After Mark Sampson was sacked by the FA for allegations that were made three years earlier, Greg Clarke says the decision to sack him should have been made then.

According to the Guardian, allegations were made in March 2014 about Mark Sampson’s time with Bristol, and FA chief executive Martin Glenn was told in October 2015, but Sampson remained in the job anyway.

Greg Clarke, who joined the FA a year ago, told The Telegraph that he didn’t find out about it until a few weeks ago, at which point they made the decision to sack Sampson. Clarke said: “Martin [Glenn] said, ‘Look, I found this out yesterday.’ I said, ‘Right, what do you think?’ He told me, I agreed with him and we had a board conference call.

“We asked some questions about legalities, facts, what happened when. And we made a decision. That’s the sort of decision that should have been made three or four years ago but you can’t use that as an excuse to duck the decision today.”

If you didn’t have the information about the original allegations, and only joined the FA more recently, then you can’t really be expected to act on those allegations.

However, clearly some people at the FA did know about them. As previously mentioned, the Guardian state that Martin Glenn was aware of them in 2015, so if that’s correct then at the very least he knew there was something to look into.

If people at the FA did know about the allegations, and hired Sampson anyway, then that would not be a good look for the organisation.

The fact that it was only after new accusations and intense media scrutiny that Glenn and Clarke went back and looked at the original investigations also doesn’t reflect well.