Wednesday 21 November 2018 15:20, UK
UK Sport chief executive Liz Nicholl says the Professional Footballers' Association needs to change and adapt to meet the needs of its members.
The PFA chief executive Gordon Taylor has faced calls, including from PFA chairman Ben Purkiss, to end his 37-year tenure in charge of the players' union.
Nicholl told Sky Sports News: "I don't think it's right to comment about a particular individual. The work we do at UK Sport, we don't look back very often, we look to the present and future.
"Athletes are changing, athletes' needs are changing, athletes' requirements are changing. Athletes want to be engaged in decisions that affect them.
"Traditional organisations need to be agile and change to meet the changing needs of athletes of the future and I think that's what the PFA is experiencing now."
Nicholl says she has first-hand experience at UK Sport of the changing demands of sports stars.
"It's about athletes feeling that they need something a bit different to what they've always had and it's a healthy thing because you need to be agile as an organisation to adjust and address those needs."
Nicholl announced earlier this month she would be stepping down as UK Sport chief executive next summer after what will be nine years in the role.
Having joined UK Sport - the nation's high-performance sports agency - in 1999, Nicholl oversaw Team GB's vast improvement at the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
She added: "It's not so much UK Sport, it's the high performing sporting system in the UK that has developed incredibly since those days of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics when we were 36th in the medal table and only had one woman who was a medallist from those games, Denise Lewis.
"To where we are now having gone through Sydney and Athens, a big uplift in Beijing and a then further big uplift in London 2012 and then onto Rio and doing what no host nation has done before and winning more medals post-hosting.
"It's just been a phenomenal journey. We're supporting over a thousand athletes over 40 sports and nearly equal numbers of men and women athletes being supported.
"Our system is really the envy of the world because we work together incredibly well and there's not an ounce of energy or resource wasted because we're all pointing in the same direction.
"It was always our ambition to do better at each Olympics Games but the big change came in 2005 when we won that bid to host the London Games.
"That was a massive boost to the performance system and the opportunity that athletes and sports had and that was when UK Sport had to really step up and put in a very strong bid to government for additional resources.
"If we he had this home Games we need to do everything we possibly can to have some huge collective success across the Olympic and Paralympic sports, it was a massive opportunity."
