English Football

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Wednesday 8th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I join others in congratulating the noble Baroness who brought this Question before us. With the noble Viscount and myself left to offer our contributions, it feels as though we are moving into extra time and I just hope it does not end in penalties. This has been a debate dominated by mention of, and sadness for, Bolton Wanderers. Two Members of this House with “Bolton” stuck on the end of their names have had fierce things to say in favour of their club and have expressed deep regret for its present fate. I wonder whether we could have a little proposal here on my part, not for the Minister to consider but perhaps for the two noble Baronesses. Mr Gordon Taylor has just retired from the Professional Footballers’ Association as the highest-paid trade union official in the world, whose last recorded emoluments amounted to £2.29 million. If I am right, the figure for Bolton Wanderers’ debt being quoted in court is a mere £1 million—perhaps it is a bit more than that but that is the figure that was in the newspaper; clearly I am in the presence of people who have authority that I cannot possibly claim—so perhaps Mr Taylor might be approached to see whether some of his generosity could be applied in that direction.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Addington, I am a rugby player. I do not always see the positive side of football; when I go to games, I can sometimes be quite afraid because of the kind of raw emotion on display and the nature of some of the chanting. After all, if you have been to Cardiff Arms Park or its successors and taken part in rugby games, where the opposing fans are mixed up with your own fans, having a jocular time, and the only villain of the piece is the referee, then you will know that that is greatly missed when we go to see a football game. I have lived within sound of the roar of the crowd at the Arsenal stadium—Highbury, as it of course was—but without ever being able to afford to go in it. Similarly, my wife reports her entire family going down to the Victoria Ground to see Stoke play—indeed, to see Stanley Matthews play. I was not going to mention Stanley Matthews, because he scored the goal for Blackpool against Bolton Wanderers in that famous cup final that saw them off in that year of glory.

However, we have to come to the point. It is the very importance, centrality and key role of football that makes it so vital that we give it our best scrutiny. I am sorry that two noble Lords have not spoken today. One is my noble friend Lord Triesman, who is not taking part in the debate for family reasons. His contribution and his insights into his time at the FA, his successor and his successor’s successor would have been more than useful. It is not an easy place nor an easy culture to manage. I think we would have found that my noble friend was still wearing his bruises as a result of that encounter with immovable and implacable systems and institutions in the FA. I think Mr Clarke is doing his best.

At the end of the day the board has been reduced from 12 to 10 and is required to have three women on it—this tick-box thing. There are now three women on the board but no one really from the minority-ethnic groups who are the first visual encounter with our football scene that any of us gets. In last night’s wonderful match at Anfield over half the team were from minority groups, and the same was true of Gareth Southgate’s team in the recent match against Montenegro. If you see the brilliance, the footwork, the commitment, the spirit and the passion represented in this diverse manner on the field, which is the most glorious advertisement for football, then you ought to see it in the management and oversight structures and institutions that run the game. Indeed you must see it, otherwise people from minority-ethnic backgrounds will feel that they are puppets paid to play the game but that the sport is not really theirs. Just one football coach was black, and I think that that is a shame.

The other person that I miss today is the noble Lord, Lord Ouseley. I wish that he were here, taking part and talking about Kick It Out. We cannot just gloss over the fact that racism and racial bigotry seem to be within the spirit and ethos of the game and express themselves in such ugly forms again and again. I remember meeting people from the Inter City Firm in the 1980s, the fascist thugs who organised at school gates to take their young protégés off to matches to disrupt them, to taunt the police and to have a go at Muslims. It was shameful and kept many Muslim people from our grounds altogether.

Our institutions must manage not only the activity and give an account for the funds that are theirs to manage, but the climate in which the game takes place. They have more responsibility than simply to regret things and effectively to wash their hands of it afterwards. I liked the introduction from the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, about the need for those running football to actively remember their duty of care to everybody in the game, not just the players—the staff, the people in the background, the people we never see. They need to be treated properly too.

In every way, football is exciting. Indeed, why are we sitting here debating this when Spurs are about to go on the pitch to play against Ajax? If anybody has an up-to-date score before I leave, please let me have it. I did not realise that my noble friend Lord Knight is an Arsenal supporter. My daughter is, but my sons are Spurs supporters. It has made life in our household extraordinarily difficult. If only they had all stuck to their father’s sport, rugby, it would have been so different. But then, if we have a Motion to discuss the way the Welsh Rugby Union manages the game of rugby in Wales, we would get into the same sticky holes we have got into in thinking about football this evening.

Football is too important for us to simply think of it as a game played either on telly or in a stadium. It is part of the culture of this country, and that makes it absolutely necessary for us to give it our closest attention in terms of the way the institution looks after the people involved in the industry and the way the questions of bullying, grooming, racism and so on are looked after too. Thanks to those who brought this forward. Now, in extra time, over to the noble Viscount.