English Football: Financial Sustainability and Governance Debate
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Anneliese Dodds
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English Football: Financial Sustainability and Governance
Anneliese Dodds Excerpts(3 days, 22 hours ago)
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Yuan Yang
I agree with my hon. Friend, who has a deep interest in her local clubs. Fans need to be able to see their clubs perform in their local area. Many MPs who are in this debate have concerns about the relocation of their grounds or lack of appropriate grounds.
The final problem is ownership. The first two problems have shown how little incentive there is to be a well-run club that spends responsibly. Most clubs rely on a generous owner to stay afloat. When the good will or cash flow of that owner starts to run dry, clubs often have nowhere else to turn. Reading fans know the perils of this dependence. The current owners, the Dai siblings, put the club up for sale almost two years ago, but they have not been seen at the club in well over a year. Fans have mostly been kept in the dark. Credible bidders for the club�some of whom I have had the fortune to speak to�have made offers, and they have been turned down and dragged through lengthy negotiations. Bidders have faced difficulties in navigating the ownership structure of the club in which the stadium, the training grounds and the club itself have been separated into different corporate entities, and in which club assets have been used as collateral for other loans.
Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)
My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech, and I can forgive her for being from Reading�at least she is not from Swindon. Oxford United, which I was grateful that she mentioned, must be able to move out of the Kassam stadium for which it is charged unviable rent, despite lacking a fourth stand and many other problems. Does she agree that the club�s exciting proposals for a new stadium in Kidlington must go forward, but that future governance models need to stop previous owners from entrapping clubs in unviable and unsustainable stadiums?
Yuan Yang
I very much agree. Stadiums are also vital community assets. I look forward to one day seeing Reading beat Oxford at the new Kidlington stadium.
What the EFL has at present is the use of fines. The owners of Reading have been fined on numerous occasions for failing to fund their monthly wage bill, but that has not changed behaviour. The most frustrating thing for Reading fans, as I am sure it has been for Portsmouth, Leeds, Bury and Charlton fans before them, is a feeling that the whole chaos could have been avoided if the EFL had had sufficient powers to implement a more robust owners test when the current owners, the Dai siblings, first took over.