HARD ON the heels of Tony Blair's recruitment of a Liberal Democrat to a Cabinet committee, there comes another surprise appointment - that of ex-Tory minister David Mellor to head a new Football Task Force to sort out soccer.

Plainly, the soccer-mad football talk-show host gets the job as the Fans' Man rather than because of the colour of his politics .

But the question is not whether football needs shaking up with the supporters' interests being put to the fore, but whether the job can actually be done.

For, in essence, the Task Force project is to regulate a big business and a market.

True, there can be no quibble about such high-minded aims as eliminating racism in football and encouraging more ethnic minorities to play and watch the game, or for improving access for disabled fans.

But as for the rest, it seems the government is responding to a perception that soccer is in the grip of big businesses and fat-cat bosses who are interested first in profit and whose concern for the ordinary fans follows a long way behind.

Yet, if the fans are being so shabbily treated or ripped off, how does that explain soccer's revival in recent years.

It is a business equation that would not work if the fans were being discouraged.

Nonetheless there is, perhaps, some justification for the view that the admission charges are going beyond the ordinary person's pocket and that clubs' repeated changes of kit are burning too deep a hole in the purses of parents pestered by their soccer-mad children for the latest replicas.

But what, other than preach at the clubs, can Mr Mellor do about that - unless the government is prepared to hand him a red card in the form of legal powers to peg admission prices and control merchandising methods?

Would or could the government go so far as setting up a regulatory body of the sort that play watchdog over the privatised utilities - when, in this instance, it would be doing so over businesses which have long been in private hands and which, in the case of several top clubs which have floated on the stock market, now belong to a multitude of shareholders who support maximum profit?

Given that pitch to play on, the Fans' Man, Mr Mellor, may be limited to persuasive gestures rather than scoring goals.

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