Greg Dyke's accession this weekend to replace David Bernstein as chairman of the Football Association, which is still undergoing a prolonged identity crisis, is a glint of historical mischief. As a tiggerishly ambitious ITV executive in 1990, Dyke promised crucial financial backing to the top clubs in their secret plot to break away from sharing their TV money with the three other divisions of the Football League.

Happy after their dinner with Dyke that ITV would lucratively buy the TV rights of a Premier League, the big clubs deputed David Dein of Arsenal and Noel White of Liverpool to talk the FA into supporting their breakaway.



That the FA did so, in its 1991 Blueprint for the Future of Football, its stated purpose an FA-backed breakaway league of 18 clubs all for the benefit of the England team, is near-universally recognised to have been a cataclysmic mistake. Reflecting on it later, Graham Kelly, the FA chief executive responsible, lamented that the FA's decision-makers had not kept football together and had been guilty of "a tremendous, collective lack of vision".

Far from controlling the top clubs' league and ensuring the primacy of the England team, as the FA misguidedly thought it would, the Premier League soared away for the glory and the money. The prevalence of overseas players in multinational, foreign-owned club sides, and the consequent weakness of England's senior teams have been acknowledged as a central problem by Bernstein, and by Dyke as "a great challenge" even before he starts the job.

The Premier League, sealing £5.5bn of TV income for 2013-16, controls football's money flows, and that means it also dominates the FA and its board. The result of the breakaway Dyke backed – although his ITV offer was ultimately gazumped by Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB – is a lack of independence and clear leadership of the game ever since, by the governing body he has now been appointed to chair.

Under pressure from the sports minister, Hugh Robertson, to improve football's governance, Bernstein produced a plan last year which would, in effect, have finally accepted the FA has no authority over central issues of concern to supporters. Bernstein proposed formally signing away any control over "club and league commercial and financial matters ... customer/fan issues; club ticket prices; club [financial] distributions and parachute payments".

The proposals, agreed by Bernstein after the Premier League pushed for the FA to cede authority in those key areas, met stiff opposition from the Football Supporters' Federation chairman, Malcolm Clarke, and "national game" grass roots representatives on the FA council.

National game representatives Roger Burden, Michael Game, Barry Bright and Mervyn Leggett then produced counterproposals, understood to reserve some lingering authority to the governing body, but the Premier League is rejecting those. Grown impatient, Robertson wrote to the FA in April demanding progress by the start of the coming season in three areas: the makeup of the FA board, encouraging supporter involvement in the running of clubs, and a new club licensing system.

"In the absence of significant progress by the beginning of next season, we should seek to introduce legislation as soon as practically possible," Robertson wrote.

Some, including Supporters Direct, the organisation that promotes fan involvement, have long believed the government should do this. The idea is for a law setting out what is expected of modern sports which all face the same dilemma: balancing the commercial hunger of sport as an entertainment industry with encouraging more people to play and be involved, and preserving sports' grassroots "soul".

Yet few believe Robertson's threat is real, that the government has a worked-out view of what such a sports law would look like, or will find parliamentary time to pass it.

Pull back from football's occasional scandals, concerns about rampant inequality, over-commercialism, the globally unique selling of England's great clubs to overseas buyers – that was never in the blueprint for the future – and the government sees the Premier League as hugely successful and popular, a global advert for the UK.

Many, including Clarke, worry that Robertson has the wrong target in his sights – the FA Council, which finally stood up for the FA as a governing body, rather than the Bernstein proposals that would have irretrievably signed authority away.

That is not to say Bernstein is handing over the FA in a wretched state after his two and a half years of calm stewardship. In many areas, he has led a strengthening, from the battered body he took over from his predecessor, Lord Triesman, who suffered relentless hostility and had reform proposals completely blocked by the Premier League.

Under Bernstein's chairmanship, the St George's Park national football centre has finally been completed, aiming to lead an improvement in coaching that might narrow the gap with more coherent European countries. Rocked by the John Terry and Luis Suárez racial abuse cases, Bernstein worked hard and considers the improvements to the FA's anti-discrimination policies and attitudes to be his best legacy.

Having won admiration at home for opposing the one-candidate election of Sepp Blatter as Fifa president in 2011, Bernstein and his international officers have improved the FA's relations with Uefa, seeing Manchester United's David Gill on to the executive committee, and achieved cordiality with Blatter.

Undeniably too, Bernstein has breathed some confidence into the FA's corridors at Wembley, reduced the sense of permanent crisis, and leaves the FA and its stadium more financially secure.

Nevertheless, he acknowledges he is passing on a football governing body that still has no agreement on how to govern the natural conflict between the game at large and the top clubs' imperatives. Dyke, in 1990, helped the clubs break away, and some of those with whom he sat down to dinner, including Dein and Martin Edwards of Manchester United, made fortunes for themselves selling their shares. Now Dyke returns, strangely, as chairman of the FA, with great hopes riding on him, and a lot to prove.