Premier League boss Richard Scudamore has blamed internal tensions inside the Football Association for the departure of its chief executive Ian Watmore.

Scudamore said "structural difficulty" at the FA and not any dispute with the Premier League had led to his exit.

"We thought Ian had the best chance of being able to reconcile what is an association of interests," he told BBC sports editor David Bond.

"That's exactly what the FA is - an aggregation of vested interests."

Scudamore was adamant that any criticism of the Premier League in relation to Watmore's departure was ill-founded.

"I accept none of it. It's an absolutely impossible thing to level at our organisation," he said. "The thing we crave most at the FA is stability.

"Whether people think we do a good job or not, the one thing the Premier League and the Football League have had [in recent years] is stability.

DAVID BOND'S BLOG Scudamore is facing the trickiest period of his tenure

"We're disappointed [about Watmore's resignation] because we genuinely felt we were really getting somewhere. Organisationally, the agenda we were working to together was a progressive one."

Watmore, 51, appointed less than a year ago, resigned after disagreements with senior figures on the FA board.

His decision leaves the FA searching for its seventh chief executive in 11 years.

Watmore, who came to the FA from the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, succeeded Brian Barwick, who left the FA at the end of 2008.

Barwick was preceded by Graham Kelly, David Davies (in an acting capacity), Adam Crozier and Mark Palios.

In 2005, leading civil servant Lord Burns was commissioned to review the FA's structure following a series of scandals, including the resignation of Palios following newspaper allegations concerning the-then England coach Sven-Goran Eriksson's affair with former FA secretary Faria Alam.

Following the report, Lord Triesman was named as the FA's first independent chairman in 2007.

The FA governs and regulates all levels of the game, claiming it annually invests £38m into grass roots football.

It runs 24 England teams and 11 competitions, including the FA Cup, and developed the new Wembley Stadium where it is now based.

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