Football Governance Bill (Second sitting)

Chris Green Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 14th May 2024 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

With respect, we have many questions, so may we have brief answers?

Ian Mather: I have a very short response: we need better financial distribution, and rules that bite to stop money being wasted through the game, so real-time regulation.

[Chris Green (Bolton West) (Con)]

Q Sharon, as the local Member of Parliament representing Bolton Wanderers, I just want to say that the transformation for local communities has been absolutely phenomenal—

Sharon Brittan: How delightful to have you here to endorse what I am saying!

[Chris Green]

I have some sense of this already, but does the Bill go far enough to empower the regulator in the distribution of funds?

Sharon Brittan: As things stand, the EFL would like to have some areas of the Bill looked at. I will not go into the detail, but I have a request. To me, Rick Parry, with what he has done over the past five years, is a man who has led an organisation in the right way. I am sorry, but I do not think that the Premier League have done the same. I would say that to them—anything I say, I will say to the person’s face; I do not talk behind people’s back and I do not gossip. Rick Parry has done a superb job. I have read through the Bill and we have talked through the areas where he thinks that the Bill needs to be amended. It is important that those areas are understood and agreed, and the amendments made. At the moment, the Premier League are not working with us, so if, after going to all this effort to get the Bill, we do not get the Bill quite right, it will cause further problems. I would like to see a Bill go through that is absolutely effective, so we can all move forward in a really excited way with our football pyramid. Football is global, and there is so much good we can do for this country, for the world.

Ian Mather: This Bill is really good in many ways. A lot of work has gone into it, and it is a thoughtful Bill, but there are flaws. One of the flaws, to answer your point, is the inability of the regulator to act if he or she sees that something is happening that makes football not sustainable. We are going to have the state of the game review, which definitely needs to be done quickly. Let us say that the state of the game review says that parachute payments, to pick an obvious one, are bad for the game. At the moment, it requires the EFL or the Premier League to trigger the backstop powers. You might say that the EFL would definitely do that, but actually, with the voting structure in the EFL, it might not. There are powers within the Premier League to coerce and influence clubs in the EFL so that that backstop might not be triggered. Why create a power for a regulator but not give the regulator the power to intervene if he or she definitely sees something is wrong? I think that is a fundamental flaw in the Bill.

[Chris Green]

Q This point will be brought to a head this coming Saturday. We do not know what the result will be—we can have our wishes—but most people on the outside will think going up a league is a phenomenal success that we should celebrate, whereas actually, it brings a bit of trauma, doesn’t it?

Sharon Brittan: It absolutely brings trauma, for the reasons that I gave before. I have to behave as a responsible human being, and it is whether I can then go to my investors and say, “Would you like to commit £20 million a year?” The reality is that you will fail. I want to be progressive every season, because like I said, when we are progressive, that gives me a bigger platform to do good. In the Championship, however, because of the parachute payments, it makes it almost impossible.

[Chris Green]

Q When we think about good business, with you coming in with those cultures and values from a healthy business environment, and that culture shock when you come into football, this is the divide that the football regulator Bill ought to be bridging.

Sharon Brittan: I completely agree. May I just say that in football, generally it can be a non-trusted environment? I have a football manager who has stayed with me four years and who has turned down three jobs in the Championship that would have given him three times his salary. I have a CEO who has stayed with me three and a half years. I have built a team of trusted people, because we are working in a culture where everybody has bought into the journey to where this football club is going. You can see that after five years, we are a differentiator in what we are doing in Bolton, and if more football clubs worked in that way, I am absolutely positive that it would enhance the economy and life for the 65 million people who live in this country, and beyond. I am on a mission.

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)]

Q I want to focus on the point you just made. Obviously, Bolton had a terribly difficult time. If this Bill had been passed five or six years ago, would it have stopped Bolton getting into that mess, or is it that the financial distribution would still be needed to change the world in such a way?

Sharon Brittan: It is a very good question. Football has—or has had—a habit of bringing semi-maniac types of people to the table. I think it is driven by ego. In those situations, it comes down to the fit and proper persons test. The previous owner at Bolton spent £180 million. He was a very good man, but a huge amount of that was spent trying to get out of the Championship. If you have someone who is hellbent and comes in just wanting to spend, I do not know if you can actually stop that, per se.

Ian Mather: Can I come in on that point? I think real-time monitoring would have been really helpful with a lot of the problems we have seen with football; Bury was a really good example. You look back over time and you think, “Well, that wasn’t very good. In fact, it was terrible,” but that was years ago. Actually, the ability to look at what is happening in real time is really important.

I know one of the criticisms is that that will be an expensive item for small clubs. As a small club, our turnover is £7 million. Let me put that in perspective for you. We have a Man City supporter in the room; Erling Haaland earns about £7 million in eight weeks. That is equivalent to our turnover. Nothing in this Bill causes me any trouble at all about form filling or submitting accounts. If you want to see our accounts—they might be four weeks out of date, but that is as much as you are going to get—our cash flow forecasts, forecast profits and losses, which are done every month, or our business plan, that is not a problem. I would not buy the argument that this is all cumbersome and difficult, because it just is not. That sort of monitoring would have helped to prevent problems like Bolton, Derby, Bury and a whole lot of other clubs experienced..