Football Governance Bill [HL]

Lord Mann Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 27th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mann (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest in the Register of Lords’ Interests, as the elected chair of a football supporters’ group with 13,000 members. On Sunday, the weather advice was that nobody should travel in south Wales. I and 3,000 others did travel in south Wales. On Sunday afternoon, we travelled, not of our choice but because football fixtures are being changed to all sorts of obscure times. We went, and returned very late, very happily. That will not be the case at all fixtures if I wish to attend this House. In the new year, we have three fixtures that have been shifted to 8 pm on a Monday, and that does not quite balance with the sitting times of the House. I am just one fan, but there are many thousands who face that.

Imagine trying to get to Plymouth by 12.30 pm on a Sunday. That is what we had to do. It is not an easy way of life, and it is not just the bishops who are losing custom by this odd scheduling. It affects people’s ability. If there were to be an added word in here, it should be “enjoyment”—enjoyment of the game. Yesterday, one club, Manchester United, announced its new prices for this season. For a child, the minimum price is £66. That was my first away fixture, supporting Leeds United, aged five. I was lifted over the barriers—in for free—as I was at Leeds until the age of eight or nine, because that was how children were welcomed then. I did not pay to go in for the very many hundreds of matches I went to in that age span, and now it is £66. Well, it is a business.

The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, who has good football taste, was none the less slightly awry with the example he gave in terms of liquidation, insolvency and the problems. If we take where I live—I will take Lincoln City and Notts County at random—both were about to disappear. The only reason they survived is that the supporters saved them. That is the difference between this industry and other industries. There are countless examples. If they were private sector businesses, they would have vanished.

In some cases, the fans could not do it. In 1987, as a Leeds United fan living in London with a few friends, I got a season ticket for a club called Wimbledon. It was a good choice; we got to the cup final with Wimbledon. I had a young daughter and I could not get to Leeds all the time, so a group of us went to Wimbledon in our spare time. If you are a fan of Wimbledon and your club wins the cup after coming from nowhere, you see what that does for the area and the fans, and people in south London. Then, a few years later, your club is extinguished, gone, shifted to Milton Keynes—vanished. The fans had the wherewithal to set it up again as AFC Wimbledon, and build from the bottom up, which is what they are having to do at Bury.

I almost thought that one or two noble Lords were suggesting that the state should not intervene in successful business, and I will end on this point. If we combine Scottish and English football, the most successful moment in terms of success on the pitch was around 1971. England had won the World Cup; Manchester United were the first English team to win the European Cup. Celtic had won the European Cup in 1967; Rangers were about to win the European Cup Winners’ Cup. We had the Cup Winners’ cup and the Fairs cup, and a whole succession of English teams about to take on the European Cup through the 1970s and dominate world football. It was the one moment when both Scottish and English football were at their height.

On the 2 January 1971, at a high moment, 66 people died at Ibrox football stadium. The state did very little intervening then. Then there was the fire at Bradford— I knew people who were there—when the state had not intervened sufficiently in the industry, and people died. Then there was Hillsborough, where people died. The state has intervened in the sport and the interventions, when they have been hard and focused, have been transformative. It was not the owners of the clubs who brought in the model of football with all-seater stadiums, revenue generation and corporate hospitality. I shall tell you the first club that did it. It was Glasgow Rangers. After 1971, their manager, Willie Waddell, went to see how others across the world did it. They rebuilt the stadium before anyone else did because of his experience of seeing people dying in front of him—that is state intervention.

In the balance between the fans, the state, the entrepreneurship and people’s ability to put in money—if anyone wants to put money into our club, we would be delighted because we are not trying to stop that—we want to see a slight tilt so that the fans are listened to. If we end up shifted to the bottom like the fans of Bury—I do not think we will, but you never know—the state should allow us to do something that they were not able to do; that is, for more to be done along the lines of what was done by the genius of those Wimbledon fans. It took them years to get back up. Wimbledon Football Club, having beaten Liverpool in the cup final in 1988, should have been able to survive seamlessly with their fans. That is the point of this regulation, and it is why I hope the Opposition Front Bench will be reluctant to further push this line of argument.

There are interesting issues that should be explored in getting that balance right. It will be legitimate to go into them and hold the Government to account, to question and even amend. Sustainability means that I, as a fan, will have my club in the future, whether it is badly or well run. That is what is critical about this legislation, and I commend the Government for bringing it forward.

[Baroness Brady (Con)]

My Lords, I refer the Committee to my interests, which are declared in the register. I want to give the noble Lord, Lord Mann, a bit of comfort in that had he been going to a Premier League away game, he would have paid only £30, because there has been a cap on the price of away tickets for the past five years.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Markham (Con)]

I am very glad the noble Baroness mentioned that. When you set the objectives of any organisation, you want to set out the balancing factors. If it is only sustainability, you can get into the lowest common denominator, because a regulator would have absolutely done its job, by the nature of what is set down, just by the survival of all the clubs. There is a very easy way to do that: just dole out all the Premier League money to all the clubs straight away. That would make them all sustainable, giving the money to all the clubs. I think we would all agree that that would be a pretty nonsensical way to do it, but that would achieve the objective. If you set only a single objective, it is very one-dimensional.

Why would you not want a regulator to take into account that the overall financial health of the game is dependent on the TV viewership? That is what drives the money. What drives the TV viewership? It is how competitive the games are—not just the top games but all the games through the league? As I mentioned at Second Reading, and as the noble Lord, Lord Birt, mentioned, we are people who have sold and bought media rights around the world. The reason why countries as far flung as Nigeria, Thailand and everywhere else will pay so much for the rights is that every game is competitive. There is a chance that Bournemouth will go out and beat Liverpool, so everyone cares about it. The Premier League does not have a God-given right to be successful. As the noble Lord, Lord Birt, said, many years ago, the Italian league was more successful. The difference today is that you do not have just two or three top teams, as you see in Germany, Spain and Italy. You have a whole host of teams which are all competitive in the league, so every game becomes interesting to watch.

My concern in all of this is if the only criterion set down is that of sustainability, it is so one-dimensional that the regulator could just decide to discharge its duties in that way. I hope it will not, but when it comes back to the scrutiny that we are all saying it should have, the regulator could sit here among us all and say, “Look, I have made all these clubs sustainable. Okay, too bad that the TV viewership has gone down and too bad that a load of the games are no longer competitive, so the TV rights money has gone down, but they are all sustainable, because I doled out all the money”. I do not think that is what any of us would want. I really do not understand why this should be. This is not a political point; I really do not understand the objective at all. I am literally scratching my head as to why there should be a problem with that.

That is why in our later amendments we try to put in other criteria of success. Those are designed to be the ones that are all about maximising the size of the financial pie, by making sure that TV viewership and attendance are high. People forget in all of this—

[Lord Mann (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for giving way. Would he like to comment on the Premier League vote of last week? Some clubs, led by Manchester City, wanted to grow the amount of money coming into football by allowing different forms of sponsorship, which were designed purely and precisely to put more money into certain clubs—for example, Manchester City, which is obviously why it is in favour. That would obviously be growing the amount of money going into the game, as the noble Lord said. Is that an issue that the regulator should be deciding or, on his argument, that the clubs should be deciding?

[Lord Markham (Con)]

I definitely do not want the regulator to be involved in every nook and cranny, but when the regulator is sitting here in front of us and we are assessing whether or not it has done a good job, to me, the only criterion is not whether all the clubs are still out there in existence. That is a pretty limiting move. Why would we want to narrow ourselves down to that measure? I do not understand why any noble Lord would not want an objective to be that TV viewership goes up or that media sports rights money goes up. I will sit down to give noble Lords a chance.