Sport: Football Clubs

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Thursday 30th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, although it is interesting that he has just revealed to us that he is so rich he can afford a season ticket at Arsenal. I am not in that league, I am afraid. I support the football club I used to watch when I was a kid, in the Third Division North, the Fourth Division and the Third Division; unfortunately, it was unceremoniously dumped out of the Football League in 1970 and is now slowly and erratically making its way up the non-league pyramid. The club is Bradford Football Club, which people will know as Bradford Park Avenue. It is currently in the second non-league tier, the Conference North—or Vanarama, as we have to call it this year.

I make a serious point here that professional football extends below the bottom of the Football League—what is now known as League Two—certainly into the Conference Premier, where I think about half the clubs are full-time professional clubs and the others are part-time. Certainly, 12 of the 24 clubs have been in the Football League, most of them quite recently, so there is a continuous spectrum from the very top down to the very low levels of the non-league pyramid. These are important clubs. To all intents and purposes, the Conference Premier is now a Fifth Division, and is recognised as that.

The rest of the pyramid is largely composed of part-time professionals; towards the bottom, some of the players are not even paid. It is all part of the richness of the British football system. Although most people who watch football watch the Premier League, for obvious reasons, most people who play football do not play in any of those leagues. They play in Sunday leagues or in boys’ or girls’ leagues. One of the most important aspects of any review of the governance and finance of football must be that more of the enormous amount of money being paid at the top has to filter down through the system. It has to filter down through the leagues and the non-league tiers to the grass roots. Any reform of governance that does not achieve that will not be fundamental in its results.

My party, the Liberal Democrats, being one of the few democratic parties left in British politics—I do not know why the Labour Party people are laughing; if I was in the Labour Party, I would be ashamed of the way that party is now run, but that is not the subject of this debate—had a debate on football and we passed a resolution and some amendments to it. Certain key parts of that resolution do not differ a great deal from what the Labour Party is now saying. There is a developing consensus, certainly outside the Conservatives, that a great deal needs to be done to reform football.

First of all, we called for an independent review of governance. This might sound like the long grass, as the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, said. It is really quite disgraceful that the Conservatives have blocked a policy that was in the coalition agreement four years ago. Anybody who thinks that running a struggling football club is difficult should try going into coalition with the Conservatives. Nevertheless, something is now coming out of it and progress is being made.

Secondly, the fundamental proposal that we put forward was that all professional clubs should have a supporters’ trust by law. That trust should have certain basic rights to block or influence essential things about the football club, such as the location of the club—we all saw what happened with Wimbledon, which was ridiculous—and the colours, name and essential nature of the football club in relation to its local community and supporters.

I am running out of time. I could read out the whole of this resolution, but it is three pages long so I will not do so—it is bound to be three pages long if it is a Liberal Democrat resolution. I urge Members on the Labour benches to have a look at it, because there is a huge amount of common ground and we can go forward together to develop a consensus on how to change the very unsatisfactory structure of British football at the moment.