An important figure has taken office in English football this week. Anyone with the slightest interest must be aware that Fabio Capello has begun work as the national team’s manager, but four days earlier a less famous face also went about his business for the first time. After three months of planning, Richard Bevan started full time as chief executive of the League Managers Association (LMA).
The name will be familiar to those with a wider knowledge of sport. For the past 11 years Bevan has performed a similar role for the Professional Cricketers’ Association (PCA), in effect the players’ trade union. The organisation grew significantly in wealth, scope and influence as cricket, thanks to television money, became bigger business and more confrontational.
Football is richer still and Bevan did not have long to wait for his first Premier League sacking as Sam Allardyce became the eighth Premier League casualty of the season on Wednesday. Impatience of clubs coupled with the recent decision of the FA to look abroad to find an England manager suggests that a difficult challenge awaits. “Not at all,” he said. “I am very excited about the job ahead and very confident about the brand.”
Bevan wants the views of the LMA to be more accurate, better presented and to carry greater authority. “Managers are the most experienced and able men to take the game forward,” he said. Opinion is being compiled via a questionnaire to managers that covers areas such as rule and regulation changes, refereeing and technology, player workloads and winter breaks, wages and overseas players.
Priorities include expanding the LMA profile and its commercial operation. An “Ambassador Programme” is about to be launched, in which “sponsors and partners can engage with the members and great names from the game”. Bevan learnt in cricket how “names” can help to secure business, estimating that 50 per cent of deals were sealed on an emotional level.
As a spokesman for managers, Bevan is coy on the appointment of Capello. “It is important not to look backwards, but to ensure that we do as much as we can so that next time the job comes up at least 12 British blokes are seen as being qualified for it,” he said. “I think Brian Barwick [the FA chief executive] could have had a British manager, but he felt he could not afford to fail again. The FA wanted the best man and feel they got him.”
Bevan, 47, played football at amateur level before breaking a leg in 1993. The injury had a silver lining. At the national sports centre in Lilleshall he met David Graveney, a PCA official and the future chairman of selectors for England. They began talking and Bevan agreed to help with contract work and pay for permanent disability insurance. Later, after six years of running his own sports management company, he joined full time.
The body has changed beyond recognition. According to Tim O’Gorman, the group chairman, Bevan “leaves us infinitely more confident, secure and powerful”. It has a seven-figure turnover and 80 commercial partners. No less a figure than Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, has agreed to speak at its fourth annual business summit, at the Brit Oval, this year.
Services for members – the players – are better than ever and the PCA has also become more active at England level, first as a result of central contracts, then filling the void in leadership created by the ECB’s failure to support the players when they were reluctant to go to Zimbabwe in the 2003 World Cup.
Bevan will continue to help the PCA as a nonexecutive director. He has left it with a document titled “Cricket’s Future”, addressing domestic and international issues. Michael Atherton, the former England captain, likened it to a manifesto and suggested that Bevan will return to the sport; he applied, unsuccessfully, for the job of ECB chief executive in 2004 but lost out to David Collier.
“I am very positive about the English game and unbelievably negative about the world game,” Bevan said.
On the whole he is impressed with Collier but remains concerned at areas such as the volume of cricket and proliferation of Kolpak players. He wants a reduction to three domestic competitions but suspects that the ECB will resist for commercial reasons.
He believes that the opinions of players should carry greater weight. More than 80 per cent, for example, want a cut from three to two limited-overs competitions. He also thinks that players should be used better in coaching and youth development and that the sport will risk becoming stale and repetitive unless it continues to find new ways to engage its audience. Twenty20, he has noted, did just that.
His real wrath is reserved for the ICC, which he indicts on almost every important issue. As well as working for the PCA, he has been active in the Federation of International Cricketers’ Associations (Fica), whose relationship with the world governing body is often acrimonious. With each country who join – Bangladesh are the latest – Fica becomes more and more of a presence and Bevan is damning. “The ICC is not a governing body, it is a facilitator of events,” he said. “It must move to an independent board structure based on good governance and accountability. Only strong ICC leadership devoid of political influence will have the ability to control and grow the game.”
He believes that the Future Tours Programme (FTP), whereby countries must face each other home and away during a six-year period, has failed and fears that smaller established teams will be marginalised as the richer teams seek to meet more often to maximise earnings. “The ICC says it is promoting cricket in 120 or so countries, but what about safeguarding New Zealand and West Indies?” Bevan said.
On Zimbabwe, he accuses the ICC of “having blood on its hands as far as destruction of cricket over there is concerned” and of doing too little to ensure that payments from leading events, such as the World Cup, have not gone into the wrong pockets.
“I do not believe that Zimbabwe will be playing Test cricket for another ten years,” he said. “There are people in the game who cannot say so but who are determined to see that they do not come back for a long time.”
Zimbabwe are scheduled to visit England for a one-day series next year and Bevan believes that the Government could do more than bar the squad from visiting by refusing visas, as was reported last week. “If Gordon Brown is talking to the ECB about Zimbabwe not coming here, I would like him to go the full hog and impose economic sanctions as well,” he said. “The Government should not expect sport to act in isolation.”
Some believe that the PCA, certainly at England level, has too big an influence. Bevan, though, puts the organisation into context. “If a governing body does its job efficiently, you never hear from something like the PCA,” he said. “A union will only step into the limelight when something is wrong.”
Given the lot of the manager, football must prepare to see a lot of Bevan.
