Football Governance Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Brady and Lord Bassam of Brighton

Committee stage
Monday 16th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

My Lords, I hope I can deal with this group of amendments fairly quickly. It is again a disparate group, but the main theme is fan consultation and the requirements on a club. The amendments seek to alter the fan engagement threshold requirement by requiring a club to have structures and processes for effective engagement with their fans.

It is vital that there are proper requirements to ensure that a club applying for a licence, for instance, has a suitable home ground for a minimum period of 20 years. This would help prevent owners using much-adored home grounds as bargaining chips and collateral to strengthen their financial muscle against the wishes of fans. The clauses that we seek to insert would incentivise clubs to protect their home grounds as part of their heritage and their history.

Amendment 142 concerns ticket prices. This is important because we are in a situation where clubs pretty much have a free hand in raising ticket prices. Let us take the recent example of Manchester United, which has, in effect, doubled the price of some tickets and removed discretionary or reduced ticket prices for younger supporters—my noble friend Lord Shamash could say more about that than me. The amendment would insert ticketing prices as a relevant matter for consideration in the process of regulation.

That is the spirit and intent of the amendments. I am looking for some reassurance from the Minister that fans will be properly engaged in clubs’ consideration of these issues, that there will be proper processes and ways of ensuring that their voices are heard and that issues such as ticket pricing in particular, and playing in prohibited competitions and so on, will be something the IFR can look at, comment on and, in some situations, determine.

[Baroness Brady (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak in response to these important amendments, all of which seek to strengthen the Bill’s provisions for consulting fans. We should pay tribute to noble Lords who have long championed the role of supporters in football, particularly those who have been involved in supporter trusts and similar bodies for many years. Their passion and their advocacy are no doubt one of the reasons that fan voices are becoming even more central to the governance of our national game.

I support the intent behind these amendments. Fans are the lifeblood of football. They invest not just their money and time but their hearts and identities into their clubs. Ensuring that their voices are properly heard, and heard with respect, is not just a moral imperative but essential for the long-term sustainability and integrity of football. The Premier League clubs recognise this too. In recent years, they have made significant progress in embedding fan engagement into their governance structures. Through its fan engagement standard—the first of any league to introduce such a standard—clubs are held to account for how they involve their supporters in decisions that matter to them. Fan advisory boards are now mandatory at every Premier League club and provide supporters with direct access to senior executives, enabling meaningful input on issues such as ticketing, matchday operations, club identity and community programmes. These initiatives represent a significant cultural shift. They create a platform for genuine dialogue between clubs and their supporters, ensuring that fans’ perspectives are considered at the highest levels of decision-making.

While I support the principles underpinning many of these amendments, I also feel it is important to raise a note of caution. Specifically, I want to raise the risks of the IFR being overly prescriptive when it comes to fan engagement and consultation. Clubs are not one-size-fits-all entities; each has its own unique character, fanbase and operating environment. For example, the dynamics of a global club with millions of international fans will differ significantly from those of smaller community clubs, many of whose supporters live within a few miles of the ground. Let us take, for instance, the idea proposed in some amendments that clubs must prove that a majority of their fans support certain decisions. While the intent is admirable and builds on the FA’s and many clubs’ approach to heritage assets already, we must acknowledge the practical difficulties of legally mandating such approaches.

How does a club definitively determine what constitutes a majority? Should a global fanbase have the same weight as local season ticket holders? What happens when opinions are divided? Would the IFR reverse a decision if, down the track, it was found that the wrong methodology had been used? These are complex questions without any easy answers. We should be careful not to create a compliance culture that detracts from the spirit of good engagement. It is really good to make this aspirational on both sides. For fan engagement to work well, the club has to feel confident, be open and get out of its comfort zone; the fans must enter into the debate in a constructive and open-minded spirit too. The difficulty will come if the IFR is drawn into micromanaging fan consultation and adjudicating on individual decisions, therefore inadvertently feeding an adversarial approach between fans, groups and clubs.

Now that might sometimes be appropriate, but I strongly believe the IFR will often be best to focus on ensuring that principles are upheld, leaving the specifics to clubs and their supporters. I also want to make the point that many of these new structures and processes for engaging fans, such as the fan engagement standard and fan advisory boards, are still new; they need time to bed in.

There are some brilliant examples of good practice already; for example, clubs bringing fan advisory board members into their clubs and having them spend time with football, commercial and operational teams so that they can understand the realities of life inside the club. But it is too early to say what the best approaches or designs of these processes will be. We should encourage more thoughtful approaches that allow these structures to mature and evolve, with periodic reviews to assess their effectiveness. A rush to codify overly detailed requirements risks stifling this organic progress and creating unintended consequences.

Football Governance Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Brady and Lord Bassam of Brighton

Committee stage
Wednesday 27th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

I am told that EFL clubs are likely to lose around £450 million in this current football season, and I think the noble Baroness said something similar. The regulator in this Bill, which is focused primarily on financial sustainability, is surely a good thing for football regulation because it is trying to make sure that those clubs—yes, involved in the business of risk and jeopardy—are financially sustainable and have a duty to their communities, and that their activities do not risk the future of those clubs. The point of the legislation, from the previous Government and our Government, is to make sure those clubs can be sustained and not have undue financial risk.

[Baroness Brady (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord; he made his point very well. The Bill does not say “financial sustainability”. Sustainability is not defined. If you put sustainability above overall success, growth and the competitive nature of the game, you might have a safer league, but you will have one that no one wants to watch. You might, notionally, have a more sustainable ecosystem, but it will also be smaller, more boring and poorer. If sustainability is the number one aim of the regulator, can the Minister explain to us what she and the Government consider to be the definition of the “sustainability” of English football? Can she also explain why sustainability does not include supporting the sustainability of the success and growth of the Premier League?