Why is sport organized around nation-states? Why does the spot where some clown in the nineteenth century drew a border have to rule the way we organize sport?

FAs suck. They are almost without exception anti-democratic. Why should these people be the only ones with a say in the way the game is run?

Why do FAs have to be national? Why can there only be one FA per country?

FIFA operates according to Westphalian terms - every FA is sovereign in its own area and can never be touched (even when they are corrupt as all hell); and only the FAs may speak at FIFA (even though clubs and leagues are where the real action is).

Imagine you could abolish FIFA and start from scratch. How would you create a body to govern world football? Would you retain national FAs? How would you give clubs and fans a say? How would you combat the obvious possibilities for corruption?

If I could abolish FIFA and start from scratch then obviously I'd put me in charge and take it from there.

Not that I'd defend Fifa or national FAs, but if you abolished them how would you deal with the administration of domestic leagues? Or would you abolish them too?

I'm agnostic. I could be open to it, but why do leagues need an FA overseeing them? Or at least, why do FAs have to stop at national borders?

What an odd question. If you're asking 'why wasn't sport the instrument of a radical policy to remake the identity politics of the world in some post-national fashion' then the answer's pretty obvious. No-one thought about it, was into it, or would have been successful with it should they even had the notion. FAs are Westphalian because the world is. Nations states still are the primary loci of self-identification that have legitimacy and traction. people have been predicting the death of the national identity for most of my life, yet international football tournaments have grown ever bigger. Fancy!

I'm all for democratising national associations but most already are democratic internally. The problem is the electorate, which is usually clubs and others involved in the administration, with no space for fans, and in most cases, players. It retains the Victorian ethos of gentlemen and players from its inceptions. That's a worthwhile reform, as is better co-ordinating their efforts. At present, UEFA don't really have any regulatory power - only the ability to regulate their tournaments and matches they sanction. The power is with FAs and with FIFA, and giving continental confederations real power is necessary reform.

As for why their can't be one FA per country, are you serious? FA regulate football, which needs regulating. You can't have two regulatory bodies if you want to have a conception of a national football system. You can delegate, sure, but if you think there's something called Canadian football which you would like to see developed and thrive, you need someone at the top keeping everything pushing in the same direction.

But the main reason is that as appalling as FAs are, the only alternative is the market, which is so, so much worse. Clubs and leagues will be dominated by the interests of the largest and most popular, and will kill the interests of the smaller. We see this happening anyway, and it would be much worse without the football structures we have in place. If you value diversity in football, in smaller clubs as well as stronger ones, you need a regulator.

I wasn't asking it as a historical question, NHH - I know why it happened. I'm asking why it has to continue to be that way or if we could imagine different ways.

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The power is with FAs and with FIFA, and giving continental confederations real power is necessary reform.

Funny, I always got the impression you were a bit of a eurosceptic, but perhaps I was wrong.

I`m not sure I buy all your arguments. US football has come a long way without its main leagues having more than a passing relationship with the USSF. And they are open enough to let teams from other countries (i.e. Canada) play, which doesn't seem to have caused any major ruffles. Why can't the Austrians and the Swiss combine and create one decent league? Or the Belgians and the Dutch? Or the three Baltic countries? Why not have joint regulators where leagues are concerned? Or allow clubs to choose which country they want to be regulated in?

And that's all assuming a regulator is an unalloyed good. Regulators have done as much harm as good, historically, primarily because they have tended to act as a check on players' wages. The value of competing leagues with different sets of regulations (the US in the 20s, Colombia in the 50s) both acted to increase player bargaining power in Europe, much as (I think) the new Indian cricket league will have in that sport, or the WHL had in hockey in the 70s. Competing regulators might actually be a bonus.

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FAs suck. They are almost without exception anti-democratic.

I'm not sure about this, but I think you'd find that most FAs - certainly my experience of people who work with the English FA, some of whom are on this board - are far more "democratic", inasmuch as people have to work their way up through the decision making structures, and generally represent the "grass roots" of schools football, etc. If you go the other way, handing the game over lock stock and barrel to billionaire chairmen of clubs, then there would be now World Cup, no Euro finals, just an endless procession of Man United v Chelsea "World SuperLeague" finals, probably after a 39-game season of matches between Milan and Newcastle played in Bangkok, if Richard Scudamore and his mates got their way.

Is that really how we want the game to go?

But Rogin, that's clearly not how the game would go. The free-for-all you describe is more or less (geography aside) how the game was prior to the formation of the football league in 1882 or 1883 or whenever it was.

The idea of a league is a damn good one. It's impossible to imagine football (or indeed almost any sport) without leagues now. Fans would demand them. They just might not demand the ones they have now.

Most North American sports leagues manage to self-regulate - and not with results that are obviously worse that european football.

It seems to me that the only thing leagues can't do on their own is ensure a pyramid.

No, it's not how it goes. Forget pyramids, you let the owners take control, you naturally end up with a self-governing cartel of owners, who all want to keep their club in the money trough (which, to be fair to them, is understandable). Look what's happened to Rugby League in the UK, and to pretty much the same extent Rugby Union - both of which, twenty years ago, had pyramid league structures that have now been well brushed aside. Domestic Rugby Union, in England, indeed, has lost its equivalent of "international" football - the county championship - players used to play for clubs to be recognised by the counties, who in turn were the only teams international selectors used to go and watch. Now, you've got a Super League of 12 clubs, which is actually about 10, 8 of whom entertain ideas of grandeur with 2 or 3 mucking about getting promoted or relegated each season.

Not sure it's an improvement overall. It might be better for the fans of those clubs - all and any decent players are in those franchises - but it's not great for the overall grass roots development bit, nor in any way democratic. If football went the same way without the FA to say "Oy, no chance", the Premier League would be down to eight clubs, ten if they could entice Celtic and Rangers in, and there wouldn't be promtion or relegation except if a "franchise" went bust, like Man United will in 2010.

Not sure I agree with you AG. American sports generally self-regulate and if it weren't for the fact that most of the rest of the world isn't interested in our sports, they would go the way Rogin explains. We don't have relegation or promotion. New franchise owners basically pay the existing owners for a right to print money and their exclusivity helps them squeeze free stadia from municipalities.

Someone on this board once remarked that the NFL was like a league of Manchester Uniteds. That is true to a large extent.

If football were set up like NFL/MLB/NBA. There'd be two big teams in London, one in Manchester, one in Dublin, one in Glasgow, one in Amsterdam, maybe one in Ediburgh, one in Paris, one in Munich, etc (keep going til it adds up to 30). They'd all be set up in a superleague that could negotiate a massive fee for TV rights and share exactly zero of it with any other clubs or levels of the game.

If the owners of one of those teams was doing a shitty job, there'd be nothing for the local fans to do about it other than to support their local "minor league" side which has been forced by economics to affiliate itself with a big club which actually controls their players.

There'd be no promotion or relegation because that just reduces the "franchise" values.

It does feel as if one is stuck between a rock and a hard place, but the national associations are that we have in order to prevent the owners basically doing what Reed describes above. And to think that they wouldn't is flying in the face of more or less everything that we know about them.

It reminds me. Especially when MLS was coming into being, but even to this day, whenever a soccer writer does a radio show or web chat in the U.S. about the state of soccer in America in general, somebody (who clearly doesn't know much about America and or how businessmen think or both) always asks "When are we going to get relegation/promotion like in a proper league?"

The answer is almost always "you're likely to see that go away in Europe before you ever see it installed in the US." Investors want stability and as much certainty as possible. They don't want to invest in a major league team and end up with minor league attendances and a minor league tv deal. Likewise, they don't want to have to splash out a lot for a better stadium and better players if there's a chance they might go back down.

You're all assuming, off the bat, that losing an FA would mean everything would go into the hands of owners. Why, exactly?

National laws dictate the structure of team ownership far more than do FAs. You could abolish the German FA and the clubs would all still be community-owned because that's what German law says.

In fact, in the US, the absence of a regulatory body in baseball has in a sense given Congress a stick to use with owners (anti-trust legislation) when it feels owners are stepping out of line. It doesn't use it much, but it's there.

And anyways, Reed, I already conceded the difficulty with relegation/promotion and suggested that any new regulatory structure would have to take this into account. My point was - why does the regulatory oversight structure on leagues have to be national? Club regulation probably does have to be national because they are commericial entities and commercial law is national. But leagues?

As usual, I'm with Nathan here and think that many of your initial premises are just wrong.

Yes, Jack Warner should be in jail rather than Zurich, but that isn't the intrinsic fault of the FA system; it's the fault of the particular c*nts who are running it at the moment. And thinking that football would some how be better off with a series of competing national leagues strikes me as absolute nonsense; much of the game's value comes from its universality.

The lack of that universality is what allowed the North American (and Australian) leagues to go off on their own, but even there, they never broke entirely with the global system so as to risk their access to overseas talent (just look how the evolution of those relationships as overseas talent has become more important in hockey, basketball and baseball, and the fact that neither the NASL nor MLS have ever been willing to seriously challenge FIFA).

The "real action" isn't with professional clubs and leagues; its with the millions of people who play the game at every level. And given that the rest of the world doesn't have the almost entirely cost-free player development systems that the North American leagues have benefited from, the FAs do a pretty decent job of taking care of that part of the game.