Football Governance Bill [HL]

Lord Bach Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 13th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bach (Lab)]

My Lords, like many others in this debate, I am a self-confessed football obsessive. I have been a Leicester City season ticket holder for more years than I care to remember and, even more sadly, I am an addict of Fantasy Premier League, too. I find the Premier League riveting and have admiration for its success over more than 30 years: shown, as we have heard, by its vast global appeal, its world-class players, its huge crowds and its employment of a large number of people. It is intoxicating, so intoxicating that one can be tempted—as many are, I fear, including many young football fans—to think that the Premier League nowadays is all that football is. It is not, and it is because it is not that this cross-party Bill is so necessary.

Many noble Lords will perhaps know the wonderful fictional description of football fans at a Bruddersford United match during the Great Depression. It is at the start of JB Priestley’s wonderful novel The Good Companions. It is too long to remind the House this evening of the full description, but let me use an extract or two. Priestley wrote in 1929 that football turns you

“into a member of a new community, all brothers together for an hour and a half … and there you were, cheering together, thumping one another on the shoulders, swopping judgments like lords of the earth, having pushed your way through a turnstile into another and more splendid kind of life, hurtling with Conflict and yet passionate and beautiful in its Art. Moreover, it offered you more than a shilling’s worth of material for talks during the rest of the week”.

Of course, football, like society, is very different today, but fans’ emotions, as described by Priestley, and their response to a game, whether they are watching Manchester City or the bottom club in the 12th division of a Leicestershire local league are, I would argue, still the same.

I make this point to support the need for sustainability and fairness, which I believe are at the heart of the Bill. It is at this moment of almost total Premier League control and success that we need to take stock, surely, and ask whether this level of success is ultimately sustainable and, perhaps as importantly, whether it is always a good thing for the vast football world that lies beneath the Premier League. Of course, this Bill deals with the top four tiers, but let no one be in doubt that this Bill’s effect will be clearly felt right across English football.

To me, the case for a regulator is overwhelming. An industry as large as this, both in numbers and in money, and as significant to our national life, involving 35 million fans a year and almost 40,000 football clubs, should arguably have had a regulator some years ago. Given the bad experiences, but perhaps even more the near misses, that football has been through in the past few years, it seems important to have a regulator with real powers who is prepared to use them. Of course, no one on either side of this argument wants the regulator to run football, but any signs of weakness will be bad news indeed.

By way of example, the problem of football ownership has to be tackled. So much depends on the owner of a club. My club, Leicester, has been incredibly fortunate. Our owners have been marvellous, model owners, winning the confidence of the fans from an early stage and helping the community around Leicester and its county for years and years. Not many clubs, I admit, have been that lucky. Others have had years of worry and concern for fans. This is where the regulator should be prepared to step in.

I want to say a quick word about parachute payments and how reform is pressing. The present position, as others have said, particularly my noble friend Lord Bassam, is just plain unfair on other Championship teams. I am not against them as a matter of principle, but they are too high in relation to what other Championship clubs receive. Recent figures show one club that had just been relegated receiving £48.9 million in its first year while other clubs in the Championship received £5.8 million in something called solidarity payments. That is too big a distinction and it should change.

There are other big issues in the Bill and I look forward to taking a small part in Committee, but I agree that the abolition of replays in the FA Cup from round one on is a sad occasion. We all grew up, whatever our views and whoever we support, with cup replays in the middle of winter. They were exciting, surprising and very much part of the English game. I still do not know why they have been abolished.

Whether it is true that the existence of football has prevented violent revolution in our country, as we used to be told at school, I do not know, but its importance can hardly be exaggerated and that is why this Bill is so vital.