FOOTBALL INQUIRY

7 May 2008

 

Members Present:

 

Alan Keen MP (Chair)

Mark Field MP

Ian Lucas MP

Andy Reed MP

Mark Hendrick MP

Christine Russell MP

Clive Betts MP

Lord Faulkner of Worcester

 

Guests:

 

Howard Wilkinson

Bobby Barnes

Mick McGuire

Adam Brown

Alison Watt

Andy Walsh

Dave Boyle

Brian Lomax

Malcolm Clarke

Steve Powell

 

Alan Keen (Chair): First, may I thank Howard very much for coming?

Howard Wilkinson: Thank you very much for inviting me.   I have a few notes to go through so, in the interests of focusing my mind and thus focusing your minds, I shall proceed if that is okay.

Chair: Fire away. 

Howard Wilkinson: Basically, I am coming from the view that sport—football in this context—is a powerful force in our society for social, cultural, physical and educational good.   Some would go further than that, as would I, to say that it plays a huge part in the fabric of our society.   Therefore, my first question is: given the trend in the Premier League—I believe this is happening in the Football League too—would global teams and players provide a similar value to society in this country?  If they did not, could the smaller teams/clubs that exist—barely—below such teams at the moment fill the hole that would be left, given that the next steps that we are talking about could be European—I think that they will be and that we will have a European league of some sort—and global?

We have the richest, strongest and most popular domestic league in the world, containing currently the best two clubs in Europe, so does international football and does success in international football matter?  If those things do matter, are we happy to become a second-class nation—one could see that as a possibility—or perhaps even a Qatar, which sets an example in terms of spotting likely good athletes and naturalising them?  The rules of Association Football are one of our greatest exports, and their historical importance should not be forgotten.   The status of the Football Association throughout the world should not be forgotten either; I travel quite a bit, and I know that for a fact.

What problems result from the situation that I have just described? I recognise that we are not dealing with a blank sheet of paper and, as such, we must be realistic.  My first big concern relates to the development of English players.  The success of the national team is under threat, and that threat is increasing because of the current situation; I shall not expand upon that, but the evidence supports my view—we failed to qualify for this time, and on the previous two occasions we have been disappointing. 

            The second problem concerns the composition of the FA, and, therefore, governance.  Crucial to the strength of a nation’s football is the strength of the federation: a strong federation means strong governance.  In that respect, our current arrangements lead to compromise, politicking and the urge to survive; it is almost like a hung Parliament.  Therefore, leadership, maintaining impartiality and strategic long-term planning become a problem.  The make-up of football government means that it is difficult to gainsay the fact that self-interest is a problem.  Let us consider the survival level only.  We have a strong Premier League and a Football League that is scared about what its future might be and is therefore very protective of what it has and not too interested in taking part in a bigger solution that might put it at risk.  Recently, we have seen a big victim of all that.  It has been announced that the National Football Centre will go ahead, but that should have been in place in 2004; we now got the cart in place at Wembley, so we are going to set about constructing the horse. 

            Another problem relates to the “fit and proper person” test, which, at best, is being doubtfully applied, given current trends in ownership.  That is one of the reasons for a divide between the community—the supporters—and the football club.  The results for that are the benefits of success and the costs of failure.  Those are so dramatic—in football terms, many chairmen would argue that they are life-changing—that becomes success at any cost. 

Where does that lead us?  It leads us to the following: fiscal risk taking; managers on short tenures; clubs going into administration more frequently than pubs; and a lack of long-term strategic thinking.  None of those things, in the long term, is for the benefit of, or bound to encourage, the growth of home-grown talent, which brings us back to the national team again.  There has been a proliferation of agents.  Despite all the legislation that has been introduced, their growth continues and they continue to get richer.  As I said, at the very extreme end, football is starting to follow other sports.  I pose a question: if international success is important—I shall answer that point later—is it foreseeable that, as I have indicated, we might go down the Qatar route?  Should the country’s national game start to look at talent overseas and say, “Come and live here, and we will give you a passport, so that we can win a football match”?

What are the solutions?  The big solution lies in leadership, which means governance and the federation.  No matter how strong a league becomes, the governance of the game is down to FIFA, UEFA and the local federation, and it is about the all-embracing good of football.  If people with vested interests are prepared to sit down and divorce themselves from those—fine—but in the main turkeys and Christmas come to mind. 

What would I like to see? I have travelled around Europe, where major and leading federations contain strong representation from ex-players, ex-coaches and ex-managers.  The League Managers Association and the Professional Footballers Association have places on the council, but that is all we have.  We were placed on a thing called the technical control board, which has been disbanded.  It is, at best, negligent not to have the input of an ex-player and an ex-manager represented at board level in the federation.  If we look at the models abroad, such as those of Germany, Italy, France, Holland and Spain, we see a proliferation of people who have been in at the sharp end and know the business.  That leads to leadership and a clear FA vision, and on to people with the character and determination to push things through.  Given the current constitution of governance in this country, putting such an approach in place is difficult, if survival is a big problem—nevertheless, having courage of conviction comes to mind. 

The net result of such matters relates back to my big concern: youth development and the continuing production of home-grown talent.  In respect of any other activity in this country, we would be fighting to ensure that young, domestic—home-grown—children get the best chance possible to exploit their talents.  At the moment, as a result of some of the pressures that I have explained and others, that is not happening.  Securing opportunity is a big problem. 

Chair: May we ask you to elaborate on some of those points? You will have the opportunity to deal with other points later.   

Christine Russell MP: May I ask you a fundamental question, Howard?  On 21 May, there will be two English teams in the Champions League Final in Moscow.  At least eight, if not 10, players who are eligible to play for home teams could play on that night.  How important do you think that it is to have home teams—English teams—that can get to every Champions League Final?

Howard Wilkinson: Well, this next point is not opinion; it is fact.  A survey was conducted by a university professor in Switzerland on the teams in the big five leagues in Europe—the 20 teams that regularly compete at European level.  His statistics found that English players are the least represented in those top teams; we are behind countries such as France, Holland and Italy.  If we are to compete at international level, we must have players who are capable of competing at domestic level with their foreign rivals to get a place in their team.

Christine Russell MP:  Off the top of your head, do you know how many players in the French and Italian teams at the previous World Cup played for non-French or non-Italian clubs?

Howard Wilkinson: No, I do not know off the top of my head. 

Christine Russell MP: It was quite a number, was it not?

Howard Wilkinson: Yes.  I could get the stats out, but I cannot be as accurate as I should be or would like to be now.

Clive Betts MP: I was just wondering about the issue of foreign players in the game.  We are clearly in the process of revising and changing all our immigration rules for all workers.  I was reading in the press that that will possibly mean that footballers coming from abroad to work here will have to speak English, but that almost misses the point.  For any other group of workers, it would have to be demonstrated not only that the people coming from abroad had skills to offer, but that no one in this country had similar skills.  On that approach, although we perhaps cannot immediately replace Ronaldo, Torres and such people with players from this country, but should we not be getting to a position where a championship club should be saying that it could obtain players in this country who are of a reasonable standard instead of bringing people in from outside the European Union?

Howard Wilkinson:  We have to accept that, at the elite level, football is a meritocracy and that selection should depend on perceived ability, so the answer to our problems in the long term is to raise the bar in the development process in this country.  Some clubs’ development work is very good, whereas other clubs’ work in that area is not so good.  Imposing restrictions based on nationality, quotas, language and so on might have short-term results.

What about the situation in the long term? I return to my first question: if we did not have a successful national team, do you think that football in this country would continue to be as popular? My opinion on that one is no.  Let us consider the viewing figures, and the demographic of the people who watch, when England play in a World Cup or European Championship Quarter Final.  People who have never watched football before do so.  Last time England won the Ashes at home, my wife became a cricket fan and she remains one.  She had no previous interest in cricket.  International football has a way of galvanising people who otherwise have only an affiliation with a club. 

Manchester United and Chelsea are in next week’s Champions League Final.     If England were in a quarter-final, semi-final or final of the World Cup, the viewing audience would be huge.  Such occasions create and maintain interest, and provide the soil through which football is a power for good at all levels—for both sexes, for able-bodied and disabled people, and so on.  The power is enormous, and not striving to protect it would smack of gross negligence.  Whether we are talking about football, cricket or ice hockey, it is one of our national treasures and we should be looking to exploit it—

Clive Betts MP:  May I just hold things there? Is the answer, therefore, to invest in the development of young players?  How shall we get clubs to do that when some of them see going abroad not for top-rate players, but for second and third-rate ones, as an easy out and a quick fix to meet the immediate demands of success?  How will we get clubs to put money into long-term development?

Howard Wilkinson: We are talking about long-term development and education.  The group responsible for education in football is the federation.  The federation is responsible for educating coaches better, for inculcating culture and values into them and causing them to think about why they want to be in the job and what they want to do.  It is for the federation to expose those people to ever-increasingly different ways of doing things—good practice and so on.  The aim is a long-term one, but it can be achieved.  It needs football to sit down and come together on it. 

I am fond of producing the following example.  Professional football cannot say that it has a responsibility only to itself.  If Shell took the same attitude, where would we be?  Can it just go into a country, take out the raw materials and leave the country the worse for its involvement?  No, Shell has been made to accept, and it has accepted, that it has a responsibility not only to its shareholders, but to the environment from which it makes its money.  Professional football is no different: it has a responsibility.  It is an education process and the real arguments need to be exposed.  We constantly deal with political manoeuvring and we never get down to the real arguments. 

Lord Faulkner of Worcester: May I pick up on your comment about the fit and proper persons test? Your mentioning it led me to believe, as I suspect it did other colleagues, to deduce that you are not content with the way in which the rules are operated.  Can you elaborate on that a bit?

Howard Wilkinson: I am not going to elaborate specifically.

Lord Faulkner: I do not expect you to name names. 

            Howard Wilkinson: Suffice it to say that in the past five years there have been people in football, or who are coming into football, about whom I have had my doubts with regard to the fit and proper person test. 

            Lord Faulkner: By that, do you mean that the football authorities are not doing enough to investigate or that the rules themselves are not sufficiently tight? 

            Howard Wilkinson: I cannot answer that, to be honest with you, because I would not know.  When I am out on the street and I see someone doing something that is not right, I immediately form a judgment and think that something should be done about the situation.  I do not know whether the rules are strong enough or whether they are applied rigorously enough, but the whole business about the ownership of football clubs is another area, and I do not claim to have a lot of opinion about it.   

            Chair: You would like us to pursue this during our inquiry in order to become more specific about what is required.

            Howard Wilkinson:  I am thinking of a fit and proper person with regard not only to right and wrong in legal terms, but to why they are in the business and what their reason is for acquiring a football club?  If pressed, I want to know what they would say if they were looking to get out of it and whether that was in line with the long-term best interest of football both in this country and, because we all have a responsibility, abroad.  We are light years ahead of some of the nations to which the FA sends people out to assist so, if we do not get it right, we cannot expect others to be asked to get it right. 

            Chair: To summarise, you are saying that we should not stop at assessing whether somebody is a crook or not, but that we should be concerned about their long-term intentions for the future of football rather than their coming in just for the money?

            Mark Hendrick MP: Post-Bosman, European Union players are obviously considered on the same basis as English players.  Since then, many players have come in from outside the European Union, because, as others have said, if a club can buy off the shelf at a reasonable price, why should it bother paying over the odds for English or British players and, for that matter, why should clubs bother to invest in young talent when they have owners who can pay out whatever they want?  Whether we like it or not, professional football is not now a sport in many ways; it is a globalised entertainment industry, much like any other such industry.  The Premier League is no different from Hollywood, except that, despite what Clive says, one does not need to speak English; one has only to perform on the pitch, so any actor who wants to do so can come to perform in this country.

With the best will in the world, how can the Government, the FA or anybody else make the investment in young kids required to develop them through the early stages of the game so that, by the time they reach their teens, they are potentially world-class players who can get into a premiership side and can compete with the best of the rest from around the world?  If we were talking about nurses or doctors, we would say that you should not be taking nurses and doctors from other countries, because their entertainment industries should be developing in their own ways. 

            Chair: May I interrupt?  Two other people have questions to ask.  Will they like to give the subject of their question and then let Howard address all three?

            Ian Lucas MP: My question is linked to Mark’s question.

            Howard Wilkinson: May I answer that question briefly.  I agreed with most of it.  I disagreed with one thing: the statement that professional football, particularly in the Premier League, is no longer a sport.  People might say that it is not a sport, but the essence of what they are seeing is competition.  For competition to be attractive and proper it must be fair and, where possible, relatively equal, and people have to participate for the sake of participating.  Take that out of it and you do not have a sport; you have what the Romans found entertaining when they threw people in with the lions. 

I agreed with most of the question, but the essence of the discussion is never to get away from the fact that football is a sport and that sport is about participants—players and, to a lesser degree, those who lead them: players, coaches, dads, mums, uncles and so on. 

Chair: We are running short of time, and Howard has to get away.  What was your question about, Ian?

Ian Lucas MP: Mine is about getting more English players into English club sides.  German, Italian and Spanish club sides seem to have more indigenous players than English premiership sides.  Do you think that that is linked to the governance of football in Germany, Italy and Spain?

Chair: May I interrupt again? Andy’s point is the same; it deals with development.  Because we have only about a minute left, would you like to answer that question, Howard, and then mention anything else that you would like to say?

Howard Wilkinson: Governance is important, but, like all these things, the matter is complicated.  One of the things that we must not ignore is reality.  The reality is that workers migrate to places where they get paid better.  At the moment, footballers worldwide get paid better in this country.  If we are going to pay for them at the cost of producing home-grown players, we will have a problem.  We have to deal both with reality and with that problem, so we must examine ways of improving home-grown players and giving them greater opportunities to participate at the top level. 

Ian Lucas MP: So, does the fact that we have the richest league in the world mean that we will have a weak national team?

Howard Wilkinson: That is what the evidence suggests. 

Chair: Is there anything else that you would like to add in your summing up? Andy has a question.

Andy Reed MP: Everything that you said is right, Howard, but given that Premier clubs, championship clubs and others all have academies, and we now have a national academy, what specifically needs to change in our approach to investing in and developing young children from the age of eight to enable them to participate in first-team football?  We shall not necessarily educate the clubs, but what specifically—

Howard Wilkinson: Specifically, to get down to brass tacks, we need to do two things on that score.  First, we must provide education and support to coaches.  Secondly, we must make structural changes.  I am not talking about quotas.  We need to examine the structure of football in this country and be prepared to come together to make changes that will make it easier for home-grown players to get into first teams.  That is about the Premier League, the Football League and the structure.  As chairman of the independent youth group, I have a range of ideas, but here is the wrong place in which to start to air them.  We need to discuss them in a private forum first. 

Chair: I cannot thank you enough for coming all the way down to see us.  I know that the League Managers Association will be making a written submission on its policy on the issues in which we are all interested.  If there are any other views that you wish to give us, please do not hesitate to telephone or put them in writing.

Howard Wilkinson: Thank you very much. 

Chair: Another two good friends of football and friends of ours have arrived: Mick McGuire, Deputy General Secretary of the PFA, and Bobby Barnes, Assistant General Secretary of the PFA.  Perhaps one of you would like to make a relatively brief opening statement and then answer questions, during which time you can still get your points over. 

Mick McGuire: I have never been relatively brief in my life, so that will not be easy.  First, may I say that I appreciate today’s invitation? Much of what Howard was saying about governance comes from the FA, and we are in agreement with it.  I could talk at length about those aspects of the national team—its importance, the effect of the overseas players here and so on.  Such matters are very dear to our hearts, because as far back as 10 years ago, we were suggesting that problems were going to develop as a result of too many overseas players coming in.  I heard the previous conversation, and I must say that it is not about the number; it is about the quality.  The quality control was taken away as soon as the freedom of movement in Europe came about.  The work permit criteria ensured not only proper quality control, but, importantly, that the individuals coming into this country were protected and looked after. 

Saying that there are too many overseas players here is not a strong argument; my argument is that the quality falls short.  That situation is sometimes driven by agents, and that is coupled with the problems with our youth development.  We have some of the most outstanding young players in the world in our national team, so why does that not translate into a successful national team?  The competition itself does not help; the Premier League is the most physical competition in the world.  It is the best competition to watch, and it is where everyone looks every Saturday.  England has people such as Gerrard, Rooney and Ferdinand—any team in the world would want them—but we do not have the squad numbers coming through.  When the Premier League was set up, it was called the FA Premier League, the idea being that it would eventually be comprised of 18 teams and there would be 34 matches in a year.  That would ensure better conditions, at least, in which the national team could prosper. 

Let us consider how well the England team have done.  There has been a lot of criticism about that, but one can see the benefits of the Euro campaign that Terry Venables led and just how important it was to the well-being of the English game.  What would the England team have been like without Man. United’s youth policy of 15 years ago, when those players benefited from playing alongside the top, world-class players? That combination of the two develops players such as Scholes, Beckham and Giggs.  We are not saying that we do not want overseas players, because they are all members of ours and they give fantastic support to our association, but we need quality, rather than numbers.  That is one big area for us. 

On governance, we have noticed that discipline is an issue.  The FA is very much pushing a respect campaign, of which we are all very much in favour.  We must be a little careful, because when something happens in an individual aspect of a game in England on a Saturday, the world knows about it on Sunday and it hits the front pages on the Monday.  The media do a fantastic job in advising the world about our game, but there is also distortion.  People say that there is a lot of simulation in our game, but we must be careful, because player behaviour on our pitches is improving year by year. 

I am vice president of FIFPro, and I speak to all the different unions in the world.  Countries use so many good aspects of our game as a template to follow; they cannot believe how good our referees are—they believe that we have the best referees in the world.  Our country, whose game is the most physical in the world, has three cautions per match, whereas matches in Spain or Italy have five or six cautions.  There are so many good aspects to our game, which is why this campaign to respect the referee is important.  That should be a starting point and a focus.  Things such as Mascherano’s problem on a Saturday, which was still hitting the headlines the following weekend, sometimes distort the truth.  There are needs for change, and the PFA are very much in support. 

Agents are close to my heart, because I sat on the agents review panel of UEFA and FIFA in 2002 and 2004.  Bobby and I have been licensed agents for the PFA and we have both represented players and managers for a long time.  We know the problems with agents, and I can say only that with the FA we are, at least, trying to tidy up all the regulations.  It was not so much the regulations that were wrong; it was that they were not being enforced.  The regulations are now better and it seems as if the agents, to a great extent, are buying into the proposal. 

I can expand about doping issues, because FIFPro covers so many areas.  Bobby will tell you about the areas he covers for the PFA—the anti-racism campaigns; our community programme; and the Asian football network, where we are tackling diversity issues—all of which are very much templates that other countries are now following.  We are ahead of the game in so many areas—even on doping issues.  We had a system in place before the World Anti-Doping Agency got involved.  It was not an ideal system, but testing took place in training grounds and after matches, and a massive number of statistics each year supported the fact that doping is not a major problem in our game.  That does not mean that we turn our back on doping, but it is very much a social issue—football does not exist in isolation; it is not an oasis away from life—and there are no positive examples of performance-enhancing drug taking in our game. 

The problem that we face is that the WADA code, which FIFA have bought into, is for elite individual athletes—the term “athlete” is always used—and it is not really appropriate for team games and for team sports.  We end up with the whereabouts rule, but League One and League Two clubs do not know where they are going to train on a daily basis.  An athlete can advise anybody where they are going to be over the next month or two, but unfortunately a player does not really know where he will be from one day to the next.  If he is not where he is expected to be three times, a ban is handed out.  I am merely saying that that is a bit draconian and inflexible, and we are concerned that such an approach is not quite fit for purpose in football.  That is an issue of concern for us.

Finally, I shall discuss the finances in our game.  When I came here in 2003-04, I talked about salary capping, because after ITV Digital’s collapse in 2002 there was a major financial problem with a lot of clubs.  Credit was easy, and people were almost selling their futures—they were living beyond their means—and going for the dream factor.  Some £2.5 million was taken out of Championship clubs’ budgets in 2002, and that meant that many clubs went into administration.  The Football League has to be credited for resisting things and keeping its insolvency policy.  We believe that salary capping was not the right approach.  There certainly needs to be an appropriate balance between what is paid in wages and what is paid for the rest, but clubs should govern, and have a responsibility to govern, it themselves. 

It looked as if clubs had improved their finances—clubs have clearly being run better over the past three to four years, particularly at the league level—but four clubs have gone into administration in the past 12 months.  We have been involved in protecting our players and helping clubs, and our biggest concern is that the Football League’s insolvency policy is causing clubs problems. 

First, the 10 point-penalty sometimes almost puts clubs off going into administration until their position is far worse than it was a year before.  Secondly, clubs are then waiting until they are relegated before they go into administration.  Thirdly, the Football League’s policy that the club must then go into a company voluntary agreement—CVA—is causing problems too, because the Inland Revenue has a lot to answer for on the debt that has accrued at Football League clubs.  Some 75 per cent.  of the votes must be in favour of the CVA, but the Inland Revenue debts are being amassed to more than 25 per cent.  of the overall debt, which means that it can stop any CVA.  That is what happened in respect of Leeds, and Leeds consequently received a 15-point penalty.  There is a concern that other clubs in administration will not be able to get a CVA through, because they will not get the 75 per cent.  debt. 

Our concern is that, when people see a league table where Leeds United has a star against its name denoting the fact that it has had 15 points taken away, it harms the competition’s credibility.  I know that the Football League is very mindful to refining its administration policy, but we are concerned that some clubs, particularly in the Football League, are loosening their belts a little on spending and are not always following the best financial propriety. 

Chair: Thank you very much.  Mark has the first question. 

Mark Hendrick MP: I was being devil’s advocate when I said that professional football was not a sport any more, but an entertainment industry.  What is your view of how foreign players have influenced the game in areas such as diving and feigning injury?  I am thinking some of the antics that happen on the football pitch.  When I went to see games as a kid, if someone was tackled toughly, he got up and tried to pretend that he was not hurt at all.

Mick McGuire: I played in 1971, when Frannie Lee went over and got a penalty, although I am not convinced that he got touched.  The difference is that there was one camera then and there are 17 now. 

At a game on Saturday, I saw what one team thought was a goal and, within 10 seconds of the referee disallowing it, people were all around the camera at the side of the pitch and they were then cajoling the referee.  We are a global game now.  There is no doubt about the fact that overseas players have brought a great deal of benefit to the Premier League.  Unfortunately, the Premier League’s success does not always equate with the national team’s success, because different principles are involved. 

The Premier League is about entertainment.  I would pay to watch Bergkamp every day of the week, because he has been fantastic for our Premier League; one cannot begin to understand what he has done for the young Arsenal players.  Cantona was another such player.  There is no doubt that they have been very positive for our game.  Last year, three players were purported to have dived—we call it simulation, not diving, by the way—within a week, and the headlines in the papers for the two weeks that followed made them out to be the cause of football’s problems.  Things got blown out of all proportion. 

I cannot dispute the fact that, occasionally, trends emerge, such as two-footed challenges.  It is as if one player sees one, and before you know it, half a dozen such incidents occur, because the media focus on the issue.  The one good thing is that there is normally self-governance within our game.  Within two days of a player diving, their manager—or the player himself—comes out and makes a statement.  I remember Roy Keane saying, “Excuse me.  My players better not do that.”  We find that players turn their backs on a player who dives, and within a month problems sort themselves out. 

The example of two-footed challenges is similar.  When I played, the over-the-ball challenge, rather than the two-footed challenge, was the one that players hated.  Two-footed challenges were not the problem then, but they were for a time.  They have eased away again as quickly as they arrived, because a big consensus of opinion says, “We don’t want that in our game.” That is self-regulation, and that takes care of such things.  I answered your question as a politician would, by going right round the houses and said merely that I do not see it as a big problem when compared with the situation in places such as Spain. 

Mark Hendrick MP: Nevertheless, the problem is probably growing.  I am probably the wrong person to ask the question, because, as you can probably tell from the tie, I was a big fan of Lee won pen; he would trick a man on the halfway line and he would fall in the box. 

Mick McGuire: I do not think it is getting worse, Mark, but we must be vigilant to ensure that it does not raise its head again.  Diving has raised its head, as had crowding round referees.

Mark Hendrick MP: You talked about a balance between foreign players and British ones, saying that it is a quality issue.  Clearly, immigration laws—to which Clive has referred—a single market and free movement of labour are in place.  Let us suppose that you could change the law.  How would you ensure that the balance is right?  As you have said, the likes of Scholes, Beckham, Lampard and Terry are better players because of the players who are playing around them.

Mick McGuire: You are absolutely right. 

Mark Hendrick MP: So, you can say that there are too many foreign players, but when does the number become too few?  How do you get the balance right?

Mick McGuire: I wish I could solve that problem.  I shall be at strategic committee meetings next week, on behalf of FIFPro, when Mr.  Platini will be voicing his opinions on the quota system.  I feel that such a system will be a major problem in our country, because a quota system does nothing more than encourage clubs to bring in young players.  Sepp Blatter is trying to discuss discrimination on the basis of nationality, but his view about having only five foreign players is so far removed will never get past European legislation.  UEFA seems to want to do a deal with the EU in respect of “locally trained” players, whereby if someone comes into a country and remains there for three years, he would qualify—[Interruption.]

 That has been the problem over the past seven or eight years, to the point where we now have more than 300 such players between the ages of 16 and 18 in our Premier League.  Our “Meltdown report” on the stats in the game shows that Italy is the top country in terms of national success in the past 20 years.  Italy has major problems precisely because there are more than 300 such players in Italy.  The only benefit from the Italian perspective is that its top players are playing abroad in the top countries and in the top teams.  We do not have the benefit of that: why would John Terry want to play for anybody other than Chelsea? Our players stay in this country, but we end up with only 50 or 60 English players to choose from, of whom 15 might be injured.  How can a national manager pick a team out of 35 national players?  I wish I were a midfield player now, because I might be playing for England. 

Bobby Barnes: Steady.

            Mick McGuire: I got carried away then. 

            Chair: We have to move on.

            Lord Faulkner: I have a practical question.  What proportion of foreign players who are playing in this country join the PFA?

Mick McGuire: One hundred per cent.; they have been fantastic in supporting us.

            Lord Faulkner: So, there is no issue about PFA membership?

            Mick McGuire: Not at all. 

            Lord Faulkner: Now that we have got that out the way, I would like to ask you about something that Howard Wilkinson was saying.  He suggested that football might encourage other foreign nationals to come here, gain residency qualifications and then be eligible to play for the national team. 

            Mick McGuire: That is an interesting proposition, about which I shall have to speak from my own perspective, although I have discussed it briefly with Gordon.  If we are to have overseas players of quality here—please do not feel that I am myopic and do not see the benefits—we must examine why such a system works in cricket.  Given that it works in cricket, why would it not work in football?  I do not think that we would have a major problem if players remained in our country long enough to play for our national team. 

            Lord Faulkner: Would it not make it even more difficult for young British players to come through and get anywhere near the national team?

            Mick McGuire: We need to examine how we can restrict the numbers entering who are not of the top quality.  We will never have a problem with the top players coming in; that is not our beef.  Our beef is with the fact that, too often, semi-skilled artisans have come into our game in the past 15 years, driven by agents and the financial benefits.  We should not forget that that money is going out of our game and out of our country; it is not coming into our game.  The top echelon of players has enhanced everything, including our own players.  If our players cannot aspire to be as good as them, we have a problem. 

            Christine Russell MP: May I ask you about short-termism?  Nowadays, it seems as if club owners and fans expect immediate results, and managers and players who do not achieve them are on their way.  Given that environment, how can we persuade clubs to invest for the long-term in the youth academies and in young players for the future?

Mick McGuire: That is an excellent question. I wish I could answer every aspect of it, but that is not easy to do. In many ways, one can applaud Karren Brady for what she said, but her saying that Alex McLeish will not be sacked if we go down.  That is a terrible indictment of our game.  He has been there three months.  He is a gentleman.  He has done the job properly.  He started off in a difficult job.  A person cannot just go in a grasp the mantle, so the job will take him time, yet we are applauding Karren for her comments when there is an expectation that he must go. That cannot be right.

From the league managers’ perspective, managers are too quickly hired and fired.  People look at the smaller picture, rather than the bigger one. There needs to be a change in mentality from the top, whereby clubs must accept that the statistics show that a change in manager usually does not improve the situation—sometimes it worsens it.  To realise that, one need only think of Leicester City, bless its heart. Leicester City has a fantastic stadium in which to be playing League One football. I spoke to Martin Allen, who was not given a great opportunity, as he was leaving. Irrespective of what he did or did not do, it did not seem right. Ian Holloway took over, and no one wears their heart on their sleeve more than him, but he has just been unfortunate.  It is hard to do anything more than hope that sense rules.

Let us consider the example of Alan Pardew.  West Ham had an extremely good year when it went up.  The team reached the cup final and finished in mid table. It had the highest number of home-grown players of any team in the league.  He took that approach because he felt that, although he could bring in some quality players, including some overseas players, and they might enhance his team—they probably would have done—but keeping the team’s collective spirit would help him to do well. Sometimes attitudes shift, and that seriously needs to happen.

Clive Betts MP:  Governance and having a clear vision for the game have been mentioned.  Five years ago, we would have been talking of a need to review the FA’s structures.  That has now been done—players, managers and fans are on the FA Council.  Do you think that that will work?  Is there more work still to be done on making the FA the real premier body in football governance in this country?

Mick McGuire: Governance has to come from the FA, because it has control from the grass roots to the Premier League.  Some 10 years ago, there were 87 Council members—a majority in the national game—now there are 92.  In fairness to the Burns Report, the FA has accepted and taken on board some of its recommendations:  having an independent chairman; and having a board whereby five come from the national game and five come from the professional game. My only concern is talk of part of that remit being to reduce the number of Council members. How long will it take for some of the professionals, who have now been given a certain amount of opportunity, to make a change?

My biggest single concern is the youth development issue, which has been bandied around for a long term; it has been said that the coaches in the Football League have not been good enough.  There has been an argument with the FA, which has the technical control to teach coaches.  That area has not been done well enough. There seems to be a reluctance for everyone to come together to work out a formula for developing our young players.  Too many of our young players are cast by the wayside at 18 years of age, whereas training and development goes on until 21 abroad.  A total change needs to take place in that regard.  I am concerned that the FA has been so archaic for more than 100 years that it will take a lot longer than a year or two to get the machinery moving.

On discipline, we changed to fast-tracking following the problems with Man Utd and Arsenal.  It took a year for one of the committees to take place, but they have now put a professional person on the commission.  I have represented players, and I know that there are no problems with many of the FA’s decisions on discipline; the problem lies in selling the decisions.  When individuals from the national game are making judgments on elite players from the professional game, irrespective of whether they are right or wrong, there needs to be a better balance and more transparency.  It is only right that the FA takes the lead.  My only concern is how long it will take before the input from the professional game has an influence.

Andy Reed MP: Thanks for reminding us of Leicester’s weekend, Mick; the Tigers failed to make the premiership play-offs too, so it has not been brilliant.  You mentioned where we have reached with agents review.  You began to highlight the fact that you still did not feel that enough progress had been made.  Do you think that there is any chance of revisiting that, and if so, would it just need tweaking?

Mick McGuire: Well, it is interesting one, Andy. In 2001, the FA had a review of problems involving agents.  At that point, FIFA was very much leaving it to the federations, because it realised that this was a far bigger issue in 202 countries than it could cope with, so it passed it on to the FA.  That was no appetite to get into it.  Between 2001 and 2004, when UEFA decided to help FIFA to put its own regulation together, the problems escalated. Lord Stevens’ report highlighted major problems with agents, and that, to a certain extent, focused people’s attention.  The FA then conducted its own review over 18 months, in which I have been involved on behalf of the PFA. The original regulations were okay—they went further than FIFA’s original regulations—but there was never an appetite for enforcing them.  That meant a free-for-all, as more than 300 agents were getting paid by players and by clubs.  We could forget what a player had signed an agreement for, because that did not reflect what they received.  Agents were destabilising the game.

The regulations are stronger now, and there has been a lot of criticism from the agents.  One of our guys attended a review meeting yesterday.  Everybody attends such meetings, including the agents, to review how the system is working.  It is not ideal, and there are teething problems.  There are tax issues to address in terms of why entertainers are given tax relief on representation, but players are not.  That does not seem right.  It is an old chestnut about which we have been talking to the Inland Revenue for years.  Clubs are paying players’ agents, but the main thing is that there is more transparency, the FA is more accountable and, importantly for us, the agent receives what the player has negotiated in a deal with agent in his contract.  We do not have a problem whether or not he gets the sum from the club, because it is only a means of paying it across, but he must see it.  Then, at least, what he should be paying to his agent is paid in that way. Progress is being made, but this major problem had been allowed to develop over a number of years.  My only concern is that a number of agents will fall by the wayside, and the transfer windows have not helped the situation either, because there are only two such windows of opportunities in which to negotiate.

Chair: Lastly, Ian would like to ask a question.  Could you sum up after answering him, Mick, and we will then have to finish?  Before we finish and the even better looking people come on next, may I say that the TV cameras have to go to another job?  We had a bit of difficulty in negotiating with the parliamentary broadcasting people.  The rest of the inquiry will all be filmed on TV, but the Football Supporters Federation people should not be offended if the cameras disappear—it will not be because you are less important.  If you want to say a last couple of words, Bobby, that would also be good.

Ian Lucas MP: I wish to ask about your members’ subscriptions.  Some of your members receive vast salaries and others do not.  How are subscriptions paid?

            Mick McGuire: I believe the subscription is £100 a year, but they give a lot more back because the PFA survives and gives so much back into the game as a result of the money that it receives from TV revenue.  Players in the 50s could have negotiated that revenue individually, but they chose not to do so.  When David Beckham was a member in England, he was, in effect, giving up far more than a player at Shrewsbury or Doncaster.  He was giving up his rights, which would be more valuable.

            Ian Lucas MP: So, it costs every player £100.

Mick McGuire: I suggest that it costs them a lot more, although a player pays out £100.

Secondly, whenever there are disputes and a collective need to be together, the top players are prepared to support the union. You talk about their vast sums, but they should not apologise for them. The game has developed in the past 16 years and has become such a product, so it is only right that the major stakeholders benefit from it.  That is in line with what happens in respect of any entertainers.  It is a precarious existence; 75 per cent. of our players play in the Football League and 20 per cent. of our membership look for work every year.  It is only right that they should receive a salary that reflects their input and their abilities in the game, and we do not apologise for that.  In disputes, we have had to ensure that our income remains.  It allows us to do so much good for the game; we put 95 per cent. of the money that we receive back into football not only through all our own initiatives, but to help direct costs of clubs. Thus, it is only right that we have a collectiveness, and that is what we get from our membership.

Chair: Thank you very much.  Is there anything that you would like to say to sum up, Bobby?

 Bobby Barnes: Mick has been very comprehensive.  He has covered all four areas of what we do, and that is great.

One area in which the PFA takes great pride is its record on equality and diversity. We have been given an opportunity to announce, although I am sure that this has been in the media, the fact that for the first time we have female membership, in the sense that we have encompassed the England ladies football team.  That is a great point to make on our commitment to diversity and equality.  In addition, numerous discussions have taken place about the all-embracing nature of the game, whether minorities are being welcomed into it and whether the union is doing enough.

The PFA has been particularly groundbreaking in that we were the first people to examine the under-representation of black coaches and managers.  We started in 2003, and we continue, on a quarterly basis, to provide a forum giving educational opportunities, and advice about presentation, CV writing and networking to former players.  The aim is to give them more of an opportunity to get themselves back into the professional game after they have finished playing, and we are particularly proud of that work.

 Many people felt that the Asian community was disfranchised, and all sorts of different debates took place as to what issues were involved. We are in a unique position in the sense that, as the players’ union, we are able to speak to each and every Asian player in the professional game and to look at the pathways that they had trodden to make it into the professional game. We have been able to gain a lot of useful information, which we have been able to share with the FA and with the League Managers Association. We are considering what problems need to be overcome and how we can clear those pathways, and, as a union committed to equality, we feel proud of that.

Chair: And so you should. Thank you very much, Mick and Bobby.

May I welcome two old friends whose names I know very well, Steve Powell and Malcolm Clarke?  If the others would like to introduce themselves, that would be great.

Adam Brown: My name is Adam Brown, and I am a board member of FC United.  In my other lives, I have also been involved in the Football Task Force and in dealing with various issues associated with football governance.

Alison Watt: My name is Alison Watt, and I, too, am a board member of FC United.   I come to it from the background of being a fan and a qualified referee.

Alan Walsh: My name is Alan Walsh, and I am the general manager of FC United.  Previously, I was the chair of the fans secretariat of the Independent Man Utd Supporters Association, otherwise known as IMUSA.  IMUSA led the campaign to prevent BSkyB—Rupert Murdoch—from taking over Manchester United.  We made submissions to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission and co-ordinated the campaign to prevent that takeover, along with the PFA, NUJ and other bodies.   I was also a member of the Home Office Working Party on Football Disorder under Lord Bassam.

If I may, I shall spend a couple of introductory minutes on our history.  Some of you will be aware of who and what we are, and how we came about, although others may not be.  The football club came out of 10 to 15 years’ campaigning for better supporter involvement in football to serve the interests of football fans.  IMUSA came about as a direct response to the plc’s refusal to have any dialogue with supporters’ groups—we even had the ridiculous situation whereby Manchester United refused to allow supporters’ clubs to be formed in the city of Manchester. You could have a supporters’ club if you lived in Warwick or in Leeds, but you could not do so if you lived in Manchester, thus you had no input into the football clubs.  IMUSA worked with colleagues in the Football Supporters Association, as was, to establish links between independent supporters’ associations at other clubs, where similar difficulties were being faced.  Through that work with the FSA, we had conversations with the PFA and the national federation of supporters groups, and we worked to bring together those groups subsequently to form the one, unified national supporters’ body that we now have. Because of that Murdoch campaign, we played a role in the establishment of Supporters Direct and in its early days.

We have a long history, as individuals, of trying to fight for supporter involvement in football clubs.  The Glazer takeover was the culmination of all that, because even though we had done all that campaigning and had beaten Murdoch, when the Glazers came in we were completely powerless. We appealed to Richard Caborn, the then Minister of Sport, to the Premier League and to a number of organisations to assist other supporters in obtaining some sort of voice in that takeover process.  Quite simply, we were brushed aside. Many supporters were already being disfranchised economically—they were not able to continue going—and we could envisage the prospect of many more supporters becoming disfranchised economically from top-level football because of the increasing prices.  That has been borne out, because prices at United have probably doubled in the past two or three years, since the Glazers took over.

Our football club was established in June 2005, and we have 2,500 members, 300 of whom regularly volunteer for the football club.  We have had three straight promotions, having secured our promotion to the Unibond Premier last week in the play-offs.  We are negotiating with local authorities in the Manchester area in order to develop our own ground.  Enshrined in the football club’s constitution is both a clear commitment to community work within the Greater Manchester area and one member, one vote co-operative ownership, based on the structure of the industrial and provident societies.

Chair: Thank you very much.  All three of you are extremely welcome, as, too, are Steve and Malcolm.  We shall welcome an opening statement.  

Malcolm Clarke: I promise to speak more briefly than some of the others, although a statement would help to set the scene.  I shall talk only about governance, because I think that that was what you were about.  I have worn my Football Supporters Federation, rather than my FA Council blazer—I do have one as the first supporter representative on the FA Council in its 144 years.

We start from the clear proposition that football clubs are different from other businesses.  They have a different relationship with their communities.  I am a Stoke City supporter, and last night I was in Stoke to see an open-top bus going round, 15,000 people in the ground and the Lord Mayor speaking.  The community does not give that sort of response to Tesco or to a local garage.  When I hear of people wanting to have their ashes spread along the aisles of Tesco, I will believe that football clubs are just like other businesses.  The implications of that are that they need separate and different governance and regulatory regimes, and that the regulatory regimes that apply under company law and under stock exchange law are simply neither appropriate nor adequate to deal with the particular role of football clubs in our society.  I am not going to say anything about the different models of club ownership, because it is appropriate for the Supporters Direct representative to deal with that, save that we do not think that the private ownership models, or even the plc models, that exist are the most appropriate or best ones.

We have attached to our evidence the evidence that we gave to the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport about the special status of football.  We refer you to that evidence, and I merely add that Michel Platini wrote to the Prime Minister some time ago urging exceptions to that approach.  It took a long time for a reply, and when it came, it came from the Minister for Sport rather than the Prime Minister. Downing Street briefed the press that the whole idea was rubbish.  The Chief Executive of the Premier League said in the press that Mr. Platini’s ideas were akin to those of people sitting in the corner of a pub.  What we have here today are the people from the corner of the pub, and when we met Michel Platini, he said that he would rather talk to people in the pub than to the Chief Executive of the Premier League about what was wrong with football.  My reason for saying that to a group of MPs is that the Government’s response was disappointing.  In addition, having senior figures in football rubbishing the UEFA President in that kind of way is not, in political terms an intelligent way of going about trying to win a world cup bid.

I should like to say something about industry regulation, because we do not have any statutory regulation of football.  What have we got?  Lord Faulkner was a member and vice-chair of the task force, and he will recall that the task force recommended a football audit commission.  That recommendation was not accepted by the Government, who instead established the Independent Football Commission.  It was trumpeted quite a lot by Chris Smith, the then Secretary of State.  The IFC has not been as adequate as we would wish it to be, but we were horrified that it was recently abolished by the football authorities, with no consultation either with ourselves or the other stakeholders represented on the football task force, and replaced by a football ombudsman, who has not been appointed under Nolan procedures. Basically, it appears that the Government have washed their hands of this issue, and that there has been no consultation on what, if anything, should replace the IFC.  That does not bode well for trying to establish a more effective regime.

Reference has been made to the Burns review of the FA.  For the past eight months, I have been a member of the FA Council, so I think it is only fair to say that the new independent chair of the FA has yet to chair his first full Council meeting.  It is, thus, early days, to judge effectiveness.  I am not optimistic—I shall put things as diplomatically as possible—that the new Football Regulatory Authority, which has been established, will be the effective industry regulatory tool that we think is needed.

There was talk in the earlier discussion about the insolvency policy and the difficulties that it has created.  One of the major problems in football is that clubs get into financial difficulty.  With all due respect to the previous witness, the answer to that is not to blame the Inland Revenue for trying to collect money on behalf of taxpayers; the answer is to have a regime that monitors whether clubs are paying their tax bills and an effective club licensing system—something like they have in rugby league, where clubs have to prove that they are paying their tax bills.  That is the way forward.  Criticising the Inland Revenue is not.

The influence of the professional game on the FA was mentioned.  There are two types of professional game.  The first is those who represent particular groups, such as the players or the managers, and their input is welcome on the FA Council, as is mine.  The other is the input of the leagues, which are represented there.  The FA has many problems, but the professional leagues’ not having enough influence is not one of them.  If anything, the situation is precisely the reverse: the Premier League has been too dominant in terms of how the governing body of the game is run.

The fit and proper person test is another key issue.  We were once told that such a test could never be introduced in football, so its introduction is welcome.  It is focused too much on past financial issues—past financial criminality or insolvency in football—and, not enough, as one witness has said, on why people want to own football clubs.  Our paper gives the interesting example of a particular gentleman who has owned one football club before and now wishes to own another.  Leaving aside the ludicrous business of wishing to call it Harchester United, after the “Dream Team”, he openly admits that he is in business to asset-strip companies and that he lied to supporters, yet he will pass the fit and proper person test.  That, in itself, is evidence.

Football clubs are community assets. The biggest irony of all—this is contained in our evidence to the European Commission—is to give football clubs that status as community assets; LS Lowry’s famous painting of going to a match has more protection attached to it than the clubs that the supporters go to matches to watch.

Chair: Thank you very much, Malcolm.  May I say a couple of things?  First, this sitting is still being recorded, and it will eventually go on to the website.  Secondly, I congratulate FC United, because I look at the results in the Sunday papers, whenever I can, or I go on the website, and we are very proud of what it is doing.

Adam Brown: We will be in the papers even more in future.

Lord Faulkner: As will Stoke and AFC Wimbledon.

Chair: It is worth mentioning that I was not consulted on the response to Mr. Platini’s letter to the Prime Minister.  I did write to Mr. Platini to say that I would welcome meeting him, and I did not get a reply to that either.  We need to come together.  An important issue is that many more Members of Parliament represent non-league clubs than represent Premier League clubs.  This is just part of our making our voices heard for our constituents, who care deeply about football.  That is why we are carrying out this inquiry.

Christine Russell MP: I would like to ask Andy, Alison and Adam a question.  Are you still fans of Man Utd?  Do you ever go to Man Utd matches?

Adam Brown: I do not. FC United is quite a broad church in that respect, and it contains people for whom the Glazers’ takeover was the final straw. I had held a season ticket for 17 years, but I ripped it up and never went back. The main point is that FC United is a home for disfranchised and disenchanted Manchester United fans who want something that they cannot get from Old Trafford, for whatever reason—it might be the atmosphere or the specific issue of the Glazer takeover. The great plus point of DC United is that the fans are in control, and that underpins the governance of our club: it is a one member, one vote, not-for-profit, industrial and provident society. Alison and I are on the board only because we have been elected. The rules of the club are set by the members, so matters such as the fact that we do not have any shirt advertising are set by them. That empowerment has huge benefits for the club, for example, the volunteer involvement in running the club. It was about responding to the crisis caused by the Glazer takeover by saying, “This is how we’d organise it. This is how we want football to be run.”  It is about putting fans in the front seat and empowering them, and creating democracy.  Some 32,000 people—supporters of Manchester United—were members of organisations opposed to the takeover, but their interests were completely swept aside.

Christine Russell MP: What is your average gate now?

Andy Walsh: Just over 2,100.

Christine Russell MP: What gives you grounds for confidence that if you could get a ground in Greater Manchester, rather than in Cheshire, you would get more?

Adam Brown: We currently play at Bury, which is in Greater Manchester, but not in central Manchester.

Andy Walsh: It is still a fair way out of town.  For Saturday’s play-off final, we got more than 3,200 people in, on the same day that Manchester United was playing in the afternoon. For previous end-of-season games, we have had 6,000 people, so if we could get a ground within striking distance of Manchester City Centre, we would clearly get a pretty high crowd for a league club, let alone a non-league one.  As Adam says, the key is that level of participation.  One other statistic must be noted: the average age of the Premier League crowd is over 40.  One of our key targets is to address that imbalance.  We all started following football early—I started going with my dad when I was five and my two boys started going with me when they were five.  One key aim is to increase the number of young people going to games in order to keep it our game.  People might say that it is less attractive, but between 25 and 30 per cent. of our crowd are under-18s and that is significant.

Christine Russell MP: How does that compare with teams in the other leagues?

Andy Walsh: Compared with the Premier League, it is obviously very favourable and it far outstrips the teams around about us—not as many young people go to non-league games.  I cannot speak for the league level—

Adam Brown: It varies quite a lot between 10 and 20 per cent., so we are still outperforming there.

            Christine Russell MP:  So, it is remarkable.

            Adam Brown: Just by way of comparison, may I say that the average attendance at our level is between 100 and 200?  Our crowds are obviously a result of where we have come from, but they are also about involvement and participation.  People feel involved.  They feel that they own the club and that what they put in will be reinvested.

Lord Faulkner: I am anxious to ask Malcolm about his experience on the FA Council.  In particular, I would like him to expand on the comments that he made in the paper about the Football Regulat6ory Authority, which was set up by the FA and was, in a sense, a product of the task force’s recommendation on the football audit commission.  Do you envisage that that body will become the governing body—the regulator—for football as a whole?  Do you imagine that the constituent parts of the game in England will accept that it is the organisation that should be laying down the rules and regulations for them to follow?

Malcolm Clarke: It should be the organisation, but as to whether the constituent bodies will accept it is for them to comment on.  It is still early days.  Obviously, there are four league representatives out of the 12 on it.  I do not want to be too prescriptive at this stage.  As I say, I have yet to see evidence to suggest that it will be as effective as we would wish it to be.

On the general view of the FA, the new independent chair is still new, and we have to wait to see how that aspect develops.  I have been slightly surprised that I have not found some of the things that I expected to find.  The general caricature of the problem is that the blazers are anarchic, and if we were talking about things such as cup final allocations, we might have a lot of differences.  However, in my experience, most of the members of the FA Council share many of the values that supporters have and share their concerns about the development of the game, and the way in which the professional leagues, in particular the Premier League, are going.  I have found much more common ground on those issues within the FA than I perhaps expected.  It is also fair to say that a great many people working for the FA are very dedicated and skilled, and they share many of those values and objectives.  The agenda is about whether the FA can reclaim its proper and historic role as the government of the game, particularly in the Premier League and, to a lesser extent, the Football League. 

            Lord Falkner of Worcester:  If it did, would you modify your support for an independent football regulator?

Malcolm Clarke: Possibly; yes.  We have discussed that with people in the FA, but we are not there yet.  We need to have a debate about whether the FA can, under its new leadership and after the Burns report, subsume what should be its role.  The jury is still out. 

            Lord Faulkner: Thank you.

Chair: Before Mark comes in, can I just say that he is a Bury supporter despite representing Westminster.  You can be impressed by his loyalty— you cannot expect someone as old as Mark to give up his support for Bury. 

            Mark Field MP: There are a couple of things that I want to ask, before we come to you, Malcolm.  You used a very interesting phrase—we were talking about the idea of a broad church in football, and in a sense it is like a religious throwback; it is a new sect that has been formed in the footballing world. 

Where do you see the future of FC United going?  Obviously, you have had three promotions.  You are three or four seasons away from being full square premier and I assume that you aspire to move on up.  Is there not a worry that you are building another monster that will go down exactly the same route, with the intrusion of more and more money and more and more players who are not from the immediate area?  Do you have a vision in mind for the next 10 years, one that will not necessarily claim to be in line with your creation—something that would bring it out of your hands and go down exactly the same route towards a big brand loyalty? 

            Adam Brown: That is a key issue.  The higher we go, the greater the pressure and there are things such as shirt sponsorship, the ownership structure of the club, the need to seek investment and so on.  All those pressures become more intense the further up the Premier League you go.  Our vision is to create something that is sustainable, whether we go up or not.  It is about connecting with the community, building a community facility stadium—as Andy mentioned earlier—and having roots and a sustainable structure that is not dependent on others.  Some clubs at our level gets someone who comes in, throws in a huge amount of money, shoots up the league and then disappears, and the club shoots back down again. We do not want that kind of boom and bust situation. 

            Mark Field MP: The entire situation is as you have just described.

            Adam Brown: What would be the point of our adopting some of the practices that the rest of football adopts, and the commercial strategies and so on with which  other clubs are involved?  What is the point in setting up an alternative and saying, “This is a different way of doing it.   This is the Barcelona, single membership only model”?  As Andy mentioned, being of benefit to our local community is written into our constitution.  It is part of our responsibilities as directors to ensure that we fulfil that.  If we were to abandon it all, I do not see what the point would be?  

            Mark Field MP: After some clubs no longer get into the league, they take the basic proposition that football clubs are a different run of companies.  To an extent, as a big football supporter—I have supported football for well over seven eighths of my life—I have a lot of sympathy with your view.  However, the reality is that in the past there was a very strong geographical link.  Now, at one extreme we could not compare a football club in England—Manchester United, for example—with Tesco.   Let us consider a Scottish whisky distillery.  That has a real sense of place, a geographical vibe that the community will have for that particular company to make an overseas export push as well.  My worry is that, while there is a geographical link and no sense of a global brand in place, the strong community link can be maintained. We look at the players—and that applies as much to Manchester United as to any of the big four clubs—but there is no sense of that local link getting forward.  A geographical link is linked strongly to the name of a football club and dissipates over time.

            People will look back on now as the best of times in football.  The money is flowing in, and it has a global brand.  I remember what it was like in my university days in the mid-1980s, when football was something that you would not even admit to liking.  There was hooliganism, the disasters at Heysel and Bradford City, and attendances were at an all-time, post-war low.  Do you not think that this is one of the core problems?  We will look back and see the best of times?

Mark Field MP:  Do you really feel that you can impose that geographical loyalty? 

            Andy Walsh: To follow the whisky analogy; a lot of the boom in the malt whisky industry at the moment is due to big companies coming in and reviving old family brands that are linked with the community.  It is a plastic revival in that respect.  They seem to be grouping it within the local community.  In many ways, that is how the Premier League is going.  It is being aped by the Championship and by leagues one or two.  There is very little sense in creating in the minds of many of the directors of those football clubs the idea of a national game.  It is their business.  They are striving for dominance on the local stage, the regional stage, the national stage and the international stage. 

For a number of years, we have been fighting to turn back the tide.  Big business saw an opportunity in the late 1980s with the Blueprint for Football and so on to engineer a business out of the sport of football.  In our tradition, that of the independent supporters association and the FSA, we have fought to re-engineer the club out of that business.  You can still run the club in a businesslike, professional manner, but to whose benefit?  Is it to the benefit of the core community that you refer to or to the benefit of some absentee landlord, as you might have on some Scottish idyll?  That is the key issue for us.  It is a massive task that we cannot hope to tackle on our own. 

Members of Parliament—even those who may not consider themselves to be powerful when they come up against Ministers—have an influence.  That is important because,  at the moment, we get a brush off.  I can  show you letters from the Minister with responsibility for sport, from the Premier League and from the chairmen of football clubs.  They comprise two paragraphs that say, “Thanks for your concerns, they will be noted”—bugger off.  If we are serious about saving the national game, we must have everybody in the team talking about the issues.  As Malcolm says, when we talk to the blazers within the FA, they are concerned about the fundamentals and the structure of the game, but no one refers to the supporters because they are seen as customers, not as supporters and stakeholders within the game.  We need to work together on that.  Ten, 15 or 20 minutes here is not enough.  If we are serious, let us have a proper discussion about that kind of governance. 

Chair:  Mark wants to follow up on the same issue.

Mark Hendrick MP:  Yes.  What you are saying is music to my ears.  I am a Co-operative party MP, and everything you mention such as Co-operative party mutual associations have been a feature of my political life, as has the democracy that comes with it and electing people to the board.  You might not think that from what I said earlier about football being an entertainment industry and how it has been globalised, but the point is about community, and Stoke City—it is fantastic that Stoke has gone up—and the ties that you have with your communities. 

What you have achieved with FC United is fantastic.  American billionaires have moved in and taken over the club.  There are still one or two home-grown players, but we all know the situation.  They buy them off the shelf and spend as much as they need.  They cannot quite keep up with Chelsea but they can manage it.  As for maintaining that community, let us be honest.  Community is not what it was.  I grew up in Salford, a stone’s throw away from Old Trafford.  We knew everybody in our street.  There was no internet.  Now, we can email somebody in Japan and not know our next door neighbour.  That is how communities change.  Now there is a virtual community, and that is why people through the turn styles at Old Trafford are not paying the wages of the stars.  It is people who buy shirts in China who are paying those wages. 

The big question is about how to keep that community while at the same time, as we grow and develop, maintain the ethos that we have obviously brought in through FC United.  Like the building societies that have been demutualised and a lot of businesses that perhaps started up as co-operatives, once people see that value locked in, there are those who want to rob it and take it out.

The football league might move up step by step, but you will have to face those challenges.  One player may live down the M1 and not locally.  What you are doing is very interesting, and I am glad to see that AFC Liverpool has been set up to try something similar.  I applaud what you are doing.  Why do you not go and see Salford Rugby Club?  There is to be a brand new stadium.  It is in Greater Manchester.  I would be proud to see a break away from United.

Malcolm Clarke: Can I ask Steve to comment?

Steven Powell:  I have a couple of comments.  Community is interesting.  I read an interesting book a couple of weeks ago, recommended to me by colleagues, called, “Here Comes Everybody”.  It is about how we can use such tools not to alienate people from modern communication, but to bring them together.  FC United is very good at doing that.  It has a text service, an email service.  It is building an electronic community.  There is an electronic community at Arsenal, which I support, and what really interested me about game 39—globalism writ large—was the number of foreign supporters who got in touch with us saying that they loved to watch the Premier League on TV.  We had one from a guy in Argentina who said that he loved watching Arsenal on TV and that it was his dream to watch them play in London.  He did not want Arsenal to come to him, as that would be as authentic as taking London Bridge to Arizona. 

There is a sense of community around Arsenal.  Look what happens when the club is doing well.  The last time that we won the trophy was almost like a cartoon.  I saw every one of my neighbours out in the break.  Many of them only watch Arsenal once or twice a year, due to ticket availability or price, but they love being part of that energised community.  I am proud to be a member of FC United. What it is doing is fantastic. 

Let us consider the constitution of Barcelona.  Article 1 is the name of the club, article 2 says that the club shall be a non-profit making association.  That ethos runs through the whole club, and it is one of the biggest clubs in the world.  Real Madrid is also a members’ club. 

Adam Brown: Could I add a quick comment?  I take your point about community.  With my other hat, I am involved in a research company called Substance.  We did a big project for the Football Foundation, and I have a copy of the report for you to take away.  You are dead right.  Traditionally, people have regarded “the community” as one item, something that we need to deal with and for which we shall put on coaching courses.  In fact, the community is multi-faceted.  It can be geographically bound, bound by electronic media or whatever.  The crucial point is for clubs to understand that everything they do has an impact on one of those communities, whether support communities among local residents or others.

            It is assumed that football clubs are community assets.  We see that written into the whole debate on the EU competition, the collective selling of TV, the transfer policy and all the rest.  The justification is that clubs are of benefit to the community and my plea to the Government is for them to start making those clubs prove that.  Start making clubs prove that they benefit their local communities because I do not see it and we certainly do not see it higher up the League.  They serve the interests of things that drive profit and income streams, rather than the communities.  Let us make our support of the collective deal conditional.  Let us say, yes, we will support you but you must do this, this and that to show your support.  That must bring in the whole ownership structure and everything else. 

Andy Walsh:  You already mentioned Barcelona, the celebrated one-member, one-vote club owned by the fans.  However, this season, we have seen Exeter football club fight for promotion.  We have seen AFC Wimbledon and Stockport.  There are many examples of where supporters have put their lives to one side to fight for their football club and to ensure that it survives.   All those clubs that have gone bust have taken taxpayers’ money, St. Johns Ambulance money and fans’ money down with them.  None of them is fan-owned.  Each one is run on the business model that is championed by the Premier League. 

Alison Watt:  But each of them will turn to their fans now for help.

Andy Walsh:  That is one massive salutary lesson.  It is easy to listen to the Premier League, as it has the biggest booming voices and it is glamorous.   However, nobody within those football clubs listens to their supporters.  The smaller voices of the fan-owned clubs have shown that fans can run football clubs; they recognise that football clubs must be run on a business model and must be successful. 

Chair: We are running over time.  I will call Clive last.  That was a good summing up for FC United Manchester.  Perhaps when answering Clive’s question, you could use it to sum up as well.  We will take it that that was your summing up, Andy. 

Andy Walsh: Fine.

Chair:  Can I say two things before inviting Clive to ask a question?  First, we shall invite representatives from Barcelona to talk to us about how that club and culture work.  Secondly, you said that you have experienced stone-walling from Sports Ministers.  MPs react to constituents.  If you can encourage your members to write individually to their own MPs—

Andy Walsh: It is not MPs, it is Ministers.  

Chair: Well, Ministers will react to a number of MP contacts.  Get your members to write to individual MPs about the problem and the fact that you are getting a stone wall.  Tell them that you have been to give evidence here, ask them to get in touch with their MPs and with the All-Party Parliamentary Football Group and we will see whether things start to move. 

Clive Betts MP:  We all wish that football was run in a different way and think that the Barcelona model is great, but that is a product of history—where it was and how it developed as a club— which is totally different from the history and governance of football clubs in this country.  The Government cannot step in and tell the owners of football clubs to hand the clubs over to the supporters.  That will not happen.

Even the idea of putting a fan on the board of every club has problems as clubs can sometimes get round that through their organisational structure.  In any case, the sole responsibility of a director is to the shareholders so the fan on the board would need to run it for the owners, because that is what company law says.  How realistically can we go forward in way that gives more accountability to the clubs, recognising that we cannot dispense with all the constraints of ownership and company law over night? 

Malcolm Clarke:  I will let Steve answer that one. 

Steven Powell:  With respect, that is a little bit of a counsel of despair.  If we want to get to where we want to go, we would not start from where we are.  Concrete measures can be taken.  I am encouraged by what is happening at the FA.  We want it to go further.  There are regulatory regimes, both in other football nations and in other sports.  In particular, there are some interesting models in Germany with the way that the Deutsche Fußball-Bund and Deutsche Fußball Liga regulates clubs there.  It is very robust.  Part of the problem is that clubs that are trying to be responsible are competing with clubs that are financially irresponsible.  We need a regime that says that they can spend their income, and only their income.  That is how it works in Germany.  If you want to play professionally in the top two leagues, you need a licence, and that licence will be taken away if you are in deficit. 

There are interesting models of independent governance in a number of sports.  Ironically, Malcolm Glazer could not have bought a national football league franchise because there are very restricted rules on the amount of debt that can be pledged against an asset that someone is buying.  When it was bought by the Glazer family, the debt at Manchester United was nil.  It is now £666 million and climbing, to buy an asset that the fans will not own, although they will have paid it. It will not happen overnight.  There is no silver bullet to remedy the problems and it is not a matter between the political left and political right.

The last President of Real Madrid was a successful businessman.  He was a chairman, in Spanish terms, of the PLC.  I was recently in Buenos Aires with the Marketing Director of Boca Juniors, one of the big clubs there.  It is a civil association, an “IPS” as we would call them.  I talked to him afterwards over a meal and asked how come the club was still a civil association.  He replied that the fans would simply not stand for the club being sold.  There was a project some years ago for the club to be floated on the Argentine stock exchange, the Borsa de Valores.  It failed because the members would not vote for it.

We need self-regulation.  It is important and always better than statutory imposition, but parliamentarians and Ministers must keep the matter under review.  Otherwise, we will lose cultural assets.  It is an interesting irony that, going to the match, the painting cannot be sold without a Government licence, although we can sell cultural assets to anybody.  I have no problem against foreign ownership.  I do not care where an Arsenal supporter comes from; if they support Arsenal, they support Arsenal.  I want to see people who are interested in the club.  That is one of the reasons why Arsenal has been so successful.  For all its faults with ticket prices, it has stability on the board.  Now, challenges to the ownership structure are giving us problems. 

Chair: Thank you very much to all of you, and please put a written submission in some time in the next four weeks or so.  It will be recorded and go on the website.  Please take my advice about getting your members to contact each of their individual MPs and refer them to this Committee.  You will have a very large voice and we shall try to influence Ministers. 

Andy Walsh: I have some documentation for distribution purposes.   

Chair: Thank you very much.  I am sorry, we are always restricted for time.

We now have two old friends.  Thank you for coming to see us.  Perhaps you could make an opening statement. 

            Dave Boyle: Thank you for commissioning this inquiry and for inviting us to speak.  As Andrew stated in his evidence, it goes some way although not very far towards rectifying one of the biggest problems within football governance: the fact that the people who pay for it are completely excluded from the decision-making structures within clubs, leagues and governing bodies at most levels of the game.  In case of confusion, we are Supporters Direct.  We work closely with our colleagues in the Football Supporters’ Federation, but we specialise in governance, the area of interest today. 

The football fans who we work with are keenly interested in how decisions are made, who makes them, why they make them and what happens afterwards.  Specifically, they are interested in issues of financial stability and governance within the football club, not—as many have said in the past—in who picks the team.  We have been castigated for that, and it is a complete misrepresentation by mischief makers.  It has never been part of our agenda. 

            We work with football supporters at club level to create supporters’ trusts, which are democratic, mutual structures inspired by co-operatives.  To some degree, we were created by the instigation of the Co-operative movement and the Co-operative party.  The supporters’ trusts take a formal governance stake within their football clubs through the ownership of shares and the election of representatives to the board.  Since we started in 2000, we have more than 150 supporters’ trusts across the United Kingdom and we are working with UEFA to conduct a research project into the applicability of what we have learnt in the UK across continental Europe.  UEFA is very interested in what Supporters Direct has been doing and thinks that it could have some merit across the continent. 

            In the UK, 65 per cent. of trusts own shares, 29 per cent. have a seat on the board, and 13 clubs are now owned by their supporters’ trust as the majority owner.  At FC United, the club is the supporters’ trust; in most other cases, it is the majority share holder in the holding company. 

            One of the key benefits that our approach brings to football clubs is something that is sadly missing—accountability.  Many of you will be keenly aware of accountability.  You might not always like it, but I am sure that you recognise that nothing concentrates the mind more on the quality of a decision than the thought that somebody might have something to say about it and could essentially get rid of you.  In football, regardless of the quality of decisions, there is no way to get rid of people apart from demonstrations outside football grounds with people massed outside the club offices at 5.15 pm on a Saturday shouting, “Sack the board”.  It is not the best way to bring about regime change or good decision making but, unfortunately, people have no other way of getting involved. 

The main way in which accountability is brought to bear in other institutions do not apply to football clubs.  People do not signal their displeasure by simply taking their custom elsewhere.  Indeed, it is quite the opposite—football supporters tend to wear their circumstances as a badge of pride.  There is a masochistic pleasure in supporting a badly-run club that treats you appallingly, and there is no way of influencing the governance of a club because it is run as a fiefdom.  This year, in Liverpool and Manchester City, supporter-based views about what should happen at the club and what the club owners wanted to do were completely divergent, and the owners acted as if they really did not care. 

Bringing transparency and accountability into the game would be beneficial.   As someone said, we need the “disinfectant of sunlight”, which is all too lacking due to a need for public trust, as people do not know how decisions are made.  The problems of bungs and corruption are difficult to deal with because people do not trust that they are being dealt with as they cannot see how it is done.  In any institution that does business behind closed doors, it is difficult to engender support and faith in the way that decisions are made.  One of the best ways to address that in the football industry, given the constraints that Clive alluded to, is to bring in some micro-regulation and have supporters at the club involved in its governance. 

            Chair: You are giving us a submission in the next three or four weeks.  I am advised that there may be a vote around half-past four, in which case I am happy to come back again.  I am not sure whether others can do that.  If it does not work out, you are welcome to come back another time.  I am sorry about that; it is out of our control. 

            Clive Betts MP: Clearly, you have a particular role on supporters’ trusts.  Perhaps smaller clubs are the best places to see significant involvement.  How do you see a way forward for more supporter involvement in larger clubs?  Many of them are owned by one or two people or by another company that they use as a subsidiary of it.  It is not easy to go in and take assets off people or compel them to behave in certain ways.  Do you think that more could be done about it through regulation? 

            Dave Boyle: I think that we can be smarter.  In my ideal world, we would wake up one morning to find a Football Act being passed by Parliament that did exactly that.  However, you are right; that will not happen, but there are ways in which we can address the issue.  For example, a UEFA licensing system is commonplace in continental Europe and shows that status within a league can be determined by more than just existing and performance on the pitch.  We can add on qualifications as we already do with grounds and with media facilities.  In UEFA’s system, there is also debt gearing. 

It is simple to build in a regulation meaning that a top-flight football club must have stake holder involvement in its governance.  The issue is whether they are sports or businesses and what the relationship is between those two things.  If you regulate from the perspective of something being good for sport and good for what the point of the business is, it is a good thing to do.  If it is just a business, people would object to it, but do we really believe that clubs are just businesses?   In my heart of hearts, I do not think that anybody in this room believes that, yet that argument makes the money. 

            Chair: We have to vote.  Sometimes there are two consecutive votes, which means that they will stretch out for the best part of half and hour.  I will come back anyway whether there are one or two votes. 

            Division in the House

            Clive Betts MP:  We were talking about the regulatory structures and what can be done to give fans a greater voice in their club.  We come back to that key issue over and over again.  Some of us feel a bit frustrated.  I was accused earlier of being a voice of despair but, with current ownership models, it is difficult to see how we can ensure that something meaningful is done.  We can put measures in places to say that clubs must consult their fans, but some clubs will just say, “Thanks very much” and go through the motions. 

            Brian Lomax: I will quote what Steve Powell said earlier.  If I was going there, I would not start from here.  To use an analogy—I am not trying to tell MPs their own business, but with regard to the events at Northern Rock, there would once have been a movement in the Labour party to say, “No, sorry, we will not bail you or the investors out unless the company is a co-operative or not-for-profit institution.”  If people invest in merchant banks, they run their own risks.  Since we started, we have tried to concentrate on setting a quality standard.  When we first drew up the rules of the first supporters’ trust in Northampton, we quickly found out that we could not become a charity because any group that supports a private or public limited company is not allowed to be charitable.  None the less, we based our constitution on that of a charity as that had the highest requirement on the people running it. 

            We are here to talk about quality standards in football and in communities.  There is a genuine shift of opinion taking place.  It will be a bit like snooker. When the same people win the same trophies every year for years, people lose interest.  I think that the profitability of the Premier League will wane.  It did extremely well to get the deal that it got last year for the next four years, but I am not sure that it will do so again.  Things have a limited shelf life and the gate figures at lower league clubs are going up year on year on year, even though that does not get anything like the proportion of publicity attached to football that it did 20, 30 or 40 years ago.  There will be a movement within public opinion and in football that this is the way to behave and that we should run things for the benefit of the communities and for individuals who are currently priced out of attending football matches.  We will see a change.  It will not be quick, but it will be gradual.  

            Dave Boyle: I think that you will be speaking to Rogan Taylor at some point.   His initiative, Share Liverpool, is trying to raise money to buy Liverpool Football Club.  It has had pledges of £80 million.  We know that the difference between a pledge and a real cheque is often very great, but it is notable that not a halfpenny of taxpayer’s money will support Rogan Taylor.  However, tax relief on investment to promote entrepreneurship helped Malcolm Glazer to take over Manchester United.  What model of entrepreneurship a hedge-fund take-over funded by debt achieves in the public policy of the UK is an interesting discussion.

However, supporting the community of Liverpool supporters to take on a stake in ownership is a very legitimate object of public policy.  Instead of legislation to say that there must be a fan on the board, we should empower fans who would like to be on the board to achieve their aim.  There is a vast inequality at the moment.  It is like Star Wars, a rag tag band of volunteers trying to fit it in with looking after the kids on Tuesday, versus very well-funded PR operations by some of the finest financial spin-wizards.  It is not a very fair fight, and helping those people would start to make a difference.

In conjunction with things such as licensing, we shall have to start moving a conception of a club.  We know what happens if standards are not set for grounds.  We saw what that led to in Hillsborough; we saw what it led to in Bradford.  No one would even concede that it is not the job of football authorities to regulate the quality of the stadium in which football is played.  We are now moving to the stage at which we need to start regulating for the quality of the governance of a football club.  That should be handled by football itself, but the Government should be giving it a push where appropriate. 

            Chair: I am not only a Labour and Co-operative Member of Parliament, but I converted a limited company to a worker co-operative and worked in it for a couple of years, as I converted a CRS retail store that was closing into a worker co-operative for the staff who worked in it.  The problem with the retail store was that the members of staff who took it over—although I was supporting it, I had my problems to deal with—did not have support from above for their lack of experience in management and buying.  After 15 months or so, it went down because it lacked that support.  You obviously give advice to football clubs, but presumably your funds are limited.  Clubs seem to be coping extremely well, but is there need for support from the centre that can be given as a grant for a limited time, at least?

            Brian Lomax:  When I was full time and in charge of Supporters Direct, it was much a period of starting new trusts.  It increased to 100 in a short time.  We spent a lot of time holding meetings throughout the country.  We now recognise that we have reached a new phase that is a consolidation and sustainability of the trusts for the future, particularly those with no immediate prospects of playing an active part in the running of the club.  How do you sustain that and the skills required to run a trust successfully for chairs, secretaries, treasurers and so on?  The old saying is that there are more copies of The Guardian than The Sun on football coaches nowadays.  A lot of people have been attracted to the trust movement because of their business experience.  The Chairman of the Trust at Watford is the International Vice-President of BP.  I could quote many such examples.

            I was seven years on the Football Club Board and it had a preconception, as did a lot of directors of other clubs, that if it had a fan on the board, the fan would be rushing out of the board meeting, down the pub and telling all his mates everything that had been discussed.  I have been trained as a social worker in the proper use of confidentiality.  We had a lot of people with such experience as officers, committee members of supporters’ trusts and serving directors on football club boards.  At the level of Northampton—my team—I guess that the average calibre of Supporters Direct elected directors is higher than that of the remainder.

            Dave Boyle:  I echo that.  The involvement of Supporters Direct and the trust directors has  improved the quality of decision making and governance of football clubs immeasurably.  Far too often, they forget basic lessons that not spending the money that they do not have, not planning for the future game and getting rid of their main asset and having no other revenue streams.  The supporters do not see it as a bit of fun, a hobby or a trophy asset, but a real and serious responsibility and are bringing the best standards to an industry that has been lacking.  A member of the panel said that now is a good time for football.  Well, 40 out of 72 football league clubs have been in insolvency in the past 10 years.  That is not a few bad apples, but a systemic, structural failure.  One of those failures is not just how the industry operates, but the fact that there is little date-keeping about who makes the decisions.  We always say that supporters’ trusts should not be trying to run the club per se.  It should be trust-owned and professionally run, and if that means hiring the right people—so be it.  It does not mean that fans are making absolutely every decision, but that the ultimate reason why the club is moving in such a direction is that that is the direction in which the fans want it to go, not that that is the way in which it maximises profit for an absentee landlord.

            Clive Betts MP:  You talk about licensing being the way forward.  Licensing in the premier divisions as it comes from the need to play in competitions.  Some might think that it is limited in scope at present.  What do you regard as the responsible body for ensuring that fans and magazines are monitoring licensing?  Should it be the individual leagues or should the FA play a role?

            Dave Boyle:  The present system is that UEFA set the standards and the individual leagues act as the agent for UEFA.  Members of the association do not check that every club in the premier league has a licence.  It asks the premier league to do it for them.  We would want to use a similar model.  There is where the knowledge is.  The main thing is that, whatever the licence says, it must be common throughout football and trying to achieve the same goal.  What we are looking for might differ depending on the circumstances, so some of the things from a Premier League club in respect of its finances would be different from, say, a club in the Unibond Premier.

However, the overall principle would be the same and the FA would be in charge of setting it, which would be, “What do we need to insist upon from this football club that will enable it to be sustainable not, as Lars-Christer Olsson used to say at UEFA, financially doping the club and essentially cheating other clubs in the way in which Ben Johnson cheated in the Olympics.  That is what we are trying to achieve and it would be the FA that will essentially say, “Is your licensing system achieving the overall goal that we, as the governing body, has set?”

How you implement it is an area of expertise that you have as the actual league with a relationship with those clubs.  You would want to leverage the expertise and get by it.  If you want to get the clubs to think that that is a good thing, you would want the league that they see as their primary relationship to be the ones who are promoting you.  They would trust it and know that it was based on their circumstances.  They knew those who were taking the action, and they also knew that it knew that it was robust and independent.

            Chair:  Can you tell us what has happened when privately owned clubs have got into serious difficulty?  More often than not—as least according to newspaper headlines—a private group steps in and carries out a rescue.  In some cases, you have given support to people who have done it as a democratically owned club.  Give us one or two cases.

            Dave Boyle:  We find that we cannot get away from the numbers. The debt is the debt.  We often find that the way in which the club is rescued has to wrestle with the same problems as those who wrestled with it prior to administration.  The two levers for any insolvency practitioner are whether he can cut costs and whether he can increase income.  Income generally cannot be increased that much more in a football club in a short time and costs cannot be cut because of the football quota rule.  The club goes into administration and tends to lose the debts to the non-football creditors, such as the ambulance service, other public bodies and local printers, and remains with the massive football debts.

To some extent, the supporters have come in generally when it has been so bleak that not even a wealthy individual wants to risk his cash.  It tends to be the backer of last resort.  Unfortunately, from our prospective they have spent a heck of a lot of creative energy and time turning round an awful situation and the moment that they turn it into a good situation,  suddenly everyone is interested.  Lincoln City is a classic case in a point.  It was a real struggle to get investors into that club when it went into administration.  When it had four or five years in the play-offs, got rid of the debt and had a nice piece of land at Sincil Bank, suddenly lots of people became interested in being involved in the club once more and the supporters were suddenly seen almost as an intensive care unit.

To its credit, Lincoln has rejected the idea that the real business of taking the club forward should be given to other people but, too often, a lot of time and energy is spent dealing with someone else’s mess.  That is where the governance issue needs to come in.  It is a job for the FA and the leagues to stop the clubs getting into the mess in the first place because debt is debt.  Money does not disappear.  People still need to be paid what they were supposed to be paid and that is a legacy that must be dealt with.

Chair: Does each of you wish to say something before we finish?

Brian Lomax: At this year’s conference, James Purnell who was briefly Secretary of State for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport said that he would not be satisfied until there was elected supporters’ representative on every football club board at all levels.  In a revised mission statement, that should go into the FA’s aims and purposes.  That quality standard should be an insistence for registration in the leagues.  We are converting a lot of people to that point of view.

Dave Boyle:  The involvement and support of the board is more than just a moral fillip for the owners, not just something to make people feel good, but something that will bring real benefit to the governance and quality of decisive making.  That, combined with stronger regulation from the appropriate authorities within football, could start to make a difference, but we have to start seeing that a good-run, sustainable club has supporters involved and has a dimension of community ownership.

We should be promoting the track record of those clubs and ensuring that they are paying their tax bills, not spending money that they do have, being a good neighbour—all the things across many levels.  We want Supporters Trust-run clubs and community clubs to have such matters as their starting point.  Anything that can be done to encourage that would bring about big changes in the game from a small level.

Chair:  Thank you.