Football Governance Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Addington and Lord Moynihan of Chelsea

Consideration of Commons amendments and / or reasons
Tuesday 15th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moynihan of Chelsea (Con)]

The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, is absolutely correct—and what happened? Within a few days, all that went away. They had a look and it went away. As I mentioned, I wrote an article on the very day the idea came out, as did many other people, saying that it would not work. The clubs involved looked at that and said, “Yes, this is true. It’s not going to work”.

The noble Lord talked about Wimbledon. We are now saying, in the Bill, that clubs cannot move and there can be no dynamism. Yet I quoted a study in the debate last night that said that, when we restrict, clamp down and prevent things happening, that is when societies disintegrate. We cannot expect to have success if we say, “We know best and we’re going to stop this, that and the other, and impose this, that and the other”. I am just putting a warning down: one of these days, somebody will be in a position to say that this was an extraordinarily bad idea.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I will say a couple of words to wrap up from these Benches. When we did the Bill, my first comment was, “I am not of your tribe when it comes to being a football fan”. I encourage everybody to watch a decent sport on Saturday morning, when the Lions have their first Test, but we have got that out of the way now. The thing about this is that football clearly touches people’s lives because it is their local team. What the Bill does is get better management and better structures in there. It means that somebody is overseeing them.

It may be that the market will ultimately do something or run away, or we will all end up playing ice hockey on artificial pitches or something when people get fed up with it. Who knows? But at the moment, football speaks to many communities, and the fact that we will have these clubs, which are a part of the fabric of their local society and its interaction together, surviving better, or at least standing a chance of so doing, is something for which we should actually be very grateful.

In the end, the argument about these amendments is probably over how we divide up the loot. Let us face it, we did this because bits of football were fighting with each other about money; that is where we got to at the end. The Cross Benches came up with a solution that was, I felt, a little too elegant—that congratulation is really what I felt the whole time—as opposed to a rather brutal solution by the Government. We went brutal. But we have something here that looks like it will work and have general agreement.

Football Governance Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Addington and Lord Moynihan of Chelsea

Committee stage
Wednesday 18th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I am beginning to wish I had jumped up before the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, because I have come to a similar conclusion.

For every success story in football, if you look you will find a failure. It is often the case when people come forward and buy themselves the dream team, then something goes wrong. You will find that especially in the lower levels. There are stories of those clubs, with Bury et cetera copping out, that have more expenditure going out on wages than they have coming in from revenue. If the regulator does not have the power to stop that speculative spending in certain circumstances, it is being denied a basic power over one of the biggest problems that has led to instability, particularly in the lower parts of the game. After some of the discussions we had on this, I really cannot see how we can support the lead amendment here and still have the central thrust of the Bill.

How will the regulator assess the slightly strange finances of investing in people who are always one trip away from being worth nothing? One accident on a training field and your principal asset is worth nothing. How is that taken into account and balanced, which would require a level of expertise? Does the Minister have examples of where information will be gathered to make a sensible assessment on this?

On speculative purchases, we have heard about deals with agents, et cetera, on other parts of this Bill; it is important to bear in mind how these are done. If the Minister has information on how that information will be gathered and those assessments made, I would be very interested to hear it.

[Lord Moynihan of Chelsea (Con)]

My Lords, I hope the Minister will bear in mind that the repeated statements “For every winner there is a loser”, “The Premier League is in terrible danger” or “Football is in terrible danger” just ignore the fact that football is tremendously successful in this country. If for every winner there is a loser, there would have been no progress in the last 20 years. There has been progress and enormous success. We now have the greatest football league in the world. The statement that “Your biggest asset is only one accident on a training ground away from being worth nothing” completely ignores the fact that all football assets—all players—are insured. If, God forbid, your best player was injured irrevocably on the training ground, you would receive an enormous insurance payment, so it is just not true. The actual commercial realities of what is going on in football in this country seem to be completely mis-stated so often in this Chamber. I hope that the Minister will take heed of the tremendous success that private enterprise, unfettered by an onerous regulator, has created in the world of football in our country.