Lord Watson of Invergowrie
Main Page: Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Labour - Life peer)
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, I start by congratulating my noble friend Lady Taylor on securing this debate. She outlined so eloquently why football is not just the national sport throughout the UK, but why it means so much to so many people and how it affects them. I particularly liked the noble Baroness’s evocation of a weekend made or destroyed by what happens on a Saturday afternoon. I know that all too well.
I declare an interest on two counts, as I am a member of two football supporters’ trusts. One is the Dons Trust, as my noble friend Lady McDonagh has just outlined. The other is as a founder member of ArabTRUST, the trust of Dundee United. Both of those situations grew out of a position whereby football supporters—who, as other noble Lords have said, are the lifeblood of the game—were being treated with utter contempt by the people who own the clubs. My noble friend Lady McDonagh outlined the situation very well as far as Wimbledon was concerned.
Dundee United was in a situation where the board of directors had not even issued all the shares in the club: it had in fact issued less than half. Of those that had been issued, the directors owned 90%. When a shareholder who was not a director died, that person’s family were not allowed to inherit the shares. The club’s directors had first option to buy the shares. Only if they decided not to do so, usually because the supporter had owned only five or 10 shares, could another member of that family be entitled to inherit them, as the person had stated in their will. That was a situation which not only denied the club money, because there were people who were willing to invest in the club, but also meant that the fans were shut out, as happens in so many other clubs.
That is a reoccurring theme in what we have heard today. Fans are asked to shell out more and more money for match tickets, programmes, food and drink and replica kit and so on. They are encouraged to do that but, when they have the nerve to ask for a say in the running of the club, in all too many cases they are patted on the head and told to go away, because that is too important for them to be involved with.
That is why I welcomed the establishment of the Supporters Direct movement some 10 or 12 years ago. When I was Minister for Sport in Scotland, I was very pleased to be able to give seed-corn funding for the Supporters Direct movement in Scotland. That has grown, as has the movement in England and Wales, which is very much to be welcomed. The situation at Dundee United was that a group of fans came together to try to force the club board to open up, and allow fans to buy shares in the club and have a say in the running of it. I was part of that campaign. We found a wealthy businessman, a committed supporter of the club, who had money available and was willing to put it in. It took a four-year campaign to finally convince the board that Mr Eddie Thompson should be allowed in, and eventually he took over the club. Sadly, he died in 2008, but his family now run the club and it is much more open and inclusive.
The ArabTRUST supporters’ trust, which I mentioned, is now the largest owner, with the Thompson family, of shares in Dundee United. That is testament to the big changes that have taken place. It is very important that what happened there and at AFC Wimbledon—one of only four clubs in the Football League that are owned by the fans, as my noble friend Lady Taylor said—is seen to be possible. We are told that it is not possible at the top level. Swansea City is clearly an example of a club where a significant amount of shares can be owned by fans.
The Clive Efford initiative announced two weeks ago is also very important. This says that if clubs want to open up to their fans that is fine, but there are some which are determined to keep the door closed and it is just not acceptable for them to be run in that way. It seems to me that some clubs are appallingly badly run. I give the examples of Leeds United, Blackburn Rovers, Cardiff City and even Hull City. There was a proposal to change Hull City’s name to Hull Tigers, which would make it sound like a basketball team or an ice hockey team. I do not understand how a person who owned the club could have such a lack of feel for the game and what it means to the supporters to put forward such a preposterous suggestion. That is the sort of situation that would not happen if there was fan input at board level.
I welcome the fact that the expert group has been taken up. I am sorry that it has taken so long, but we are where we are. I hope that that will now begin, and can perhaps be taken forward after the general election by a Labour Government. I also hope that some of the proposals announced by Clive Efford will be brought into being, and that the very healthy development of more supporter involvement in football clubs will be taken forward.