Now that the there has,  finally after the best part of one hundred and fifty years of deliberate pretence from elsewhere, been the presentation of the strongest possible indeed nigh-one irrefutable argument that the source of modern, Association football was Scotland and not England - see: A New and Scottish Historiography of Association Football - and the proven case has been made that it was Scots, with some others, who took their game across the World making it the Global Game - see: Scots Football Worldwide - the time has come to turn attention to current matters, namely the disaster that the game's ostensible governing body, FIFA, has become.

FIFA came into being not to regulate but to coordinate the the emergent game in a limited, indeed then small number of Continental European countries. Its founding year was 1904. That it came into existence was a testament to the short-sightedness, indeed the stupidity of the British Home Nations as a whole but most of all to the one that assumed, presumably on seniority, for there was and had been little else, especially on the actual field-of-play. That is England. And that is doubly so not least because there was an "international" organisation already in place as guardian of the rules of the game but with the possibility that its scope could have been extended. That is IFAB, the International Football Association Board. 

However,  IFAB, made up on foundation by representatives of the four British Home Nations -  England, Scotland, Wales and what was then Ireland, was at first parked and when remembered became what amounts to a bargaining chip in the developing rivalry between those same Home Nations and the by now emergent and far more confident FIFA. England, having at first declined,  had joined in 1905, then seen certainly by FIFA and presumably by both parties, as per the FIFA rules the representative of the whole United Kingdom, the softener being that the Englishman, Daniel Woolfall, immediately became President. Scotland overcame its exclusion in 1910, Wales, it seems, the same year and Ireland apparently in 1911. But there were, its seems to have been a quid pro quo. In 1912 FIFA sent a letter to IFAB asking to to be included. The application was rejected yet the following year was then accepted. 

In fact it did not much matter. At the IFAB meetings of 1920, 1921, 1922 and 1923 FIFA would be excluded because the Home Nations had left FIFA over a row about Germany and Austria's war involvement, then in 1924 it was back until 1828, when they all fell out again, this time over amateurism, and remained unreconciled until 1946.   

At that point the IFAB voting system was two for for each of the Home Nations and two for FIFA also, so ten votes in total with eight votes required for a rule-change. In theory and in effect the Home Nations could collude to block any FIFA-inspired one. But that all changed in 1958, it is said to have been to accommodate the expansion of the game fully worldwide.  Under the new system each of the British Home Nations was reduced to one vote each with FIFA having four and six votes being the pass-mark. It meant the Home Nations could never impose a rule and to introduce one FIFA needed and still needs the backing of at least two Home Nations. 

The effect was to reverse polarity. Whereas before 1958 control was with the countries, where football had begun after that date it lay with FIFA and, it has to be said, has gradually been increasingly exploited to widen FIFA's influence

Rous