Mark Palios profile

The former professional footballer turned business expert also declined to rule out returning to the post, which is still vacant.

Palios took over from Adam Crozier as FA boss in July 2003 but stepped down a year later after it emerged both he and England coach Sven-Goran Eriksson had conducted a relationship with FA secretary Faria Alam.

Here are the highlights of his interview with BBC Five Live.

It was a fantastic job and a great opportunity to contribute something to the fabric of this country.

But it did not work for me on the basis of the media intrusion.

Being a single parent looking after four young girls aged between nine and 14 years old, that level of coverage was inappropriate.

I had my girls in a safe house for a week and that's not something I would like to repeat ever.

It's irrelevant, and unfair to put pressure on people who are looking at the appointment and on the FA who are seeking to appoint a new chief exectuive.

What I would say is that the new chief executive should be aware of the fact they have to make their own priorities and that many people will be trying to make their priorities for them.

It's an unfair question; unfair on me; on the FA and any potential new chief exectuive.

I have said what I have said; It is a fantastic job, people talk about football gates declining and they may well have peaked, but there are enough good points about the game in this country that most guys and probably women would die for that job.

If you looked at what should have been on my agenda, one was drugs, and at the time I was not convinced we had a drugs problem, but to clear that one off quite easily and quickly I brought in Lord Coe.

If you had asked me six months before I took the job whether I could conceive an issue like (Rio's missed test) could be blown up in that way I would have said No'.

A lot of the people in the game were very supportive and said "It will pass" and I realised very quickly that was the case.

A lot of journalists liked to characterise the fact that the way I played football is the way I conducted myself in the boardroom, but I was not about to leave my foot in in the boardroom, so to speak.

The only time I ever spoke to Alex Ferguson was in the line up for the FA Cup final and we just smiled at each other.

There was nothing that needed to be said, we both appreciated and understood we had common ground.

There are 40,000 clubs and its a fabulous part of the infrastructure of this country and (as chief executive) you sit on top of that.

But that passion also drives a media interest that's not best for the game.

The interest does help, because it helps promote the commercial side but maybe it is a bit out of perspective.

Tony Blair made a decision to take the country to war, I made a decision to resign.

The FA is about the governance of the game but also, because of the money it has from telelvision rights, it is about the devleopment of the game from the grass roots to the elite.

The FA should look after the longer term interests of football in this country.

It is recognised within the game that there is an inextricable link between the grass-roots participiation, and the customers that go to the matches of the professional game and provide the TV audience that provides the cash.

When I arrived it was important to deal with the cash crisis, and there was a crisis, without selling out the future.

We needed �23m within 21 days to make our last payment on Wembley Stadium.

There was �130m of debt on offer but we did not take that and we managed through a variety of things - managing cash better, nailing down TV contracts, arranging cash flows - we managed to get by and solve the immediate crisis.

We covered off most of the risks now the FA has no debt.

The FA can now weather the downturn in TV monies that will be coming along and make a choice as to whether we want to maintain distributions - and that's a significant achievement.