Watmore last night stepped down despite having been in the post for only a year. An emergency FA board meeting has been called for today to discuss the resignation.

Former executive director Davies - who has had several spells as acting chief executive of the FA - believes there is much for them to discuss.

"Like a lot of people, I was very impressed by how Ian Watmore had begun," he told Sky Sports News. "He had only been in the job effectively since last June. The reality is the FA has now lost five chief executives in little more than a decade.

"Most of them, in my view - Ian Watmore is just the latest, it seems - have been victims of the chronic instability inherent in the way English football is run.

"The structure builds in-conflict, which is hardly surprising given it is riven with conflicts of interest and people's roles and responsibilities are either blurred, or not defined at all, or worse still set up in competition with each other."

Davies added: "If an organisation loses five chief executives in little more than a decade you can't really believe they were not all up to the job.

"There has to be something fundamentally not right and I think there is a huge challenge here for the FA board - who have very good people on there like David Sheepshanks, David Gill and others - but they have to admit there is a problem and ask themselves 'what are we going to do about this?'."