense.

The club-insiders-know-best argument looks okay on the surface which is why it’s managed to win the day every single time it’s been argued anywhere around football for over a century. Club powerbrokers sure know how to mobilise a crowd.

The punchline is when those same clubs’ supporters see governors who are accountable to their on-field enemies running the game. The lesson learned to prevent history repeating? That this lot of football governors can’t be trusted and … dunno.

If Arbib and the state-based club powerbrokers take a hard line and Frank Lowy gets no visible support from the broader football community to ram home reforms to the states’ voting structures as was the case after Crawford, Lowy will have little choice but to repeat a bit of history himself and just walk away shaking his head.