Grassroots Football

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Tuesday 1st April 2014 Westminster Hall

[Mr David Crausby (Bolton North East) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I thank the Speaker for granting this important debate, because grassroots football is in crisis.

The Football Association is about to lose £1.6 million of public funding for the amateur game in England, after it failed to reverse a sharp decline in the number of people regularly playing football. Sport England says that that is a clear message that football must change its grassroots strategy. The FA has called the funding reduction disappointing. Frankly, it should be more than disappointed; it should feel ashamed, because if it is failing the grassroots game, it is failing the game itself and everything that the FA should stand for.

Of course, it is not all the fault of the FA. Local authorities own 80% of pitches, and local government funding has been cut by 40% over this Parliament, with councils having to reduce their budgets by £20 billion by 2015-16. Local councils have tough decisions to make, and when faced with sacrificing investment in sport in order to protect vulnerable children and adults, they will inevitably—albeit reluctantly—opt for what they see as shielding the weak and defenceless.

The lack of local authority investment in football is bad enough, but many authorities feel that they will have to increase fees dramatically, which will inevitably discourage participation in the game. One midlands council has proposed increasing the price of pitch hire for junior football next season from £382 to £1,613—that is a 323% rise. What with poor pitches, weeks of play lost to bad weather, no changing facilities, no showers, increasing pitch fees, poor families priced out and other families deterred by the shoddy conditions, participation is unsurprisingly falling.

According to Sport England, 1.84 million people play football regularly—a fall of 100,000 since April last year. More than 2 million people played regularly in 200. We are witnessing a long-term decline. What was once a working-class game is steadily becoming a game that can be afforded only by those children with better-off parents. It is already difficult enough to drag our kids off the couch, away from the Xbox and into the car in order to play proper football in the open air, but for a child with poor parents who cannot afford the fees, let alone the kit and the football boots, and who do not have a car, the prospect looks even bleaker. Often, such children will be denied the opportunity to play.

I met a married couple in Horwich in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West (Julie Hilling) who do a fantastic job running a league and a team of their own. Those people are the absolute salt of the British earth, because without them the game would flounder and die. They are not unusual in being expected to pay for their training courses, and they frequently put their own money into the sport because they know in their hearts how much good they do. They told me that they had started a boot club, because one of their players turned up in wellingtons as his football boots had become too small. They now collect boots from children who have grown out of them and pass them on to others.

I do not know about other Members present, but I hate the idea of wearing other people’s footwear, even in new socks. It takes me back to my days as a poverty-stricken child in the 1950s, but this is 2014. The fact is, we really should be doing much better. I know that these are difficult, austere times for the country’s economy, and no one really expects the Government to find the millions and millions of pounds needed to fund the game properly. However, while local authorities have lost income, the Premier League has been handed an even greater windfall. Domestic broadcasting rights for 2012-13, 2013-14 and 2014-15 were sold for £3 billion, with an estimated £2 billion expected from international rights. That is £5 billion in total—nearly as much as the value of Royal Mail. We need a new settlement for grassroots football. After all, it is the national game, not the Premier League’s game.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on bringing such an important issue to Westminster Hall for debate. Sport in Northern Ireland is a devolved matter. The Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure not only gives to teams in the premier league, but filters moneys down to the intermediate and lower leagues. Each level gets some of the money. Would the hon. Gentleman like to see that happen in England as well?

[Mr Crausby]

I will come on to that later in my speech. We must have a bigger commitment from the Premier League in order to keep the game healthy and alive.

[Mr Crausby]

Absolutely. It is very much in the premier league’s interest that grassroots football survives. That is why I started an online petition that called for a new arrangement, whereby 7.5% of the proceeds from broadcasting rights is used to fund grassroots football. It called on the Government to ensure that grassroots football receives financial support from the Premier League, a call I repeat today. By the time it closed, the petition had received 30,599 signatures, and I did not receive one message, by any means, of principled disagreement from anyone.

Of course, the Government responded when the number of signatories to the petition passed 10,000—well, they did not actually respond right away, even though I wrote to the Leader of the House twice. I am sure that it was a coincidence, but they responded just after midnight on the day that I was listed on the Order Paper to put an oral question to the Minister, asking for a reply. Although the response was welcome, I am afraid to say that it was an apology for the football authorities, which even Sport England says have failed.

The resolution of the grassroots crisis will, of course, take a lot more money than the £1.6 million that has been cut by Sport England. In the football world of billionaires, £1.6 million is not exactly a fortune. It is probably about six weeks’ pay for a top premiership player. Now, do not get me wrong: I do not blame young footballers for accepting £300,000 a week for playing a game that they would probably play for the minimum wage. What do we expect them to do? Say to the multi-millionaire owner of the club—the Russian oligarch, American billionaire, or Arab oil sheik—“No thanks; keep the money and buy yourself another ocean-going yacht”? Of course not! Nor do I blame clubs in the premier league for offering the money, because they are caught in a trap, knowing that if they do not pay players ridiculous wages, one of their rivals will.

The fact is that the market is broken. There are clearly not enough talented young footballers, and, at the same time, billions of pounds are slushing around from TV rights. So what do we do? Well, it is not really that complicated. We should invest much more in grassroots talent, and we should do it by using much more of the money from rights.

[Jim Shannon]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for being gracious in allowing interventions. Ards football club in my constituency is in the Irish premier league. It is a locally focused, community-based club, and its relationships within Ards borough are the envy of many football clubs across Northern Ireland. It is focused on the community, which endears the club to the community. Does he feel that the Government should encourage more of that community-based spirit?

[Mr Crausby]

I very much think so. I am sure that the Government do encourage the community to participate in grassroots football; my argument is that more money must be made available to the volunteers who run the game, and that the place to take the money from is the lucrative professional game. Committing 7.5% of the £5 billion from television rights would deliver £375 million over three years. That would not exactly break the premier league, and I do not envisage any starving players, either.

The harsh truth is that the Government should top-slice the TV money before it gets into the hands of the professional game. The professional game is a hugely competitive business, and we cannot expect one professional football club to support the amateur game sufficiently if its neighbouring clubs do not. The premier league is the envy of the football world, with huge amounts of money pouring in and endless stories of enormous wages and excessive lifestyles. If English football is doing so well, why do we allow all the money to stay at the top of the game and not filter down to the grassroots? Why are our international teams so unsuccessful? The fact is that there is a short-term obsession with the premier league in British football. If we are to succeed as a footballing nation, we must broaden our horizons.

Every Saturday morning, premier league scouts tour children’s football grounds scouring for talent. When they find it, they tempt the child and his parents away, delivering the best of coaching and facilities, not to mention various other goodies, but leave all the other children in the team behind, with no changing facilities and no showers, stripping off at the side of the pitch in the depths of winter. Talented young footballers are obviously important, but so are the rest. I want to live in a country where all of our children who want to play football get the opportunity to do so. If we do not pay urgent attention to the grassroots game, there will be no one left in the UK for the professional football club scouts to recruit, leaving the leagues to ever younger foreign players recruited from around the world, some of whom are, frankly, too young to be away from their parents.

My concerns do not just include children. Football can make an enormously positive difference to the lives of developing young people. I talked to a mother who told me that her two sons had been picked up by a premier league club and were very well supported, but when they got to 15 and 16 years old, the club decided that they were not strong enough and let them go. The boys inevitably found that difficult to take, but what made it much worse was that once they were dropped from the club, they had nowhere to play the game that they loved so much.

In 1999, the football taskforce report committed the Premier League to a 5% contribution of its broadcasting income to grassroots projects, which was agreed, but the Premier League never fulfilled that commitment, and anyway much of the money has gone to professional football clubs lower down the leagues. Less prosperous professional clubs are important, of course, and I want them to survive as much as anybody does, but the grassroots game, especially children’s grassroots football, is even more important to me, and it should be more important to the country.

The present arrangement is just not good enough. The Football Association, the Premier League and Sport England work closely together to invest in facilities through the Football Foundation, but between 2007 and 2013, only 6% of football facilities were redeveloped. We clearly need many more artificial pitches. Grass pitches can sustain only five or six hours of football a week, but artificial pitches can take up to 80. In the present economic circumstances, we will not have the number of pitches that we need for at least another generation.