Just over a month ago, during half-time of Preston’s FA Cup clash against Manchester United, Greg Dyke, chair of the Football Association (FA), was outlining the organisation’s vision for the grassroots game. 

More artificial pitches are needed. So too are more coaches. In total, the FA needs to raise about £30 million a year. “We’d gratefully accept any money the Premier League would like to put towards it,” he said. “I’m sure they will.”

But will they? They are under no obligation to chip in and help out. If anything Dyke’s wishful statement was a stark reminder of the huge imbalance of power between the game’s governing body and the top clubs in the form of the Premier League. 

Even more so after the recent £5 billion rights deal.

But how did it come to this? Well, as Dyke himself told me, the seeds for these problems were sown back in the early 1990s when, his predecessors at the FA gave their blessing to the Premier League without ensuring the FA, and by extension English football, got anything in return.

We met in April 2013 when I was researching a book about the history of football media in England. 

Although Dyke’s appointment to the FA had been announced when we met, it would be three months before he took up his post, so we met at the offices of the BFI where he was (and still is) chairman.

There he was kind enough to talk to me about his time as chairman of ITV Sport where he’d brought regular football to TV before losing the rights for the newly formed Premier League to Sky ahead of the 1992 season. 

But it’s his forthright comments about how the top-flight breakaway came about that stuck in the mind most.

“As I’m just finding out in my new role in the FA, the biggest fuck up in the world is that the FA didn’t ask for anything,” Dyke had said candidly. “It was ridiculous. The breakaway would not have happened if the FA had said ‘No.’ The clubs would not have done it.

“What the FA should have done is asked for a set of things, but the trouble is Bert Millichip and Graham Kelly (then chairman and chief executive of the FA respectively) weren’t the brightest blokes off the block and they hated the Football League. 

“They were in the middle of one of their bust-ups with the Football League and they saw it as a way of putting the knife in, instead of saying: ‘If this works, this is a massive opportunity for the England side.’ If they’d said: ‘You can only have 16 sides — you’ve got to release players at certain times, we want a percentage of your television income,’ they’d have got it all. 

“But they asked for nothing. There are moments, there are opportunities that you can only see later. For the FA it was a terrible mistake and everybody knows it.”

Dyke was referring to the turf war between the FA and the Football League that broke out in late 1990. In October of that year the league put forward a plan called One Game, One Team, One Voice, proposing that the two bodies to enter into a power sharing arrangement with equal representation on a joint board controlling the English game. 

It was a system similar to that in Germany at the time where the DFB was the sole body that controlled all football, with one arm in charge of the clubs and another in charge of the national team, coaching and grassroots football. 

Greater separation was implemented after a review in 2000 but the German system still has much closer co-operation between the Bundesliga and the national team with a relationship built on compromise and mutual self-interest. 

And what was the reward? The World Cup last year and semi-final appearances in the three previous international tournaments.

In response the FA expressed “concern” about the 50-50 split of power and came up with their own Blueprint for the Future of Football. 

This would place the England team at “the apex of football excellence” just above a reduced 18-team top division. 

When the top clubs came along with their proposal for a breakaway league, the administrators of the amateur FA jumped at the chance of linking the two but they were quickly outmanoeuvred by the businessmen running the professional clubs.

“All those guys who set up the Premier League were great believers,” Dyke told me. “They all say that it is a great success, which it is. It’s been a massive success except it’s owned by foreigners, managed by foreigners and played by foreigners. 

“So it’s become a world league which has great disadvantages for English football, particularly for the England team. Most of the clubs are owned by foreigners, why would they care about the England team?”

It’s easy to accuse Rupert Murdoch and Sky of stealing football from free-to-air TV but the reality is that it was sold to them. 

The birth of the Premier League was characterised by the self-interest of a number of parties, not least those in charge of the FA at the time, who took the chance to assert their authority over the Football League once and for all. At least so they thought.

Roger Domeneghetti is the author of From the Back Page to the Front Room: Football’s Journey Through the English Media, available from Ockley Books for £9.99