Football Governance

Damian Collins Excerpts

Thursday 9th February 2012 Westminster Hall

[Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger, in this important debate. We have heard a lot from both sides of the Chamber about the report and about people’s experiences of their local football clubs. It is clear that when football and football clubs fail, fans bear the cost, which is why we take the matter so seriously. Because football plays such a fundamental role in society—football in Britain is an expression of the country in which we live—it is right that Parliament take a view on some of the issues that are highlighted in the report. Those issues affect the whole of society and not simply the administration of a football club or a football competition.

[Mark Field]

I can understand why many in the footballing fraternity might think it is not necessarily Parliament’s place to opine in the way that we are doing. Not only do we have an interest on behalf of our constituents, but we have a fundamental financial interest. The British footballing industry was on its knees during the mid-1980s after a series of disasters, hooliganism and, ultimately, the Bradford City fire, which led to the Taylor report. A huge amount of public money has gone, and continues to go, into the game. That is one of the reasons why it is appropriate for Parliament to have a say on the matter.

[Damian Collins]

I agree with my hon. Friend. When we have foreign ownership and we do not know who the owners are; when we have a largely unregulated transfer market bringing billions of pounds into and out of the country, which is largely unknown and uncontrolled at its source; and when communities bear the cost of the financial failure of a football club and taxpayers bear the loss through unpaid tax bills, Parliament should take an interest. We do not seek to take away someone’s right to run their football club badly. That is beyond the control of Parliament. The report of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee and the debate have thrown up legitimate public interest concerns, however. The events of the past seven days demonstrate that the Football Association has an obligation to be the moral guardian of the game in this country, not simply the administrator of football.

I am sure that hon. Members support teams in their constituencies at all levels. I am a lifelong supporter of Manchester United, but one of the most exciting football matches I have ever watched was when Hythe Town beat Staines Town last season to qualify for the first round proper of the FA cup for the first time in its history. That was the first time in more than 50 years that a side from the Kent league had qualified. That is a single competition in which a club in the Kent league can compete alongside clubs that are competing in the Champions League. When multiple clubs are playing in multiple formats and competitions, there must be a single governing body that can have some oversight over the whole of football in this country. That can only be the Football Association, which is the guardian of the game in all competitions.

I praise the chairman of the Football Association, David Bernstein, for taking a stand on the John Terry affair. David Bernstein rightly accepted that the captain of the England football team has a position in public life in the country, and millions of sport fans look up to him as a role model. If his position is put into question by a criminal charge that has been made against him, although he is not guilty of that charge, while doubt remains about his role it is not appropriate for him to be captain of the England football team. If the manager of the England football team, Mr Capello, could not accept that ruling, it was right for him to stand aside. Although we might not have wished for the outcome of the past seven days—the removal of the captain and the manager—the course of events was inevitable. It was right for the Football Association to take a moral lead on the case, and I commend it for doing so. There are real financial concerns about the administration of football and clubs in this country, and a real concern about the lack of powerful oversight and intervention. There are many areas of concern, and hon. Members have touched on a good number. I will limit my remarks to three issues—club ownership, the football creditors rule, and player ownership and the player transfer market.

During our inquiry the fact that Leeds United was owned by a trust whose investors were not known was highlighted, together with the fact that Mr Ken Bates was employed by that trust to be chairman of the club, but did not know who the owners—the investors in that trust—were. No one in football in this country believes that Ken Bates did not always control that club. There is no other way in which he could suddenly have completed the purchase of it within days, without any kind of tendering process, and assumed ownership. He blamed the political obsession of the Select Committee, which was simply standing up for the legitimate interest of Leeds United fans to know who owned their club, for its interest in Leeds United. Many hon. Members have spoken about the role of the fit and proper person test. How can that test be applied if we do not know who the person is? That has been a recurrent problem for the football authorities, and shows that the test, which should function as a guardian, works only if the person who is being investigated is the owner, and if that can be proved beyond reasonable doubt.

[Graham Jones]

On that note, does the hon. Gentleman think that somehow the fit and proper person test could include stupidity?

--- Later in debate ---

[Damian Collins]

The test is designed to make it possible to understand whether someone is a capable administrator, without criminal convictions, but also whether they have no conflicts of interest in the game, such as stakes in other football clubs that might give them a biased view in competition and an unbalanced view in the operation of the transfer market. “Dispatches” on Channel 4 highlighted the case of investors in the far east seeking to invest in British football clubs and taking multiple stakes in them by using different businessmen and personas to make the investments, beyond the football authorities’ ability to track them. That undercover report was an important piece of work, and it highlights some of the issues and the test’s failures.

[Mr Foster]

The hon. Gentleman constantly refers to the fit and proper persons test. Does not that draw attention both to the concern of many hon. Members that football clubs are often in the hands of an individual and to the merits of greater supporter involvement, which would spread the load and the responsibility and would be a more sensible way forward?

[Damian Collins]

I completely agree with my right hon. Friend that it is a good thing for supporters to have that interest, but if they do not control the club, and the controlling interest lies with another party, they should have the right to understand who that is, and the source of the finance. That is crucial. I made some inquiries of the Football League about the ownership of Coventry City. It transpired that it is owned by an investment trust—a private equity firm. It is not known who the investors in that trust are. The Football League had to concede to me that to this day it does not know who owns the club.

[Tom Blenkinsop]

The hon. Gentleman is making an excellent point and a valid argument. I want to praise the Government, who talk in points 40 to 42 of their response about allowing supporters to have representatives on club boards, but there would be a trigger point. What type of trigger point would he see as tenable, in allowing more clarity and transparency in club boards by allowing the fans in?

[Damian Collins]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. I shall come on to my views on the solution to the problem, but many clubs in Coventry City’s position will have a management company—a holding company that runs the club—and a supporters’ trust may have a seat on that board. However, that is just a holding company. The ownership of the club is somewhere else completely, and that management company may not know who the owner is. It may deal with a businessman who represents the owners, but it may not know who the owners are.

I recently had conversations with a businessman who was involved in running Sheffield Wednesday from the moment it went into administration through to the period when it was taken over by Milan Mandaric. He described a series of potential investors coming forward, some of whom used fake names and identities. When non-disclosure agreements were signed, it turned out that the principal investors were based in the far east and were not who they originally seemed to be. The impression is created of a murky world where no one is quite who they say they are. People running clubs in this country who seek to sell them to a foreign investor to raise funds for the club may not know who they are dealing with.

When I wrote to the Football League about Coventry City, I had a reply from Nick Craig, the director of legal affairs, who made a telling point:

“We have for some time expressed our concerns as regards investment vehicles (often offshore) and the issue of the lack of transparency surrounding ownership of them. Indeed we have previously sought assistance from DCMS and HMRC in that respect but to no avail. We are left in a position where we can regulate and seek to require clubs to comply but are reliant on self-declaration with no official means of independent verification.

That the proliferation of offshore investment trusts means we will never always be 100% certain in all cases but we continually assess the appropriateness of our rules in a changing environment.”

There is not very much comfort there for any football fans concerned, because the Football League is saying that if a company is registered offshore and it buys a British football club, it does not have the authority or power to know who owns the club.

The Select Committee report contained a request to the Government for a retrospective examination of the Leeds United case. That would require powers beyond those of the football authorities to inquire what was the source of the finance to purchase the club out of administration, how much Ken Bates paid for it and where the money went, so that we could determine who controlled the club’s source of finance, even if it was impossible to determine who the owners were. The source of finance will take us to the owner of the club.

[Graham Jones]

The hon. Gentleman is generous in giving way, and makes an excellent point, which I want to add to, as well as supporting the Minister’s position. What would the hon. Gentleman say about a club such as Blackburn, however? The board exists, but it is being bypassed; the manager is directly responsible and flies out every month to Pune in India to run the football club. What would happen if the supporters’ trust sat on the Blackburn Rovers board? It now has no role within the club. Is that an issue that concerns the hon. Gentleman? How would he deal with it?

[Damian Collins]

I am grateful for that comment, but I will make that the last intervention that I take, if the House does not mind, as I want to make a few other points. I said at the beginning of my speech that I do not think it is the role of the House or the Government to stop people running a football club badly. It would be difficult to legislate that a club now in private ownership should be majority owned and controlled by the supporters, even if the supporters might want that. As the report says, the Government should—they have stated in their response that they will look at this—make it as easy as possible for supporters’ trusts to be set up, so that such representation exists, where the club wants that.

As to ownership, I do not have a problem with clubs being owned by foreign investors. If people want to spend their money on football in this country to improve facilities and the quality of competition, that should be welcomed. However, there should be a clear register of any individual, with any investment in a football club, no matter how small, and that information should be available. I would push for it to be publicly available, but it should at least be available to the football authorities. In response to what the Football League said to me about Coventry City, if a football body—the Football League, the Premier League or whatever it is—cannot be satisfied about who the owner of a club is, it should stop that club competing in its competition. It should not necessarily be for the football authorities to chase round the world trying to find the owner of a club. If the club cannot demonstrate it to the satisfaction of the competition, it should not be allowed to take part.

A way to carry out that policy would be to request clubs, perhaps as part of the licensing scheme, to allow the football authorities to inquire of their bank what the source of funding is, and who the club’s owners are. The bank should make that information available, and if it cannot or does not, the matter should be passed to the Financial Services Authority. The ownership of clubs is not just a matter of football competition. If money is being channelled in by businessmen whose identity is not known, that should be a matter for the tax and financial authorities, as it would be in any other business.

I want to make a couple of points about the football creditors rule, which other hon. Members have touched on. As the chairman of the Football League said when I questioned him in the Select Committee, there is no moral case to justify the fact that, when a football club goes into administration, the local printer who prints the match programmes or the local building firm that does ground maintenance should get 1p in the pound for its debts, while a football club at the other end of the country or a multi-millionaire footballer get their football debts paid in full. That is wrong. The taxpayer loses too, because owed tax is not covered by the football creditors rule. That is the subject of a court case between HMRC and the football authorities. If that is not resolved, it should be a matter for legislation, and the House should resolve it. There is no moral case for that state of affairs, and we should move on.

On player ownership and player transfers, concerns have been raised that third-party ownership of players, although outlawed in this country, is still part of the game. A magazine, Tipsbladet, in Denmark, published an article this week that raises concerns about third-party ownership. Players are channelled through clubs in Denmark and, ultimately, on to the premier league. Funds that seek to own and control players have a financial interest in moving those players between clubs. That financial interest is greater than the interests of the player, or the club he may go on to on an intermediary basis.

Bloomberg’s news website also raised a concern last week about what it called “letterbox companies”, which are set up for a matter of days to loan money to a football club to purchase a player, and are then closed down almost straight away. It highlighted a case with Porto, in Portugal, where companies set up in this country had loaned money—non-bank lending—to FC Porto to buy players. Those companies were then shut down straight away, making it almost impossible for the authorities to identify where that money had come from.

The flow of money in football is an issue of the utmost importance, and one that we touched on in our report. The football authorities have to get to grips with the matter. The Government should consider it in their response to our report, and in their consideration of the response of the football authorities at the end of the month.

[Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale) and his Committee on producing such a detailed and comprehensive report on the state of governance in our national game. I am the vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary football group, and I associate myself with the comments of other hon. Members about our late friend Alan Keen and all the work that he did.

I am a lifelong football fan, and in the past 20 years since the foundation of the Premier League, English football has undergone a massive transformation. Rather than continually attacking FIFA—I am glad that we have not really spoken too much about the national game, but there has a campaign against FIFA, particularly in the aftermath in December of the Football Association’s failure to secure the World cup, either in 2018 or 2022—we need to examine seriously the governance of the domestic game. There should now be a pledge from both the Football Association and the Premier League to put their houses in order urgently. True fans of the national game have become increasingly dismayed—as we have heard from hon. Members—at the cynical culture of illegal payments, opaque ownership and disregard for the grass roots of the game in recent years, as global TV money has dominated.

As has been said, half, perhaps slightly more, of all premier league clubs are now foreign-owned, and an increasing number of sides in the championship are attracting wealthy investors from overseas. However, as the report points out, a majority of clubs are still owned by a local business man on a philanthropic basis. Foreign ownership itself is not a problem if we have a robust fit and proper person test. Many will recall that Manchester City has not had an easy path in this regard. In 2007, they were bought by the disgraced former Thai Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra. As we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth North (Penny Mordaunt), Portsmouth had no fewer than four owners in a single season before entering administration in 2009-10. Manchester United and Liverpool have both been subject to highly leveraged buy-outs from US owners. That model is highly risky and is not supported by the vast majority of fans or, indeed, by the Premier League.

There is a risk of chronic overreaching by clubs. I fear that the reckoning—the same can be said for much of the rest of the economy—is yet to come. Under all types of ownership model, this has led to a massive inflation in the cost of running a football club, which has usually impacted most profoundly on loyal, long-standing fans who find themselves priced out.

Asset stripping is highly detrimental. The separation of a football club from the ownership of their ground often spells long-term financial disaster. We have heard that that was the genesis of many of the problems for Wimbledon in 1991. My hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North (Mark Lancaster) is not here, but one of the lessons of the phenomenal success of AFC Wimbledon is that the franchising model need not necessarily be one to which we should aspire. It took eight long years—in the scheme of things, quite a short period—for Wimbledon to move their way right back up that pyramid into the Football League. If there are to be such instances as Milton Keynes—a new town with a large population that is not traditionally served by a nearby football club—I hope that that will be a lesson for the future. Outside the Football League, Darlington have high-profile problems, having fallen into administration only this season. They are now subject to a bid for a community takeover.

It must be acknowledged, as other hon. Members have, that on occasion the football authorities are faced with the choice between allowing a bad owner to complete a takeover, or a club simply no longer existing. Football League clubs tend not to disappear, with the exception of Aldershot 20 years ago. However, often when they lose league status oblivion follows very quickly—one thinks of Maidstone United, Scarborough and Rushden & Diamonds. With that in mind, the Football League, rather than the Premier League, has led the way in recent years in improving the good governance of football in this country. Many measures that began in the Football League have since been adopted across English professional game.

A number of hon. Members have mentioned the owners and directors test, so I will not go over old ground. On players’ wages and the issue of debt, average wage spending per club at the advent of the premier league in 1992-93 was £4.5 million, which was 44% of turnover. That has since risen in the past 20 years to an average of £1.3 billion—68% of turnover. Deloitte and Touche suggests that 60% would be a prudent number. Wage spending is at its most corrosive in the championship, where it amounts to 88% of average club turnover. Championship clubs together made an operating loss of £133 million in 2009-10, and their aggregate debt hit £875 million in summer 2010—£36 million for each club.

Premier league clubs generally make an operating profit until financing and player trading costs are taken into the account. By contrast, each division in the Football League—championship, league one and league two—has collectively lost money. In total, debt across the 92 clubs stands at a £3.5 billion. Those staggering numbers really do put in doubt the future sustainability of our game outside the premier league, with all its wealth in its current format. Football League clubs are a vital pillar in all our communities and they play a vital role in developing young players, not just for our national team, in a professional and competitive environment.

One problem is parachute payments, which make getting into the premiership such a strong financial inducement. The pressure on clubs to succeed is perpetuated by parachute payments, which are paid over a four-year period after a club is relegated from the premier league and are worth £48 million in total. The justification is that it provides insurance to promoted clubs to allow them to be competitive in the premier league. The downside is that clubs have to be in the premiership only one in every five years to have such untold wealth coming their way. It therefore provides a perverse incentive, providing artificial support and allowing clubs to spend money that they have absolutely no hope of raising naturally. That distorts and undermines the integrity of the championship and, by extension, the rest of the football pyramid. There is no provision forcing clubs to use parachute payments to honour existing player contracts, for example, or to pay down debt. They can instead be used, and often are used, to finance the purchase of new players in a winner-takes-all gamble to win promotion.

On financial sustainability, currently, all clubs must include divisional pay clauses in player contracts that indicate what the player would be paid in each division, if he were to play in them, in each term of his contract. A salary cost management protocol was introduced as long ago as 2003 for league two, limiting club spending on player wages to 60% of turnover. That limit was reduced to 55% this season. Clubs provide budgetary information to the league, which is updated as the season progresses. Any player registrations that take clubs beyond the threshold are refused. The protocol has proven successful, with the vast majority of clubs in the division spending less than 45% of turnover on players’ wages. League two’s operating losses fell from £9 million to £8 million in 2009-10. I am very pleased that league one clubs are shadowing the protocol this season, with a 75% limit of turnover in place, although at this juncture there are no sanctions for clubs. Next season, the threshold will reduce to 65% with firm sanctions in place. The limit will fall again in future years.

I understand that the Football League is in discussions with clubs in the championship regarding the introduction of UEFA-style financial fair play measures based on a kind of break-even model. That is much needed if championship clubs are to bear the brunt of some of the premier league-induced wage inflation without the requisite TV money to absorb it.

[Damian Collins]

My hon. Friend mentioned the UEFA scheme. Does he share my concern that a report published by FIFPro this week, based on a study of players in the former Soviet republics in eastern Europe, showed that the salaries of 40% of the players it surveyed were paid not by the clubs that they play for, but by another party?

[Mark Field]

Yes, I share many of those concerns. I suspect, I am afraid, that at some level, even within our own professional game, there are similar problems.

Other hon. Members want to speak, but I hope that I have a few moments to say a little about sporting sanctions, which have caused considerable angst within the footballing community. The Football League pioneered the use of sporting sanctions, with a mandatory 10-point penalty applied to any club that enters administration. I strongly support the sanction, because it protects the integrity of the competitions by ensuring that clubs do not gain a competitive advantage, not just by going through insolvency, but through overspending in the years before that.

I understand why many fans are upset by the sanctions, particularly fans of clubs such as Luton Town and Plymouth Argyle, which have dropped rapidly through the divisions as a result of not just a 10-point penalty, but often more punitive penalties. In a sense, the new owners and loyal, much put-upon supporters find themselves left to pick up the pieces, although they are not responsible for many of those past misdemeanours.

We have not discussed agents’ fees to any great degree today, and there is also the issue of publication. The abolition of the minimum wage 51 years ago and the Bosman ruling, fundamentally, in 1995 have so massively tilted the power away from clubs to the players. It has gone from one terrible extreme of indentured play to the other, where the players have the whip hand. They have so much power that their agents can now extort huge fees. Although it is easy for the footballing fraternity —the FA, the premier league and even the Football League—to accuse agents of being at the core of all these problems, they often have a symbiotic relationship with agents, some of whom may be on their side, as the hon. Member for Hyndburn (Graham Jones) said specifically in relation to Blackburn Rovers, although that applies within many other clubs as well.

I am keenly aware that other hon. Members want to speak. Payments to HMRC have already been discussed by other hon. Members. On FA governance, as we know, the Football Association was created in an Olympian, Victorian age. In fairness to Oxford university, it won the FA cup a few times in the 1880s, which is probably why it still has representation to this day, but clearly this is not a sensible body to go forward as a 21st-century model for running our national game.

Given the commercial explosion over the past couple of decades following the emergence of the Premier League, which I have mentioned, one has to wonder how the FA in its current form can have any influence. In many ways, the Premier League has, again, been complicit in this and has colluded and been happy to allow the FA to take quite a lot of flack for elements of the governance concerns that we have addressed today.

The FA will need to change its culture to understand that it alone is there to enforce the rules and policy agreed by the whole game. The overall direction of football in this country should now have significant input from the Premier League and the Football League—not as a takeover, but as a partnership. Just think how much more successful even a relatively traditional FA could be with more input from the acknowledged day-to-day leaders in the leading tiers of global club football. A change in the culture will see the FA participate alongside the rest of the football family in creating policy with more of a focus on oversight, which is close to all our hearts.

Hon. Members have mentioned having more independent directors. Such directors would have an important role in examining the game’s policies at a board level. More power should be handed to them and to expert executives who will initiate the policies.

The Government are keen to avoid having an independent regulator for our domestic national game. Football must accept that, if many of these proposals are not acted upon, working together with footballing organisations, an independent regulator may be a sanction. I am interested to hear what the Minister has to say about that. This subject has probably been a headache for him, knowing that he is, in truth, much more of a professed player of cricket and rugby—more than just a fan—but I suspect that football takes up a huge amount of his time.

This report will play an important role as a stepping-stone to ensuring that the national game, which all hon. Members have close to our hearts, will thrive in the years to come.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Coffey]

Of course, one of the new independent directors is a woman, which was a little bit of a surprise, but I was delighted that a lady with a pedigree at Millwall is already making a contribution at the highest level of the game. Kelly Simmons is in charge of the national game and does a great job working with communities.

A lot has been said about the ownership of football clubs and financial fair play. I was keen to ensure that the model of a significant owner was not condemned as a particularly bad thing. I say that because that is one reason why we are able to have so many clubs throughout the country. I do not want to come across as patronising, because I was born in Wigan and grew up in Liverpool and have always believed that it was working man’s philanthropy. Others ensure that their theatre keeps going or donate to the Royal Opera House and there is no greater thing than to keep a local football team going. I do not pretend to be an Ipswich fan. I always want them to do well. But whether it is Marcus Evans at Ipswich Town or the infamous Delia Smith, saying, “Come on, let’s be having you,” up at Norwich, it is important that people invest in something that is critical to their community.

Everyone is worried that the huge amounts of money coming in have skewed the field somewhat, and financial fair play will go a long way towards addressing that. I am impressed that the owners of Manchester City have basically put equity into their finance, as opposed to loans—that is a good thing—and it has to some extent shaken up the premier league. However, when the rules are introduced we must ensure that there are no loopholes, which we saw in Germany, when okay money has not been invested—a €100 million sponsorship deal for a particular team was the way of getting money in, and it went straight through to the profit and loss.

[Damian Collins]

My hon. Friend is making an important point. She is referring to the loan made by Gazprom to Schalke. Such informal financial arrangements might, potentially, confer some influence over the running of the club, which people could find concerning.

[Dr Coffey]

That might well be true, but I do not pretend to speak on behalf of Schalke. There are, however, some interesting, tidying things to be done, which financial fair play needs to take account of.

The involvement of supporters was part of the coalition agreement. Before the previous election, the three main political parties each had an element on how to get supporters more involved. Supporters Direct has been working hard to see how supporters can get involved. I support its bronze-level approach of ensuring that every team has a liaison officer or a trust, so that there is appropriate interaction with the club. To be honest, supporters having a veto on the sale of assets is a little unrealistic, although many will take advantage of the Localism Act 2011 and designate certain places as community assets, which might be a useful step. We have also seen fans getting together and buying their club—most recently in Wrexham, where a lot of my family live and where I fought the election in 2005. That is something to be welcomed, to keep it afloat.

Some interesting points have been made. Someone wrote to me from Arsenal, concerned about the illiquid market, although there is a supporters’ trust and a “fanshare” scheme. I cannot necessarily come up with a solution, and it might just be the nature of trying to raise finance in these times. Indeed, Spurs was taken off the stock market last month, because of the restrictions on how to get additional investment into the club. Something that the Government can easily do, therefore, which I am sure the Minister will confirm, is to amend the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. Supporters’ trusts could then come together, whether through industrial and provident societies or community interest companies, and get over those silly bureaucratic hurdles, which were not meant for such community organisations.

Other colleagues have already talked about licensing. I must admit that the whole concept seems contrary to classic English law. Under the Napoleonic civil code, on which most continental law is based, people are permitted to do something—that is how the legal basis operates—whereas our basis is that people can do anything they like unless we legislate to say that they cannot. Licensing would change that, and at first I was a little unsure about it, but eventually I was persuaded that it is the right thing to do to provide stability in the football family. The Premier League and the Football League have already moved considerably to try to address some such points in their terms of practice, whether paying PAYE and national insurance on time or ensuring enough liquidity to operate for the next 12 months. The formality that we saw in the German league probably is appropriate and should put fans’ minds at rest.

We are interested, however, in the future and in the money that sometimes struggles to get down to the grass roots. The 50:50 rule has already been mentioned, and my understanding is that the national board are happy to leave it at that—I suggest leaving that option open. The investment that has been put into St George’s Park is fantastic. I was lucky enough to go up there only this week to see it. I cannot believe that it will open in September—perhaps I am too used to debating Network Rail and things taking a year and an eternity to be done. That is a genuine vision of how to put in place the coaching that we desperately need. Again looking across to Germany, after it had a disaster in Euro 2000, it set about a 10-year plan, which has proved rewarding. I pay tribute to David Sheepshanks, a former member of the FA board. He happens to be a constituent of mine, but credit is due to him for taking that vision along and making it a reality. Long may that continue.

Coming on to the structure of the FA, as has been explained we have the FA council, the shareholders and the board. Credit is due again for the two non-executives, which is quite a change of view by Mr Roger Burden, who back in March last year was yet to be persuaded of the case for two independent directors. I am pleased that he changed his mind and with the vote in favour. The right hon. Member for Bath has already mentioned the committee structure. Our recommendation is imperative: that all committees should report to the board, rather than to a mixture of the board and the council, simply because we end up with the board effectively not being able to run the FA even though it has been given that direction by the council. That change is imperative, and I hope that the FA council will take it firmly on board.

Coming on to other things such as the proposal for term limits, I understand that many felt that that was an attack on people who are very good for football. To be blunt, such people have been there in all weathers, painting the lines, coaching the young kids and running the teams, out there in the freezing cold, and they will be thinking, “Why is a bunch of MPs telling us that we can’t stay on our council?” It is not about that. Absolutely, those people deserve full recognition; I have been out with Suffolk FA and local community clubs, and football would not survive without them.

If only the professional game were involved, we would not have that same emotional connection. However, given the role of the council, changeover of people is appropriate for governance. The reason we came up with 10 years was simply that the chairmanship of a Select Committee in this place is two terms of five-year Parliaments. That is where it came from—[Interruption.] We talked about it, didn’t we? We thought about how to ensure changes of governance as well as continuity, helping the organisation to look at itself. I understand fully that many people rightly deserve a little reward once they have been serving the FA for some time as a volunteer, and that should continue, but fresh blood is also useful. Likewise, older or longer-standing Members of the House hopefully recognise the value of change at an election, when we get new Members.

On that note, although we have had some interesting discussion, such as a spat—dare I say it—about Milton Keynes or Wimbledon, the debate shows the strong emotion that we have about our beautiful game, our national game. I hope that football fans at the FA recognise the opportunity to put our game on an even better footing. Long may the celebrations continue for Euro 2012.