Against the backdrop of a fresh spate of controversies involving his club, the Manchester United chief executive, David Gill, has called for the Football Association to give up responsibility for disciplinary matters.
Gill, also a member of the FA board, said it should delegate the task to a new body to avoid repeatedly finding itself at the centre of criticism and controversy.
Wayne Rooney recently sparked a furious debate when he escaped censure from the FA because it was decreed that the referee in question, Mark Clattenburg, had already seen his alleged elbow on Wigan Athletic's James McCarthy. Rooney's manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, is appealing against an FA charge for criticising another referee, Martin Atkinson, after his team's defeat to Chelsea at Stamford Bridge last week.
"The FA has a very broad remit, with grassroots, coaching, England, the FA Cup, the professional game and goes on to discipline," Gill told the culture, media and sport select committee that is conducting a wide‑ranging review of the governance of the game.
"One area I would look at seriously is separating out the discipline and making that semi-autonomous under rules and regulations stipulated by the FA but with a separate body dispensing the decisions. The FA gets a lot of bad press for not acting on particular issues for this, that and the other."
The idea is understood to have support among other clubs and the Premier League itself. The FA argues that the Football Regulatory Authority, set up in the wake of the Burns review, is already a semi-autonomous body with an independent element. But critics say it is not sufficiently independent and is interchangeable with the FA in the public mind.
Senior referees have also called for disciplinary matters to be taken out of the FA's hands. "The main issue referees want is for the retrospective action to be taken out of their hands because the current system is totally flawed," said one leading referee. "Managers and clubs know full well how the system works now, and that it goes back to referees to decide whether anything should be done retrospectively, and that means too much responsibility is being put back on the ref.
"The FA hide behind it saying 'we can't do anything' but that's a weak excuse. There needs to be an independent panel of three people that oversee the process."
Gill, who has repeatedly defended the leveraged business model of Manchester United's owners, again backed the Glazers to the hilt under questioning from MPs and said it would be "odd" to have any dialogue with fans' groups who were "at war with the owners".
He argued that he communicated with fans through a thrice yearly forum and pointed to its customer relationship programme with fans at home and overseas. But he said the club would never engage with the Manchester United Supporters Trust (Must), which saw huge growth on the back of last year's anti-Glazer protests, and now has more than 167,000 members. "Must's objective is to change the ownership. So it would be rather strange to open a dialogue with those fans," he. "We're not going to engage in a structured dialogue with organisations like that. I don't think it's appropriate or sensible."
In answer to critics of the Glazer's business model, Gill said he was "comfortable" with the club's level of interest payments on its £500m debt, which stand at £45m a year. He said revenues had risen under their ownership from £40m to more than £100m and again insisted "there has been no impact in terms of transfers".
But critics immediately said his claim that net transfer spend after the takeover had been "greater than in the five or six years before that" was untrue. Andy Green, who blogs on United's finances as Andersred, said the club's accounts showed the net spend was £89.4m from 2001 to 2005 and £56m from 2006 to 2010.Peter Coates, the Stoke City owner, also echoed recent calls for the addition of two non-executive directors to the FA board. However, he said it was crucial that they were at the expense of two existing directors, as originally envisaged by Lord Burns's 2005 report.
"It's got a recent very bad record. Lots of own goals, lots of things that have gone on that reflect very badly on the game. I'm strongly in favour of two non‑executive directors. I think we've appointed a good chairman but he has to be able to do his job," he said. "Two non-executive directors, of the right calibre, would be very good for the governance of the game and along with that you'd have to reduce the size of the board. We haven't had support for that in the FA and I hope that's going to change."
The committee, chaired by the Tory MP John Whittingdale, is likely to deliver its report by the end of next month. It will be used as the springboard for action by the sports minister, Hugh Robertson, who has called football the worst governed sport in the UK, and is likely to call for reform at both the FA and the Premier League.
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