Football Governance

Debate between Clive Efford and Yvonne Fovargue

Wednesday 25th November 2020 Westminster Hall

[Clive Efford]

I deliberately focused on the need for change in governance rather than rehashing and dwelling on all the arguments about the financial state of clubs. As the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern), said, at the moment there is a drive towards change. I am delighted to hear that the Government are now holding their own roundtables in preparation for a review into the governance of the game—that has to be welcomed. The momentum is there now, and that is why I tried to focus my comments on governance.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) mentioned facilities. We have the richest football league in the world, but we lag behind other countries such as Spain, Germany and France. It is no coincidence that those countries have enjoyed so much success in football when they have invested at the grassroots level as they have done. Look at the statistics comparing the number of coaches and the number of all-weather pitches with floodlights per head of population. Let us not forget that if a facility does not have floodlights, it is not useable for large parts of the winter. Those are important factors.

We are all told by the Premier League—I am sure that the Minister gets this as well—how much our constituencies get, how much it has spent and how much it supports the local football trust. If we step back and look at the bigger picture, though, it is a sorry situation for such a rich football league to have such poor facilities. I remember that when I was on the shadow sports beat, I learned that in Liverpool there was no all-weather football pitch in the city, apart from at Liverpool FC and Everton FC. For a city that is so imbued and associated with football, that was quite a shocking fact.

I welcome that the fact the Government are reviewing the governance of the sport. Now that the Minister has stated his commitment, I think there is no going back. We will have to move forward, because we cannot leave it to the structures in the game. As the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins) and others have pointed out, the owners of clubs are so blinkered in their views that they look at the matter only through the prism of their own clubs. They see their clubs as their own businesses and they do not want outside interference. We will not get the fundamental change that we need if we allow the focus of the decision making to come from those in the game.

We can make the game sustainable. The amount of money in Project Big Picture was minuscule compared with the overall income generated by the Premier League, and it could have put the English football league on a sustainable footing. I did not support all the proposals in Project Big Picture—I had issues with many of them—but I supported the debate because it put the dead cat on the table and made everybody talk about what we would do about football. Nobody else was putting anything on the table, and at least the project started to address the issues.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston raised concerns about the super league. I suspect that the talk about the super league is overblown, but the increase in the number of games in 2024 in the European champions league is a big issue. There will be more games, and they will have an impact on the domestic game. Project Big Picture tried to address that issue, and it will come up when the Minister sits around the table with other stakeholders to discuss the future of the game.

We have to embrace this moment and make sure that we get change. I favour an independent panel, and I hope that the Minister’s roundtable will frame the panel’s terms of reference and make-up. I would certainly volunteer to be on that panel, and I am sure the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe would, too. The fact is that change is coming. If it does not come from the Government, it will come from elsewhere in Parliament, because the mood is that we have to deal with this now.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the future of football governance.

[Yvonne Fovargue (in the Chair)]

I will now suspend the sitting until 4 pm.