Greg Clarke got his handshake from Eni Aluko in the end. After a devastating four‑hour parliamentary hearing that fully illuminated the Football Association’s shambolic handling of her allegations of discrimination, it was a confused gesture of goodwill. “I want to meet with you properly,” he said. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to try anything, it’ll all be above board.”
That the chairman of the FA felt he had to give such assurances to a wronged party, particularly one who played for England 102 times over a glittering 11-year international career, shows what a miserable mess this saga has become. That meeting may never happen, not least because Aluko’s devastating testimony should spell the end – certainly for the chief executive, Martin Glenn, and possibly Clarke and the technical director, Dan Ashworth, too.
At the other side of the room in Westminster’s Portcullis House, Damian Collins, chairman of the House of Commons digital, culture, media and sport select committee, was calling for resignations and it was hard to argue with his reasoning.
“I think the FA board need to look very carefully at the evidence that has been given,” he said, “not until right at the very end was Greg Clarke even prepared to admit that they should apologise over the serious failings of process.
“It’s disappointing that not one of the people who had responsibility for taking charge of that process was prepared to admit that they had got it wrong. You have to question whether they are the right people to take the organisation forward.”
There were moments of slapstick – Glenn pouring himself a glass of water and turning to do the same for Clarke before realising the jug was empty – but far more serious misjudgments unfolded. A failure to grasp the full scale of the FA’s failings was at the top of the tree.
Glenn was given four chances to apologise to Aluko for the FA’s failings with gaping, inexplicable holes in two investigations but did not take the opportunity, instead responding with obfuscation. He was accused of telling Aluko she would receive the second half of an £80,000 settlement payment if she agreed to say the FA was not institutionally racist. “I don’t know the legal definition of blackmail,” Aluko said, “but I felt I was being asked something I wouldn’t ordinarily have done in exchange for a payment that had already been agreed.”
Perhaps not blackmail to the letter of the law, but it certainly did not sound good for Glenn. On top of that he had the humiliation of retracting a statement made to this newspaper only last month that he had insisted the barrister appointed to lead the independent investigation into Aluko’s allegations of racism was from an ethnic minority background. “You’re only retracting that because you realise it is illegal aren’t you?” asked the Labour MP Chris Matheson, understanding that such a request would contravene discrimination laws.
Chief executives have been sent packing for a much shorter roll call of embarrassing incidents than that.
Aluko was the first of six witnesses, who also included her former England team-mate Lianne Sanderson – who had flown in from New York – and the FA human resources director, Rachel Brace, to appear before the committee. The poise and fluency with which Aluko delivered her evidence told the FA executives who were watching remotely that they would be in for a trying afternoon.
She said she felt relations between herself and the governing body had become unnecessarily adversarial over the past few months after her grievances became public knowledge. “I have been made to feel very isolated but I feel a sense of vindication now.” It was a long time coming, the outcome of a third inquiry only reaching Aluko an hour before the hearing on Wednesday.
Conducted by the barrister Katharine Newton, it found the former England women’s manager Mark Sampson did tell Aluko to be careful her Nigerian relatives did not bring the Ebola virus to Wembley and also upset Drew Spence, a mixed-raced player, by asking her how many times she had been arrested.
Newton’s revised findings came after taking evidence from a number of other England footballers who heard the comment to Spence at the China Cup in October 2015 but, crucially, were not interviewed as part of her first investigation – or for the internal FA review that has been branded a “sham” by the Professional Footballers’ Association.
Spence herself was not even interviewed by the first inquiry. Aluko disputed the FA claim that she had said Spence did not want to be interviewed. “Let’s for a second suppose I had said that, would it not have been prudent to pick up the phone and ask Drew,” Aluko said. Again, it was hard to argue with.
There were throwbacks to what we may have hoped was a bygone era with Aluko’s allegation that the goalkeeping coach Lee Kendall used to speak to her in a fake Caribbean accent. That Aluko is of west African descent was almost immaterial, what it says about the FA as an organisation and its leadership is the pertinent issue – and Kendall remains in post.
It seemed the FA had been skewered by the well–prepared and composed Aluko. But while he probably should have entered the room with a bit of humility, Clarke instead came in swinging, at one point even talking about the “fluff about institutional racism”, before hastily trying to retract his words.
There was a stunning interlude as Clarke attacked the PFA for what he claimed were its own governance failings, accusing it of cutting off a child sex abuse survivor. “They spend millions of pounds on salaries but they are walking away from people like him,” Clarke said. “I will never respect those governments for walking away from their people.”
But the PFA chief executive, Gordon Taylor, on Wednesday night accused Clarke of “diversionary tactics” and said his claims about the union stopping funding for an abused player were untrue. “To say we turned an abused player away is wrong,” Taylor said. “We’ve never turned anybody away, whether with problems of abuse, gambling or addiction. It might have been said in parliament but it’s blatantly untrue. Why on earth couldn’t he [Clarke] not raise it with me. It’s classic diversionary tactics.”
Taylor said there had been one case of an abuse survivor who had reached the limit of 24 counselling sessions at Sporting Chance funded by the PFA. Sporting Chance had said that would be enough but Taylor says he stepped in to provide more.
It was towards the end of the hearing when the blows began to land harder and faster. Matheson raised the case of Lucy Ward who won a high-profile discrimination case against Leeds United. She was awarded £290,000 by an employment tribunal and, according to Matheson, repeatedly attempted to raise assistance from the FA when the money was not paid in full.
All four executives wore blank expressions when Ward’s name was mentioned despite her case being widely reported by the mainstream media. When England’s men were dumped out of Euro 2016 by Iceland Glenn famously declared: “I’m not a football expert.” But, given he was not aware of such a high-profile discrimination case at a Championship football club you were left wondering what exactly his area of expertise is.