New Football Association chief executive Martin Glenn has claimed England winning the World Cup in 2022 is not a “pie-in-the-sky” hope.
Glenn started in his new job on Monday and said he supported FA chairman Greg Dyke’s target of England winning the men’s World Cup in 2022 – which is being held in Qatar – and the women’s tournament a year later.
He told www.thefa.com: “Winning the World Cup in 2022 is not a pie-in-the-sky hope. It is the kind of ambition that should catalyse all ambitions to do things a bit differently.
“Because let’s face it – doing the same thing, after 49 years of not winning anything – might suggest the definition of madness.
“I know exactly why he (Dyke) did it and I totally support it. Unless you have some super-ordinate goal to drive an organisation you won’t get there.
“When John F. Kennedy said he wanted to put a man on the moon by 1970, everyone thought he was bonkers. But he put NASA in place and gave them funding.
“There were no guarantees but everyone, including the janitor, knew that the aim was to get a man on the moon by 1970 and they did it by the end of the decade.”
Glenn admitted that his reputation might be judged by the success of the England senior team whatever his achievements in other areas of the job.
He added: “(Premier League chief executive) Richard Scudamore said to me when I first met him: ‘The irony is the FA can do a lot of things over the next few years in terms of improving the grassroots game but your reputation is going to be made on whether the English national team does well or not’.”
Glenn is also targeting improving the standing of the FA around the world after the embarrassment of the 2018 World Cup bid when England only gained one FIFA vote apart from its own representative in the 2010 vote.
He said: “We didn’t get the 2018 World Cup. We learned along the way that the English FA isn’t that popular around the world of international football.
“Let’s work at that, not for popularity’s sake but that our regard would grow because people would see the immense change that we are wielding to make sure the FA is a progressive organisation, and the immense changes that we can make in English football.”
Glenn also promised to build women’s football and try to bring the FA closer to the professional game.
He said: “As an outsider I see football as being very tribal and sectionalised. I hear the FA agenda, the Football Lea-gue agenda, the Premier League agenda and the national game agenda.
“But I think there is much more that unites the various parts of English football than that divides it, so I think that the Premier League would be really happy if the England national teams were spectacularly successful.”