James Lawton: Taylor fears for football's future after exit of Crozier

'It's an impossible job now. I wouldn't back Henry Kissinger to do it. I'm not saying the game is going to die. But how can you be optimistic?'

Gordon Taylor, who, as chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association, is in the unique position for a leading administrator of having played the game professionally, knows that he has more chance of reclaiming his old left-wing spot for Bolton Wanderers than succeeding Adam Crozier at the Football Association.

This is not, it has to be reported, creating an overload of personal consternation. Not only does he doubt that the FA has any longer a real job to offer, he also wonders whether a Government which purports to be interested in the cultural life of the nation can any longer hold back on a proper investigation of what is happening to the governance of the national sport.

He sees the forced resignation of his FA counterpart – someone who came from another world but quickly impressed the old pro as an operator with both the wit and the feeling to make some sense of a situation running out of control – as not so much the fall of a good and talented man as the expunging of an idea.

"The casualty," said Taylor yesterday, "is again the game – and the idea that football is being properly looked after by the FA.

"I've lived through Heysel, Hillsborough, hooliganism, racism, the arrival of the Premiership, Bosman, TV money, the influx of foreign players, financial meltdown, and I've seen a lot of people from all walks of life who have come in to sort out the future of the game – brewers, publishers, barristers, you name them – and they have been here one minute and gone the next. And all the time the game is getting less secure."

"Do I expect a call from the FA?" asks Taylor. "The answer, and you can spell it in capital letters, is NO."

He is neither dismayed nor saddened by his exclusion from a provisional list of runners that has had such entries as Simon Lewis, a former spin doctor of the Queen, Andrew Croker, an agent and son of a previous occupant of the job, Ted Croker, and the ex-chairman of the Football League Keith Harris.

Harris, who has a successful career in banking, is thought to be the most compelling hat in the ring, but he listens to classical music, is passionately fond of the game, and is generally considered to be extremely bright. All this creates the suspicion that he would see the role as Crozier did, one of a leader rather than professional lickspittle, which of course is likely to work against him in any final adjudication.

"The trouble is," added Taylor, "it isn't really a job now, being chief executive of the FA. Half your bosses are looking at things entirely from the interest of the professional side of football – and, of the other half, not enough of them have the bottle to stand up and fight for the overall game. The chairman of the FA, Geoff Thompson, claims that he has made the FA modern and geared for the future. But what kind of future is it when the chairman of the organisation can't protect a man who has improved things so quickly, and so dramatically?

"Doesn't everyone know that's the meaning of what happened to Adam Crozier? He came and did the job, talked in a language which anyone who truly loved the game could understand, and he's out of business inside three years.

"We only have to look back through the history of the FA to know that strong leadership is the last thing it has looked for. In other countries people who have proved themselves in the game are asked to help shape the future. Look at Germany and you see people like Franz Beckenbauer and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, in Italy there's Giacinto Facchetti and Roberto Bettega, and in France the value of someone like Michel Platini was seen quickly enough. But at the FA they couldn't get rid of Alf Ramsey quickly enough. Now we're just getting the pretence that the FA is there to look after the whole game.

"The Crozier affair holds up a light to that. It's an impossible job now. I wouldn't back Henry Kissinger to do it. I'm not saying the game is going to die. It's too good a game to do that. But as the leading professional sport in this country, as the national game everybody looks to, how can you be optimistic?"

Twelve months on from his gruelling fight with the Premiership for a decent share of television revenue – when his PFA was required to spell out day after day the value of a professional organisation that could shape the education of players and provide a net for those thousands of ex-pros who were used up and spat out by a game which accorded employees basic rights only after orders from the courts – Taylor is aghast at the surrender of the FA's old, if often poorly maintained, rights.

Taylor feels a bit like the helpless witness of a road crash. "You could see it developing 10 years ago when the Premiership came in and got hold of the TV revenue," he said. "The FA said OK, put our name in front of your league and leave us discipline and the FA Cup and the national game. What you couldn't quite imagine, though, was the FA would go along like some nodding dog in a car."

As Taylor talked, Frank Pattison was the latest to hand in his resignation at the FA. Pattison's job was to oversee all those parts of the "national game" that are not subject to the grinding self-interest of the Premiership. He looked at the back of Crozier and then at his disappearing empire.

Howard Wilkinson, the former technical director whose pet project was the national training centre at Burton – a breathtaking innovation that was programmed 30 years after the founding of the famous Australian sports centre – is now back in the day-by-day scrapping for existence in the Premiership. Steve McClaren, No 2 to the England coach, Sven Goran Eriksson, has washed his hands of the national team, and the heavy speculation now is that his former boss will also be soon to follow. You are reminded of the forlorn placard on the freeway running through Seattle when Boeing launched one of its periodic lay-offs. "Will the last guy leaving town," it said, "kindly turn out the lights."

Taylor has a radical suggestion. Give the whole of the game's administration of football to the Premiership, he says, and let us see how widely it would take its responsibilities.

"The Premiership has become a tiger," he adds, "and I don't think it gives a damn about the rest of football. So why not own up to the true situation – why not say: 'You've got your way on everything, now do the job – the whole job, and let's have some true transparency. Let's see what you do on youth development, and fighting racism and protecting the national team and respecting the fact that football is not just about a group of élite clubs trying to maximise their profits for as long as they can and to hell with everything else'."

Taylor is making the case for reality rather than the old pretence. He is inviting the cabal which did in Crozier, men like Ken Bates of Chelsea and Peter Ridsdale of Leeds and David Richards, formerly of near bankrupt Sheffield Wednesday and now chairman of the Premiership, to take their spoils of victory and make something of them that can be seen and evaluated by both the public and a watchful Government.

At the peak of last year's battle with the Premiership, Taylor declared: "What I've been fighting for is the strong being forced to give some consideration to the weak. It's been about old crippled pros getting looked after and kids who have had their lives shattered being given some kind of future." No doubt, Taylor is right. There will be no call from the modern FA.