Peter Corrigan: If he's too go-ahead, the head must go

It can only be a matter of a day or two before the Queen makes a discreet intervention in the regrettably messy affairs of the Football Association. After all she is Queen of England, among other places, and if anyone should have a say in what goes on under the name of her principal domain it should be Her Majesty.

For the clubs intent on snatching control of the game, it would be like a Runny-mede in reverse; with the monarch forcing the robber barons to sign a Magna Carta promising to keep their ugly snouts out of national matters.

Whose country is it, anyway? Come to that, whose footballers are they? One of the clashes of interests that led to the resignation of the FA's chief executive, Adam Crozier, last week was the basic disagreement about England's right to claim players for international games and other duties.

The idea that when clubs employ English-born players they automatically assume complete mastery of their destiny in all matters has its origins in the days of serfdom. From the same source, I suspect, comes the swaggering arrogance to want to hire them out for international duty at a hefty price.

While it is true that the clubs have usually paid large sums of money to acquire the players – or kidnapped them when they were young – parenthood belongs to the state under whose auspices they were born, bred, educated and medically cared for.

They'll be saying next that if, God forbid, there was another war, we should have to buy our soldiers from whoever they are working for. You may think that none of this is serious enough to bother the sovereign about, and you may be right, but don't believe it's going to end with the hounding of Crozier out of office. What's at stake is the future of the major sporting passion of the nation.

What I will say for the clubs is that in the past decade or two they have regularly done far more to stoke up those passions than the England team, and I have taken their side on many of the club v country issues.

But the World Cup earlier this year proved the ability of the national side to galvanise the interest of the entire country, even if their bid for the game's highest prize eventually petered out tamely.

However tattily bedecked they are at the moment, the England team remain the game's flagship, and from them must flow the revenue that enables the FA to fulfil their duties to the game as a whole. However they attempt to dress up their plotting as a protest against Crozier's autocratic style, some Premiership chairmen are far less concerned about the grass roots than about the financial disasters they have managed to create at their clubs, and want access to the FA's earning power.

Their problem with Crozier was not only that he was hell-bent on stopping them and had already set up sponsorships using England players without their sanction, but also that he intended to curtail their excesses for the good of the game generally.

He wanted to introduce measures to control players' wages, maybe with a salary cap; transfer dealings, by introducing a central registration office; and the activities of agents. The clubs may have resented this interference but they surely could not have questioned the long-term wisdom behind it.

Crozier was also feeling sure enough about his position in the game to warn David Beckham not to include any Roy Keane-like revelations in his forthcoming autobiography; to lift the three-year England ban on Jonathan Woodgate; and to pester Fifa to give Nationwide clubs exemption from the controversial transfer freeze.

He didn't get everything he wanted – he failed miserably to persuade the clubs to agree to a mid-winter break – but this is quality of activity I would expect from a go-ahead chief executive prepared to accept responsibility and not go scurrying off to the committee every time a decision was required.

I was naïve enough to think that he had a chairman who was behind him, but Geoff Thompson was behind him in the sense that he was hiding under the table. I had always regarded Thompson as innocuous but I didn't realise that he was so cravenly disposed to inaction.

It is ironic that the FA's first chairman to draw a salary has proved so utterly unsuited to strong and fearless leadership. It is reported that he sided with the Premier clubs over this issue because he needs their votes to secure another term in office and proceed with his ambition to ascend to a high position with Uefa – not an ascension that requires much in the way of zest or ability.

The way he dealt with Crozier's resignation was typical of his approach. He left a statement on the FA's website and departed immediately for a meeting in Switzerland. His praise of Crozier's work described a man any normal person would fight tooth and nail to keep.

His is the most reprehensible part in the sorry affair. At least Crozier's enemies have long identified themselves as such. We know where Chelsea's Ken Bates is coming from (what mystifies us is where he's going). Premier League chairman David Richards, himself without a glittering past in football finance, and Peter Ridsdale, chairman of cash-strapped Leeds, are two of the other protagonists.

With Crozier out of the way the Professional Game Board will take over the FA's control of the clubs and of England. Where will it all end, we wonder.

Apart from the cash they siphon off, they may take over the discipline structure from more objective hands, and make it easier to annex the best young prospects from schoolboy level.

And, if they get away with this coup, where else will their greed take them; Europe? Don't scoff. There is a meeting in Brussels on Tuesday of G14, the top clubs of Europe, who have long muttered about a European Super League that wouldn't leave much room for domestic entanglements such as the FA Cup. No more giant-killers; think how happy they'd be.

Even with Crozier at the helm, the FA were a long way from perfect. He had concentrated on marketing and promotion when there were other urgent matters that appear to have been neglected. One of them was the Wimbledon situation.

Franchising is a subject the game must look at sooner or later, but the actions of Wimbledon FC's new owners in moving the club to share premises in Milton Keynes with an Asda supermarket have to be studied more thoroughly. At the moment it is left to the fans to draw attention to the scandal, and they are doing so magnificently.

Last Tuesday night Wimbledon attracted an all-time record low First Division crowd of 849 to their home match against Rotherham at Selhurst Park. Even that figure included season-ticket holders who didn't turn up. The actual crowd was 493, and that included 227 Rotherham supporters. Wimbledon play Rotherham again on Tuesday and can expect even fewer. The FA must intervene before the situation gets even more bizarre.

Meanwhile, we can only hope for another twist in the Crozier saga. I can think of one that is more wishful thinking than serious prediction. The amateurs who comprise the FA Council are likely not to have warmed to Crozier's slick and impulsive style, but they may be sufficiently alarmed by events to decide to try and rescue the FA's authority from the very jaws of the clubs by calling an EGM and passing a vote of no confidence in the chairman, electing someone with more fire in his belly and asking Crozier to withdraw his resignation.

The battle that would then ensue would be long and bitter, but it would be worth fighting and winning for the sake of the game.

Perhaps it was unfair to suggest that the Queen gets involved. The more I think of it, this traitorous behaviour requires the intervention of no less than Queen Elizabeth 1.