Chairman emerges with credit after bypassing Fabio Capello and grasping the nettle of John Terry’s court case

This is unusual territory for the Football Association in more ways than one. The governing body finds itself in the unfamiliar position of being widely, if quietly, praised for its handling of a toxic and difficult situation – outside Cobham and Stamford Bridge, at least.

Not for the first time the FA chairman, David Bernstein, has emerged with credit for calm, decisive action amid evidence of greater steel atop an organisation too often buffeted by events. The sports minister, Hugh Robertson, said: “This is not necessarily a popular thing to say, but I’m impressed with David Bernstein. He’s a very calm hand on the tiller. He seems to get the balance right. He calmly rang round the board, made a decision and pressed ahead with it. He did it in the right way.”

There was a sense of deja vu this week, as pressure built on the FA to act. They had been here before in Feburary 2010, when Terry was accused of an alleged affair with a former team-mate’s ex-partner. But it is a measure of the speed of turnover at the top of the organisation over the past decade that the inhabitants of both the chairman and chief executive chairs have changed since then.

Then, the chief executive Ian Watmore chose to handle the situation by attempting to clear enough air space to allow the decision to be made by Fabio Capello, though the Italian seemed to show little appetite for it, insisting the captaincy was a matter for the coach.

The issues were different this time. But Bernstein resolved to take the matter out of Capello’s hands reasoning, say insiders, that the issue was not simply a football matter but a broader one.

Bernstein’s statement, delivered direct to camera in Pravda-esque fashion from a Wembley box, made this explicit: “Fabio Capello has not been involved in the FA board discussions which reached this conclusion, but understands that the FA board has authority to make this decision.”

Bernstein’s move to bring the Club England wing of the organisation back under the jurisdiction of the FA chairman is also significant, allowing for swifter decision-making.

It has hard to imagine the famously low-key Geoff Thompson, Bernstein’s predecessor but one, putting his head above the parapet in such a way. And such was the level of vicious infighting during the David Triesman era, it is equally difficult to see him building a consensus for swift action in the way that Bernstein did.

Bernstein is quiet too. But quietly effective. Once Terry’s case was adjourned to July he consulted his 13 fellow board members, a number swelled since the addition of non-executive directors Heather Rabbatts and Roger Devlin last month, by phone on Thursday. The majority shared his view and Bernstein called the Chelsea player himself on Friday morning to inform him of the decision.

Rather than worrying about precedent or previous cases, he judged the situation on the facts before him and shifted course when circumstances changed. There is a valid debate about whether the FA should have acted earlier, especially once Terry was charged in December, but Bernstein can point to the widespread belief that the case was to be settled before the European Championship.

There is talk of a more businesslike approach in the Wembley boardroom since Bernstein arrived in January last year. Premier League insiders make increasingly positive noises about relations with their counterparts at Wembley, while good relations with Uefa have been fostered.

The former Manchester City and Wembley chairman has been criticised for his lack of dynamism in public. But following a period during which the FA churned through six chief executives and three chairmen in a decade, who all jumped or pushed for a variety of reasons, his calmly resolute stance might be just what it needs. He will need every ounce of it for battles to come. The FA is going into a major tournament with a coach who will leave at its end, no discernible succession plan in place and a now former captain facing a racism charge weeks after it concludes. Meanwhile, football’s response to government calls for change in the way the game is governed is due by the end of the month, with the composition of the FA board a sticking point. And for any stability to endure, the FA’s statutes will have to be changed if the 68-year-old Bernstein is to carry on beyond his 70th birthday in May 2013.

There will be no immediate respite either. Already, many are questioning whether it is a sustainable position to strip Terry of the captaincy but not suspend him altogether. Atop the dysfunctional FA, balancing inertia and knee-jerk reaction while being buffeted by the demands of the media and avoiding being undone from within by politicking or from without by the demands of the professional game has often seemed an impossible job. Bernstein seems to have got the balance about right. For now, at least.

John TerryThe FAEnglandChelseaFootball politicsOwen Gibson
guardian.co.uk

The hierarchy have been left reeling by supporters’ angry response to the Stamford Bridge buy-back proposal

Bruce Buck and Ron Gourlay cut isolated figures as the abuse flew from the floor. There were accusations that the club’s approach to the Chelsea Pitch Owners had been “patronising” and “shabby”. Any mention of “the brand” this team have become drew howls of derision from the audience. Mark Wyeth QC approached the microphone and denounced the whole meeting as “a farrago” and, once dictionaries had been thumbed, few could disagree.

Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea are not used to suffering home defeats but this felt like the most critical of the oligarch’s eight-year ownership. To lose the vote – Chelsea secured 3,569 shares but, with 2,227 going against them, fell well short of the 75% they needed for their proposals to be accepted – did not come as a complete surprise. This was always likely to be tight given the uncertainty of just how many shareholders would seek to attend or supply proxies.

Yet what must have shaken the Chelsea hierarchy was the animosity to which they were subjected. There was a ferocity on show in the Great Hall, tucked away on the concourse of the west stand, that took the breath away. Even after an exhausting round of “meet and greets” conducted by the chairman, Buck, Gourlay, the chief executive, and John Terry the impression that lingered was that Abramovich and the board had misread the mood of the masses.

“The club simply do not understand the fans,” said Tim Rolls of Say No CPO (SNCPO). “That has been totally demonstrated by the emotions that surfaced. I was disappointed with the general manner in which they conducted their campaign: it was a PR disaster from start to finish, and their use of Matthew Harding [a former director who died in a helicopter crash on his way back from a match in 1996] – implying this is what Matthew would have wanted – was ridiculous. All this shows to me is that they need to have a proper dialogue with supporters in the future; not just with the old-school fans but also the disenfranchised supporters who are under 30 but who don’t feel engaged with their club at all.”

That much will be key as Chelsea gauge how best to proceed. Lessons need to be learned from this defeat. There is an acceptance among many, even in SNCPO, that this club may need to move from Stamford Bridge to compete with rivals who can get 60,000 fans through the turnstiles. But the board will need to engage more properly with the shareholders who successfully deflected the proposal to buy back the freehold to Chelsea’s home of 106 years if they are ever to secure the land and, therefore, the option to move to an alternative site, whether that is Battersea Nine Elms, Earl’s Court or White City.

Perhaps CPO retaining some portion of the freehold in any new arena would have to be offered. Maybe the option of a “conditional sale agreement”, as proposed by one shareholder at the meeting, whereby CPO would relinquish the freehold once a move to a site within three miles of Stamford Bridge had been agreed, may be explored. Some kind of concession will have to be made, particularly with a new board of directors at CPO likely to be in place before the end of the year, after December’s annual general meeting. The club have to understand the concerns of the voters better next time.

One complication that has been aired by Buck is an uncertainty as to who the majority of the shareholders in CPO are. “They booed me over this but at the meeting I indicated there was only a 10-12 per cent overlap between season-ticket holders and club members with CPO shareholders,” he said. “That means there are only about 1,500 or so season-ticket holders and members who are Chelsea Pitch Owners. So who are all these other 12,500 shareholders?

“[Ken] Bates did a number of things to encourage purchases of shares in the 1990s. There was one FA Cup final in the mid-90s where, if you bought a CPO share, you had the right to buy tickets. So some people were legitimate about it but there were also a bunch of scalpers [touts] that bought tickets, I believe. So we’ve always had difficulty understanding what the make-up of that shareholder base is.”

In the end this became a matter of making the best of the defeat. “We are convinced that the large body of shareholders, of CPO and fans, recognise it may be necessary to move. And it’s not ’stay at any cost’,” Buck said. “That’s one major threshold we got over. The other is that Earl’s Court would not be the only site that is satisfactory to them. Honestly and truly, we don’t view the result as somehow catastrophic in any sense.”

These positives should serve as the starting point for the negotiations that will inevitably resume when this issue flares up once again. But the reality, depressing as Buck may consider it, was that the only time he had the whole room with him on Thursday was in his closing statement once the rejection had been confirmed. “We are all Chelsea fans,” he said. “I can only hope that, on Saturday, we all get together, support this club and beat the crap out of Arsenal.”

ChelseaRoman AbramovichDominic Fifieldguardian.co.uk