ON the face of it, and with the greatest of respect to Partick Thistle, the leap between leading the Firhill club and Scottish football’s governing body looks like a cavernous one. But Les Gray, chairman of Hamilton Academical and member of the SPFL board, has no fears about old friend Ian Maxwell handling the step up to be the figurehead of the Scottish Football Association.
Maxwell may only be 42, but having hobnobbed with the Firhill chief executive in the boardroom and seen him at work in close quarters in committee rooms, Gray can think of no one better suited to pick up the baton that was dropped in rather calamitous fashion by predecessor Stewart Regan.
“I’m really quite hopeful having known Maxi for a long time in a football sense with Partick Thistle as well as the various boards we’ve been on and committees, that I think he will bring an awful lot to the party,” said Gray.
“Ian is a well-respected football guy, he has been in the game a long time, he’s played the game, he’s been at managing director level for a long time and he’s got a lot of business acumen, so I think it’s an exciting appointment. He’s a young man, and I think Ian will do very well in the role.
“As well as being young though he has got a real common-sense approach, and I can see him being quite pragmatic with the things he will have to address in the coming months.
“He’s a determined man, he’s intelligent and he has a football mind. He also has a business head as well.
“I think what he can bring to the party is more of a grounded persona than we had previously. I got on fine with Stewart Regan, but I think that Ian is more entrenched in the football side of things. He’s going to bring a new approach, and it’s exciting for Scottish football.
“Ian will have a huge remit now with the Scottish national team, women’s football, the pyramid, Project Brave, all of the things that are in place now, but he will come at that with a real football knowledge, and I think that’s important.
“I have no concerns about him handling the step up because he is going to have good mentors in there. The SFA have been going through a process of change in the last number of years. There’s a younger board there now, Rod Petrie is there with lots of football experience, Mike Mulraney who is a good businessman with a lot of football experience, and that’s before we get to Thomas McEwan and his background of amateur and junior football and the non-execs, so there’s a lot of people in there with the right acumen and the right fit to help Maxi drive the organisation forward.
“With his football knowledge and his common-sense approach to a lot these issues mentioned there, I think it bodes well for the future.”
One of the factors that may have worked in Maxwell’s favour given the balance of the SFA board these days, is that he is coming into the role with an in-depth appreciation of the issues faced by the 42 professional clubs that make up the SPFL.
That fact is certainly not lost on Gray, who hopes that Maxwell can be a great unifier between the game’s two governing bodies. So much so, that plans are already afoot to have senior SFA executives sit in on SPFL board meetings in the future.
“For a long time now, Scottish football has been perceived as having two bodies that are odds with each other,” he said. “This might be an opportunity to have the SPFL and the SFA liasing a lot closer together in the future than we have done previously,
“There’s a lot of positive stuff going on between us over the last number of months. Having Ian there as the chief executive of the SFA and having been on our board at the SPFL as well as running his club, I feel that there’s a real opportunity to get a bit of continuity and some cohesion between the two organisations that has perhaps been missing.
“Let’s not underestimate the job that he’s got. He’s not going to be able to go in there as the chief executive of the SFA and have an eye on 42 professional football clubs, he’ll have a much wider role than that.
“But, if we can get somebody who understands what our professional game needs from our governing body and try to bring us closer together, make us more aligned, then that’s positive.
“In our meetings today already we’ve had discussions on the SPFL board about inviting senior SFA personnel into our monthly meetings and just having much better dialogue than we had previously. I think there’s a real opportunity here to do that.”
Having found it difficult in the past to get their point across to the SFA, Gray is excited by the prospect of the clubs having a better relationship with the organisation moving forward with Maxwell at the helm.
“I think that one of the things that has been frustrating for the clubs previously, and I say that as an old SFL board member and now as an SPFL board member, is that one of the things was the lack of dialogue between the two organisations,” he said.
“It’s an exciting time for all of our professional clubs.”
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