Steve McManaman exclusive: FA need to take the blame for England's failure

The dust is now settling on the unmitigated disaster that was England’s Euro 2016 campaign and while thoughts are turning to who should succeed Roy Hodgson in the top job, I believe we need more than a change of manager to change this pattern of failure.

I’m back in Paris for the next round of matches in Euro 2016 and as an Englishman, it feels little hollow because we all expected to be in this city watching Hodgson’s men take on France this weekend.

Of course, we can have no complaints that England’s players are back home watching the rest of this tournament on TV because they were nowhere near good enough to be in the latter stages, with Iceland fully deserving of their win in Nice last Monday night.

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Hodgson has now gone and while he and his coaching staff of Ray Lewington and Gary Neville are getting more of the flack for a catastrophic Euro 2016 campaign, the concern for me is that this mess will continue to rumble on for years to come.

When I see the FA chief executive Martin Glenn admit publicly that he doesn’t know too much about football, then we all have a right to be concerned that he will have a major say in who will become the next England manager.

FA Development of Elite Development Dan Ashworth is another name that I have not come across before in football and he also appears to have a big role in identifying Hodgson’s successor, with former Manchester United chief executive David Gill the third member of the selection committee.

The latter of the trio is a serious football man working with FIFA and UEFA and I bet he is a little embarrassed to be on a panel with two guys who are not anywhere close to being connected to the top of the game, but in their hands lies the future of the England national team.

The truth is, the FA need to look at themselves at some point and take their fair share of the responsibility for problems we see with the England team on the pitch every time they reach a major tournament.

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We have loads of money in England and our manager is one of the highest paid in world football, but what is that giving us? Precisely nothing when it comes to competing with major nations (or even minnows like Iceland) on the biggest stages of them all.

You see FA people popping up on TV with weird and wonderful titles such as Director of Elite Development and while they are very good at holding up a glossy book and declaring they have a blueprint for the future of the game, something needs to change at all levels if we are to succeed.

There is no reason for England’s continued abject failure as all the resources are there to make sure we over-perform in major tournaments, yet somehow the opposite happens every two years.

We have a huge team of people attached to the England set-up and yet the sports psychologists that travel with the team will need psychologists themselves after watching this team performing at Euro 2016 because from first to last, we saw a set and players terrified to be part of a big tournament environment and struggling to deal with the expectations around them.

The manager and his staff we hopeless and deserve to get some stick, but the players and the infrastructure at the FA are also lamentable in their efforts and I hope that this latest failure is not followed up by yet more panic and ‘root and branch’ reviews that get us nowhere.

England’s national team needs to develop an identity and that should not be trying to copy Spain when they win a tournament or setting up an academy like France just because they did well a few years ago.

No, this needs people who know how this game works to get involved and be part of a changing mentality that will help England to shed their inhibitions in major tournaments. We have said these words time and again when England have crashed out of big competitions but this time we need to make something happen.

Yet when I look at the men in grey suits who somehow get into positions of power at the FA, I fear we are in for more of the same over the next couple of years.

Will England be any better by the time they get to Russia 2018? Probably not, but let’s hope I am proved wrong this time.