In the triumphalist, semi-coherent interview Greg Dyke gave to the Guardian after the arrests of Fifa executives in May the Football Association chairman shared his personal philosophy: “The only advantage of being old – well, of being old and having made money,” he said, “is you don’t give a fuck.”

How that remark looks to FA staff now, the day after more than 100 were told they will be losing their jobs as part of Dyke’s “restructure” and “reprioritising” of the FA can hardly be imagined. None of them will have the luxury of enough money – Dyke lucked out in 1994 when he made £7m selling his London Weekend Television shares in the takeover by Granada – that they can afford not to give a fuck. These are good, dedicated people who must support families and maintain eye-watering London rents or mortgages, many having moved there for the opportunity to work at the FA.

The rationale for Dyke, whose tenure at the FA ends next year, making so many people redundant is to save around £5m for investment into building 3G football pitches nationwide. Nobody can argue with a programme to raise England’s public football facilities above the level of squalor but it is unclear whether Dyke even understands how much of a personal climbdown this programme represents or how complete is his political defeat by the Premier League.

The most generous interpretation of his “don’t give a fuck” attitude is that he believes his wealth and proximity to comfortable retirement means he is unafraid to take on rich and powerful vested interests. He came into football with some of that reputation, having as director-general of the BBC fought the Blair government’s attack on the corporation’s coverage of the Iraq invasion.

In football, however, he has singularly failed to take on any vested interests, most importantly the rich and powerful Premier League, to enhance the FA’s authority. He has instead been consummately outmanoeuvred by the league’s overwhelmingly dominant chief executive, Richard Scudamore, and now turned on his own staff.

In the early part of his tenure in 2013 when hopes were high for the FA under Dyke, he did promise to take on the Premier League. He had, he said, talked to “a range of serious people in football” – over coffee or dinner, as is his way – who had told him what many football people believe: the Premier League is too commercially driven and too powerful.

So Dyke unveiled his FA “commission”, choosing to focus on the issue of the declining number of England-qualified players featuring in Premier League teams, now down to 33% of starters. Dyke had to acknowledge his own formative part in the English game’s damaging division, having in 1990 as an LWT executive – over dinner – agreed with the “big five” First Division clubs he would do a TV deal with them if they succeeded in breaking away from the Football League, in which they had to share TV money with the other three divisions.

In his 2013 speech Dyke blamed the then FA, which backed the Premier League breakaway in the heroically deluded belief it would improve the England team, for failing to make “stronger demands or seek necessary assurances from the fledgling [Premier] league.” He claimed it was an “unintended consequence” that the league now overwhelmingly features overseas stars – as, presumably was the consequence that the men at this dinner mostly made fortunes in subsequent years selling their shares in the clubs.

One of the issues which now needed to be addressed, Dyke said in 2013, was the resulting predominance of foreign owners “impatient for success” whose “national allegiances are elsewhere”. He promised his commission would look at this, an important examination, by the FA into the effect of football clubs being owned as investments by billionaires.

Dyke said the Premier League chairman, Anthony Fry, who was “his mate”, had agreed to sit on the commission, but then Fry did not, and Scudamore barely engaged with it at all. When the commission finally reported last May, it literally said nothing at all about ownership, or foreign ownership, of clubs. Dyke, the fighter, appeared to have swerved that challenge to the rich and powerful. Instead it produced the B league idea, which was laughed out across football.

Then came commission’s modest but sensible proposals to improve coaching and facilities, with Dyke promising to find money for 3G pitches. The Premier League is expecting £8bn from its 2016-19 TV deals but Dyke has now cut out a trifling £5m by sacking 100 of the FA’s own people.

He is now expected to approach Scudamore and ask the Premier League to match it, which they can be expected graciously to do. If that is presented as some kind of triumph, Dyke will fail to see where the FA has ended up. Under him it has shied away from challenging the dominant investment-ownership of the Premier League, as he promised, and he has no wider reform process continuing. The FA is to be responsible for the England team, FA Cup, grassroots and disciplinary processes: exactly where the Premier League has always wanted the governing body.

There is an argument, of course, for examining whether the FA, like any organisation, is structured and staffed ideally. But it is wretched to lay so many people off as part of a political shrinkage, to save a relatively tiny amount of money for investment. To have the job losses perpetrated by a man who says he personally has so much money he “doesn’t give a fuck” is close to unspeakable.