Football Association Governance

Clive Betts Excerpts

Thursday 9th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Damian Collins]

The hon. Gentleman makes a very important point. I have long believed that the creditors rule should be abolished. It means that when a club is insolvent, it has to pay all its football creditors, but the other creditors—the local community and the businesses it works with—do not get any money. I believe that that rule should have been abolished. The chairman of the FA said when he was chairman of the Football League that no moral argument could be made in favour of the creditors rule, but nevertheless it stands. I welcome the fact that progress has been made in putting a greater obligation on clubs to settle with non-football creditors on much better terms than was the case a few years ago, but I would like that to go further.

Football receives, as do other sports, a considerable amount of funding from the public purse, and we in Parliament are right to take an interest in how public money is spent on our national game. In the brief time that I have, I want to set out how and why I believe the FA needs to be reformed.

The FA Council—effectively, the Parliament of football—should represent football across the community, but it is not representative of modern society and the people who play the game. Of its 122 members, 92 are over the age of 60 and 12 are over the age of 80. There are eight women, and there are four people from minority ethnic backgrounds, so there are more men over 80 on the FA Council than there are women. That is not sustainable, and it does not reflect modern society. Although some on the FA Council understand the need for change, some do not. Barry Taylor, a life vice-president of the FA and life president of Barnsley, said in a letter to his colleagues on the FA Council that it “would be great” to have more women involved,

“but not just for its own sake”.

Hearing that, I do not think that he has any serious commitment to the idea of more women on the council, or that he even understands why it is necessary.

The FA Council is an important body because it has power over youth football and women’s football, and it is an important influence on the game. The FA board needs to be stronger and more independent—a more executive body. Only one of its 12 members is a woman, and there are only two independent directors. The last three chairmen of the FA—one of them, Lord Triesman, is sitting in the Gallery—have written to the Select Committee to say that reform is necessary to strengthen the board and ensure that the balance of power is held by the independent directors on the board. That was also a recommendation in the Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s report. Reform is needed to give the FA the power to resist powerful forces and vested interests in the game, particularly the power and strength of the Premier League.

The primary job of the Premier League is to promote its competition, and it does so brilliantly all around the world. However, it exerts an enormous influence over football, because of the vast amount of money it raises and the funds it puts back into the game. We need a strong Premier League—that is good for football—but we need a strong national governing body of football that is ultimately responsible for many of the sporting and ethical decisions that football has to take.

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

The hon. Gentleman is making a really important point. This is not just about who sits on which boards, but where the money is and the power that it exercises. Does he think there is room for a further look at the whole issue of the power and money of the Premier League, and what governance changes could be brought in to get more control over it for the good of the game as a whole?

[Damian Collins]

The Select Committee recommended that the FA board should have a 6:4 ratio in favour of the FA executive and independent directors, so that their voice is stronger than that of any other component parts, including the Premier League. I think that is a necessary reform.

In closing—I could speak for a lot longer, but I want other Members to have the chance to make their own speeches—it is necessary to reform the structure of the FA board to make the FA more independent and give it the power to act. We have been calling for that for years, and the Select Committee has called for it in previous reports. We now believe that legislation is the only way in which that can be delivered. That was the recommendation of the last three chairmen of the FA to the Select Committee, who said that the FA cannot reform itself—turkeys will not vote for Christmas—so there has to be external pressure and action through legislation to achieve it. In this debate, I am asking the Government, if they are unsuccessful in getting the FA to reform, to prepare a Bill to introduce during the next Session of Parliament, following the Queen’s Speech, to deliver the reform the FA so badly needs.

--- Later in debate ---

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

I should like to put on record, as chair of the all-party groups on football and on football clubs, the fact that both groups get administrative support from the Football Association.

Back in 2005, we had the Burns report, and I met Lord Burns shortly after the report was published and had discussions with him. Over the years, I have also talked about these matters to my colleague, Richard Caborn, because the report was commissioned jointly by the Government and the Football Association. The tragedy is that it has taken an awfully long time to do very little over the years. The FA council is virtually unreformed since Lord Burns talked about it.

Some progress has been made with the FA board, which now has an independent chair and two independent members, but more needs to be done. The suggestion about having a fans’ representative on the board should be taken seriously. The problem with the FA board, of course, is that it does not really run football as a whole. There is so much power because of the money coming from the Premier League, and the professional game board still has powers that have been taken away from the FA board as a whole. If we are going to have a reformed FA board, it has to be responsible for the whole of football. It has to be the governing body for every aspect of the game. That is something that we absolutely want to see.

I do not want to belittle the Premier League. It is a magnificent global brand and it has done some good things, including introducing the £30 maximum charge for away fans, but in the end, we still have a situation in which an ordinary premier league player can earn more in two months than Sheffield City Council spends on its junior football pitches in a whole year. There is something wrong with that; it shows that the balance of money in the game is all wrong. A reformed board has to be able to divert more money into grassroots football and address the cliff edge between the premier league and the English Football League.

Also, we should not belittle everything that the FA does. It has done some great things. For example, it has done really well on the women’s game at local and professional levels, and it has tackled racism. It needs to do more on homophobia, but it has started to do so. Mr Speaker, you hosted a reception at which Graeme Le Saux spoke about what the FA was doing to tackle homophobia. It is also starting to address the issue of black and minority ethnic coaches, and the English Football league has taken important initiatives in that regard as well. We want the Premier League to do more.

In Sheffield, we run the largest junior football league in Europe, under the banner of the Sheffield and Hallamshire County Football Association. The FA is now pioneering the Parklife project, which has two schemes in Sheffield, one of which is in my constituency at the Isobel Bowler sports ground. Spades are now in the ground and the scheme will be up and running in a few months’ time. The FA is taking really good initiatives such as those, despite all the problems, but there has been too much delay in regard to its governance. In Greg Clarke, we have someone who wants to see reform and we ought to back him now. However, we must make it clear that if the FA and other footballing bodies do not back him, we will ask the Government to act instead.