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The Scot who sits on the IOC gave his backing to a Great Britain Olympic football team yesterday and dismissed fears that it could threaten the future of the Scotland side as “groundless”.

Sir Craig Reedie’s intervention came as the furore that erupted over the Prime Minister’s stated desire to see a Britain football team at London 2012 showed little sign of abating. Gordon Brown has approached Sir Alex Ferguson, the Manchester United manager, to take charge of such a side.

Brown has succeeded in infuriating not only predictable opponents such as Alex Salmond, the First Minister of Scotland, but he has also annoyed some of his own Labour colleagues up north and Scotland managers past and present.

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Yesterday, however, Brown received some much-needed support from a Scot when Reedie, a former chairman of the BOA and a key figure in bringing the 2012 Games to London, entered the fray. “Of course, there should be a British team,” he said. “The fears of the Scots, the Welsh and the Northern Irish of losing their independence are, in my view, groundless. They should simply join a British team. There will be a UK football team. We have the most magnificent football footprint, better than any other Olympic country.”

The main stumbling block to such a Britain team has been the perception that Fifa and Uefa, the governing bodies of world and European football respectively, would use its existence to argue that the same arrangement should apply for the World Cup and the European Championship. Reedie insisted yesterday that this would not, and could not, happen, but his assurances did not end the ferocity of the political exchanges.

The football associations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are vehemently opposed to the Britain team idea, although the FA is for it. Craig Brown, the former Scotland manager, said that the Britain team project was “disgraceful” and George Burley, the present Scotland manager, was drawn into the argument yesterday. “The national team comes first and at the moment we are keen to keep our nationality intact,” Burley said. “We have to have a national Scottish team and we can’t put that in jeopardy, so there has been no change.”

Sepp Blatter, the Fifa president, has suggested that it would be better for Britain to field a team entirely made up of English players because “this will then not provoke an endless discussion of the four associations”.

The controversy began to take on a hint of the ludicrous when one member of the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood tried to answer Blatter by suggesting tongue in cheek that the controversial Barnett Formula, which is used to decide financial allocations in the UK, should be taken into account when choosing a Britain team.

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