Grassroots Football

Debate between Andrew Bingham and David Crausby

Tuesday 1st April 2014 Westminster Hall

[Mr Crausby]

I will come on to that later in my speech. We must have a bigger commitment from the Premier League in order to keep the game healthy and alive.

[Andrew Bingham (High Peak) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate. I spotted that it was taking place only this morning, but I am a great fan of local and non-league football. Does he agree that such football is why people progress to watching premier league football? As a small boy I watched teams such as Buxton, and that fostered an interest that attracted me to top-tier football.

[Mr Crausby]

Absolutely. It is very much in the premier league’s interest that grassroots football survives. That is why I started an online petition that called for a new arrangement, whereby 7.5% of the proceeds from broadcasting rights is used to fund grassroots football. It called on the Government to ensure that grassroots football receives financial support from the Premier League, a call I repeat today. By the time it closed, the petition had received 30,599 signatures, and I did not receive one message, by any means, of principled disagreement from anyone.

Of course, the Government responded when the number of signatories to the petition passed 10,000—well, they did not actually respond right away, even though I wrote to the Leader of the House twice. I am sure that it was a coincidence, but they responded just after midnight on the day that I was listed on the Order Paper to put an oral question to the Minister, asking for a reply. Although the response was welcome, I am afraid to say that it was an apology for the football authorities, which even Sport England says have failed.

The resolution of the grassroots crisis will, of course, take a lot more money than the £1.6 million that has been cut by Sport England. In the football world of billionaires, £1.6 million is not exactly a fortune. It is probably about six weeks’ pay for a top premiership player. Now, do not get me wrong: I do not blame young footballers for accepting £300,000 a week for playing a game that they would probably play for the minimum wage. What do we expect them to do? Say to the multi-millionaire owner of the club—the Russian oligarch, American billionaire, or Arab oil sheik—“No thanks; keep the money and buy yourself another ocean-going yacht”? Of course not! Nor do I blame clubs in the premier league for offering the money, because they are caught in a trap, knowing that if they do not pay players ridiculous wages, one of their rivals will.

The fact is that the market is broken. There are clearly not enough talented young footballers, and, at the same time, billions of pounds are slushing around from TV rights. So what do we do? Well, it is not really that complicated. We should invest much more in grassroots talent, and we should do it by using much more of the money from rights.

[Mr Crausby]

I very much think so. I am sure that the Government do encourage the community to participate in grassroots football; my argument is that more money must be made available to the volunteers who run the game, and that the place to take the money from is the lucrative professional game. Committing 7.5% of the £5 billion from television rights would deliver £375 million over three years. That would not exactly break the premier league, and I do not envisage any starving players, either.

The harsh truth is that the Government should top-slice the TV money before it gets into the hands of the professional game. The professional game is a hugely competitive business, and we cannot expect one professional football club to support the amateur game sufficiently if its neighbouring clubs do not. The premier league is the envy of the football world, with huge amounts of money pouring in and endless stories of enormous wages and excessive lifestyles. If English football is doing so well, why do we allow all the money to stay at the top of the game and not filter down to the grassroots? Why are our international teams so unsuccessful? The fact is that there is a short-term obsession with the premier league in British football. If we are to succeed as a footballing nation, we must broaden our horizons.

Every Saturday morning, premier league scouts tour children’s football grounds scouring for talent. When they find it, they tempt the child and his parents away, delivering the best of coaching and facilities, not to mention various other goodies, but leave all the other children in the team behind, with no changing facilities and no showers, stripping off at the side of the pitch in the depths of winter. Talented young footballers are obviously important, but so are the rest. I want to live in a country where all of our children who want to play football get the opportunity to do so. If we do not pay urgent attention to the grassroots game, there will be no one left in the UK for the professional football club scouts to recruit, leaving the leagues to ever younger foreign players recruited from around the world, some of whom are, frankly, too young to be away from their parents.

My concerns do not just include children. Football can make an enormously positive difference to the lives of developing young people. I talked to a mother who told me that her two sons had been picked up by a premier league club and were very well supported, but when they got to 15 and 16 years old, the club decided that they were not strong enough and let them go. The boys inevitably found that difficult to take, but what made it much worse was that once they were dropped from the club, they had nowhere to play the game that they loved so much.

In 1999, the football taskforce report committed the Premier League to a 5% contribution of its broadcasting income to grassroots projects, which was agreed, but the Premier League never fulfilled that commitment, and anyway much of the money has gone to professional football clubs lower down the leagues. Less prosperous professional clubs are important, of course, and I want them to survive as much as anybody does, but the grassroots game, especially children’s grassroots football, is even more important to me, and it should be more important to the country.

The present arrangement is just not good enough. The Football Association, the Premier League and Sport England work closely together to invest in facilities through the Football Foundation, but between 2007 and 2013, only 6% of football facilities were redeveloped. We clearly need many more artificial pitches. Grass pitches can sustain only five or six hours of football a week, but artificial pitches can take up to 80. In the present economic circumstances, we will not have the number of pitches that we need for at least another generation.

[Andrew Bingham]

The hon. Gentleman is being generous in giving way so often in a 30-minute debate. I concur. We have an artificial pitch in my constituency at Glossopdale school; it can be seen as one comes over the hill into Glossop. Every evening it is floodlit, and kids play on it night after night. To mention something that we have not discussed, on Sundays there is football for elderly gentlemen—I actually qualify—which gets people of my greying years out playing football as well. That must be good for the health agenda.

[Mr Crausby]

Those pitches cost money, and the only source of honestly available money is the Premier League’s billions. If we do not deliver the number of artificial pitches necessary, we may well destroy our seedcorn for the premier league.

I end by quoting Bill Shankly, who once famously said:

“Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”

I think Bill Shankly only applied it to Liverpool FC, to be honest, but I apply it, as we all should, to the grassroots game.