Sport: Football Clubs

Lord Collins of Highbury Excerpts

Thursday 30th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend for initiating this really important debate. As she said, football can unite communities and, regretfully, in some cases can even divide families. I am Arsenal red and my brother and sister are Chelsea blue, but there you go. That is life. English and Welsh football has undergone a transformation in terms of commercial success, the quality of football and even the experience of the spectator, but that sometimes comes at an extraordinarily high cost.

However, there is another side to this positive story, as my noble friend has highlighted. Since the creation of the Premier League, top footballers’ salaries have increased by 1,508%, compared to the 186% increase in average earnings. The percentage of turnover spent on players has increased from 48% in 1997 to 71.2% this year. With these huge rewards for owners, managers and players, who is representing the interests of the club as an inheritance to be passed on, thriving and intact, to the next generation, rather than just an asset to be sweated?

Since 1992, over half of England’s professional football clubs have been formally insolvent. Most only survived because the wider community received less than what it was owed in order to ensure that players continued to get all of what they were promised. There are no effective means for fans to have a say in how their clubs are run or to safeguard their long-term interests. That is why, as my noble friends have said, Labour is committed to having football fans on the boards of clubs.

Fans are now paying up to 1,000% more to watch their team play compared to 1992, all in order to support their club’s huge wage bills. As my noble friend said, the BBC’s Price of Football survey has shown that average prices have risen at almost twice the rate of the cost of living since 2011.

The Government’s recent announcement establishing the expert working group—promised, as we have heard, three years ago—on a way forward for supporter ownership has taken a long time to come. Perhaps the Minister would inform the House on why it has taken three years to establish that working group. The Minister of State in the other place, Helen Grant, responding to a question from my honourable friend Clive Efford, said that the group would look at very important issues such as pricing, club ownership and debt, and seating. I would be grateful if the Minister could inform the House on the mechanism for determining the terms of reference. Who, for example, did the Government consult and what prompted the inclusion of some items and not others?

While we are on the subject of inclusiveness, I will pick up the point made by my noble friend and ask the Minister why supporters’ groups from Premier League clubs have been excluded from the expert working group. After all, as my noble friend said, the suggestion of an expert working group was first made by Arsenal Supporters’ Trust in response to the Select Committee. Surely its voice should be heard.

In contrast, the Labour Party has listened over several months to the views of fans about changing the way that football is run in England and Wales. We want to ensure that those fans are heard by the owners of the clubs, too.