Football Governance Bill [Lords]

Lincoln Jopp Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 28th April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Lincoln Jopp (Spelthorne) (Con)]

Bromley FC!

[Max Wilkinson]

Bromley—there we go. I think that has rather proved my point for me. The Conservatives’ reference to the risk of increased ticket prices suggests that they are either uninformed about or wilfully ignorant of the existing problems that football fans suffer every week with ticket price inflation, as tens of thousands of fans will confirm. Unaccountable football club owners are not forced to engage with football fans on the issue of ticket pricing.

In my reflections on how to improve the Bill, I will begin with financial fairness. According to Simon Perruzza, the chief executive of the Cheltenham Town Community Trust, the Bill is needed

“to ensure clubs like ours continue to make a valuable contribution to supporters and the community, the game’s fractured governance model and inequitable distribution of finance need to be urgently addressed”.

The Premier League generates more than £3 billion each year from media rights alone, yet the share reaching clubs further down the pyramid is dwindling; it keeps 84% of the revenue now, up from 74% in 2007. Any suggestion that the Premier League is a golden goose that will be killed by the Bill somewhat misunderstands the problem in our game. The campaign group Fair Game warns that the balance of funding between the top division and lower leagues in this country stands in stark contrast to that in other major leagues. The fact is that the money simply is not trickling down here as it does in other European leagues.

[Lincoln Jopp]

Given that the person who negotiated that rights deal is going to be the regulator, how confident is the hon. Member that they will change the process that he criticises?

[Max Wilkinson]

Well, that person will be working within the boundaries of the regulator, and he is obviously very good at striking deals, is he not? If the hon. Gentleman’s contention is that he did a good job in his old job, we can be confident that he will do a good job in his new role.

The Liberal Democrats think that the redistributive mechanisms ought to go even further to promote financial sustainability, including by taking account of the restricted resources in the fifth tier, and redistribution beyond that level to cover more grassroots clubs in the national leagues north and south and beyond. Then, there is social responsibility. Football clubs are not just businesses; they are also civic institutions. They are often the most visible and well-loved organisations in any community.

Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords pushed for clubs to be mandated to report on their community work, so I welcome the new clause requiring clubs to do so. In my constituency, the Cheltenham Town Community Trust delivered £5.4 million-worth of social value work with young people and older people, and to reduce antisocial behaviour, in its last reporting year. What gets measured gets done. Clubs want to continue doing such work, but they cannot keep doing it if they cannot afford to because the Premier League is hoarding all the money. We need to go further to support clubs in that, particularly by providing help for smaller clubs that may struggle to fulfil reporting requirements. I agree with the Members who have made similar comments.

We believe that the Bill must go further on problem gambling. Nearly 30,000 gambling messages were posted across the premier league’s opening weekend this season. That represents a tripling of ads compared with the almost 11,000 recorded over the opening weekend of the season before. Such ads are normalising a dangerous relationship between football and gambling that is destroying lives. Football should not be a gateway drug to problem gambling. It cannot be right that, whether watching on television or in the stands, we are bombarded with gambling adverts to the extent that the enjoyment of the game is now, for so many people, culturally intertwined with placing bets. It cannot be right that broadcasters can launch their own gambling platforms, and use advert breaks to promote those platforms, using the pundits who describe the games as mouthpieces for gambling. That merger of journalism and advertising should give us all pause for thought.

[Max Wilkinson]

The football regulator would have a wider role than currently envisaged in the Bill if the Liberal Democrats were in charge.

When the Lords tried to tackle the proliferation of gambling ads, the Government committed a professional foul. As the Bill makes its way through this House, we hope that MPs will show gambling companies a yellow card—yellow cards on this matter are very Liberal—not a red card; we do not propose the banning of gambling, shadow Ministers will be pleased to hear.

[Lincoln Jopp]

Do you want to bet?

[Max Wilkinson]

I will not be placing any bets from this Chamber today—not to the benefit of myself anyway.

On ownership, this Bill provides a stronger defence against owners who might have a dodgy track record, but there are still gaps at the back. The new owners and directors test still makes no explicit mention of human rights. That is a glaring miss. Sportswashing is an all-too-common tactic used by oppressive regimes to launder their reputations through our national game. As the historic home of the global game, we have a moral duty to seek to use the soft power of football. Those who want to run a football club in this country should not be able to do so while running roughshod over human dignity elsewhere in the world. Liberal Democrats will continue to push the Government to replace the red carpet for dodgy foreign owners with a red card.

On broadcasting, not a single premier league match this season has been shown on free-to-air television. All 380 matches in the premier league now lie behind a paywall, while matchday tickets are increasingly expensive. The latest deals will see Sky Sports and TNT Sports have the rights to show premier league matches for a four-year period. That means that those without a subscription will have no opportunity to watch a live match on television until the 2030s at the earliest.

Spain’s la liga has one free-to-air game per week, as does England’s women’s super league. We will continue to champion expanded access to free live sport broadcasting in this Bill. We will also call for the strengthening of the Bill to ban domestic games being played abroad. The thought of Manchester City playing Arsenal in Dubai should leave us all reaching for the sick bucket.

We can go further to build a game that is open, accountable and properly rooted in its communities. Every good manager knows when to switch to a 4-3-3 and bring on the super-sub. It could be Steve Howard—I understand that the Minister, the hon. Member for Barnsley South (Stephanie Peacock), is a Birmingham City fan. Now is the time for Ministers to embrace that principle of bringing on substitutes, changing the formation and being even more ambitious about this Bill; after all, they have more than enough players sitting on the Government Benches to be more ambitious. They should do that because football is not just a business. It is part of who we are as a nation, so let us treat it that way.