Many figures with strong Anniesland connections have influenced the round ball game over the years
Names like Mellish ,McPhail, Bain,and Clark  and several more but none of them had the opportunity to change the landscape of Scottish Football like the incoming President of the SFA Campbell Ogilvie has
Campbell a product of Glasgow Academy who was a useful runner with Victoria Park AAC takes over today at a time of  great change for the association code north of the border

The Herald reports

Change will do you good
Published on 7 Jun 2011

Richard Wilson

THE Scottish Football Association is seeking to streamline and modernise its structure in keeping with most other sporting and corporate organisations, but the pace of the change is radical.

The SFA’s 93 members will vote on the proposals at today’s agm, with a 75% majority required to embark on the overhaul that will establish a similar governance structure to that of the English FA and the Football Association of Ireland.

But both those organisations took longer to move away from the committee structure that has been the norm for sporting bodies – and generally remains the case in football across Europe. Alistair Gray, of Genesis Consulting, carried out a series of reviews for the FAI that began with John Delaney assuming greater control of the organisation as chief executive officer and the old board being reduced in size.

Gray was charged with conducting the review after the 2002 World Cup, which Roy Keane left early due to frustrations about the facilities arranged by the Irish FA, among other complaints. Gray went on to conduct a performance review, which led to the appointment of a technical director and a performance director, a process he has also just completed for the SFA, who intend to appoint their own performance director soon.

“The similarities with Ireland are Stewart [Regan] playing a significant role during the last six or nine months, which John Delaney did,” Gray says. “The constitutional change at the SFA is more significant than in Ireland, where it was John taking more control of the leadership and management of Irish football as ceo rather than being the puppet of the very large board of Irish football.”

Among the recommendations of the Genesis report was a reduction of the organisation’s board from 29 members to 11. The SFA hope to reduce their executive board from 11 members to seven, with the chief executive effectively managing the day-to-day running of the organisation. But there will also be changes to disciplinary procedures and a separation between the professional and amateur sides of the game.

“Ireland didn’t have a McLeish Review. The work that we did was performance-driven, and on the back of that came a number of significant changes in terms of the way the sport was organised,” Gray says. “There are differences, John Delaney’s was more gradual, with a bit at a time at successive agms, whereas in Scotland there is a whole bundle of constitutional and judicial changes. In some ways, you either win everything or lose everything, whereas in Ireland we went systematically from the basic organisational processes to reviewing the league, the amateur game, the schools game, the performance strategy, and it was almost a project a year.”

Gray has also conducted reviews of the Scottish Rugby Union, Scottish hockey, swimming and athletics, with Scottish football being behind other sports in changing their governance from the old committee structures. Yet with Fifa and UEFA still being run by their respective presidents – Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini – most European football organisations remain committed to the old style of management.

“In England, the FA have moved to a degree down the governance route, but they have steadfastly refused to appoint non-executive directors,” Gray says. “Scotland, hopefully if they pass things through, will make moves which are in line with other governing bodies. In a football sense it is radical, and they wouldn’t have achieved that without McLeish doing the review that he did, and also the president [George Peat] being as open to change as he was.”

The hope at the SFA is that the changes will make the organisation more accountable and transparent, particularly when it comes to disciplinary judgments, but also allow a more coherent and planned attempt to improve Scottish football. Youth development and the fortunes of the national team improved in Ireland once the FAI made its structural changes and Pat Bonner was appointed the technical director, with Wim Koevermans, a Dutchman, the performance director.

“What you will have [at the SFA] is an association planning to achieve outcomes, to focus on the growth of the game on the field and off it, in terms of its performance,” Gray says. “That is encouraging, for any sport. There will be many punters who will say they don’t get that at all, but from a governance and leadership perspective it’s a significant day and, hopefully, they’ll get the majority. I know that the FA came agonisingly close to rejecting the Burns recommendations [to restructure the FA] in 2007. They got them through by around one vote.”

Gray is in Loughborough today, working on behalf of British Swimming, but he has several people primed to text him the outcome of the AGM. The changes proposed are far-reaching, and as Ireland have shown, the consequences can be significant.

This article was originally posted on 7-Jun-2011, 07:00 by Hugh Barrow.
Last updated by Hugh Barrow on 7-Jun-2011, 10:30.