Grassroots Football Funding: Wembley Stadium

Alex Sobel Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd January 2019 Westminster Hall

[Justin Madders]

As a Manchester United fan, I would say that, if we can encourage more George Bests, I will certainly be very pleased to see that. I will talk a little more about how we can encourage more youngsters to participate a little later.

Football in this country is in a very strong position. The premier league is the envy of the world. Most of the world’s top players come here, and England’s youth teams have enjoyed unprecedented levels of success in recent years. Whether those kids who have enjoyed great success with the national team recently get to play at the highest level remains to be seen. We should be concerned about the declining number of home-grown players, such as George Best, coming through the leagues, although I am sure someone with that talent would still make it today.

About 35% of players who started games in the premier league last season were English, on average. That represented a huge reduction on the 69% of English players who started games in the inaugural season of the premier league in 1992-93. There are huge questions about how professional clubs operate and about how our younger players can hope to get a chance against the huge influx of imported superstars, and I also sometimes wonder about the effect of giving a 17-year-old who has never played for the first team 10 grand a week—what does that do to their chances?—but that is probably outside the scope of today’s debate.

What we can do today is discuss how to improve the game below elite level. One in six grassroots matches were cancelled last year, and I recall my own kid’s games getting repeatedly cancelled over the winter period, although I do not think it was a particularly extraordinarily bad winter. Cancellations have a detrimental effect on both an individual’s and a team’s development, and we need to encourage that development. There are of course plenty of distractions and reasons why kids may find something else to do rather than play football, but we should do what we can to support it by encouraging a little bit more of the wealth that flows through the game to trickle down to the grassroots. We cannot expect the superstars of tomorrow to emerge if we are not prepared to invest in them.

One thing we can and, in my view, must do is improve the standard of facilities for younger players of all abilities, and for everyone involved in grassroots football. We should not tolerate second-rate facilities in our national sport. We know the pressure local authorities are under to balance the books and how there is little left for discretionary spending on improving sporting facilities. Pitches are often in poor condition, with poor drainage and areas of the pitch that are more mud than grass. Many pitches have little or no changing facilities connected with them.

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend is making a wonderful case for grassroots football. A club in my constituency, Otley Town, wrote to me to outline its concerns about facilities. It said:

“The key issue that we have is the quality of training facilities in winter. Most junior and senior clubs need access to all weather pitches so they have good environments to train in.”

They went on to talk about the need for funding for girls football, veterans football and disability football, to ensure that everyone can enjoy the game. Should we not ensure that the money trickles down from the billionaire owners to the grassroots?

[Justin Madders]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. A whole range of groups are participating in football that possibly traditionally did not, and we need to encourage them as well.

I am not saying that there is no investment. Since 2000, the Football Foundation, funded by the FA, the Premier League and Sport England, has invested more than £600 million in projects. My constituency has recently benefited from such investment, with fantastic facilities at the Vauxhall Sports and Social Club, where two new fourth generation pitches, which I occasionally grace, have been opened alongside a fantastic new clubhouse. About half the money for that came from the Premier League and the FA facilities fund, but the other half had to be raised locally, and I pay tribute to the incredible work done by Dave Edmunds and Tony Woodley, in particular, who really fought to get those facilities off the ground.