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Lord Grantchester: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Faulkner for securing this debate today. I pay tribute to him for keeping sport and our national game firmly within our attention, recognising that it has significance to millions in their lives, whether as players, supporters, armchair critics, family or community participants.
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I declare an interest as a past director of Everton Football Club.
Lord Grantchester: My Lords, I am glad to see that we have a supporter present.
I am the present chairman of Liverpool County FA Local Football Partnership and a trustee of the Foundation for Sports and the Arts.
I wish to make some comments as a backcloth to our debate today. The first and obvious area is financial. The accountants, Deloittes, produce an excellent report each year which has highlighted how financial returns and wealth are becoming more and more concentrated in the hands of the élite. The gap is widening between the top clubs and the lower leagues.
Even within the Premiership, the returns going to the top three or four clubs have produced a major distortion of competition. The pyramid system of promotion and relegation, even within the top élite of the Premiership, cannot work effectively with such financial hurdles whereby an ambitious club—and one could have classed Leeds United in this category—can hardly manage the risk.
There are those who have sought an alternative business model—community ownership—and have engaged in discussions with Treasury Ministers. I await the result of their deliberations with interest. However, a simple solution is available within football and I call upon the Premier League, and the majority of clubs that are excluded from the top riches and yet can effect change, to restructure the merit payments to produce a more equitable distribution. Competition not finance should be the spur to improvement. After all, the top clubs must have an opposition.
A strange contradiction has been produced. Never has there been such money going into the game and yet all but the few top clubs plead poverty. It is, of course, the players who have achieved predominance and managed to take most of the spoils. While there may be no real quarrel with this, nevertheless it denies the fact that football is a team game.
The individual relies on his club for the team. The players naturally contract their services to the highest bidder—that is, the clubs. I should like to propose to the clubs and the footballers' union, the Professional Footballers' Association, that they take a look at how a player's returns can give recognition back to the club in its pursuit of building a successful team. I suggest that a percentage of the personal endorsements that a player receives over and above his contract with his club is returned to the club.
The hunger for success has pushed many clubs to seek finance from the market and yet the modern idiom of shareholder value is inappropriate to running a football club. It has been an unhappy experience for the City institutions seeking a return for their investments. The dividends of soccer are points, trophies and yet more expensive players. Success and returns accrue to the
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community. It is, after all, business and the community that support the club through sponsorship; the owners are merely custodians.
I make this comment in the light of discussions on Merseyside between the two Premiership clubs—Liverpool and Everton—the city council, the North West Development Agency and the public purse. Both clubs wish to build new stadiums; both clubs need to maximise their resources to the playing staff—and yet both clubs seem to be approaching this in terms that they can do only what is in the best interests of their shareholders. Last week both sides met with the Minister for Sport, my right honourable friend Richard Caborn.
What is needed is a greater vision for the community of Merseyside, which will be celebrating as the European City of Culture in 2008. If public funds are to be made available, this should only be on the basis of a shared stadium, seeking maximum value for money and minimising infrastructure disbenefits.
As an aside—I use my colours in a sporting complexion—Peter Johnson made a curious remark to me on joining Everton's board. He said, "I didn't know I had a red in the boardroom".
As to the blue side of Merseyside, the noble Lord, Lord Lyell, is correct to pay tribute to Everton's community programme. Everton is the people's club. It has received "Community Mark" recognition from Business in the Community, especially in relation to its disabled development programme whereby eight different impairment group teams—such as amputee, deaf, partially sighted and five pan-disabilities—now field teams, and nearly 10,000 children and adults with disabilities participate in football.
I add my comments to those of my noble friend Lord Pendry in paying tribute to the Football Foundation on its work in supporting grass roots football. On Merseyside the Local Football Partnership is mandated with channelling this to football development, in partnership with the local authorities and other stakeholders.
Liverpool's LFP has identified key strategic objectives—namely, to reverse the decline in adult league football; to redevelop employer-sponsored and private sports grounds; to develop, in a strategic programme, outdoor pitches and facilities and the devolution of responsibility to clubs; to promote community use of school facilities; to promote the women's game; and to use football as a tool for social inclusion. Now in its third year, this strategy has delivered over £3 million towards club and community football and its facilities, with the objective of extending a further £20 million locally by 2007. My noble friend Lord Pendry is correct when he describes the work of the FA in this area.
I would also like to echo the concerns of my noble friend Lord Faulkner regarding corporate governance of the game. I have already commented on the lack of responsible patronage of those who have custodianship of our clubs. It is vital that the FA gets to grips with these issues and follows up the good work undertaken by
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Mark Palios, the recent departed FA chief executive. I echo the good wishes of my noble friend Lord Faulkner towards his successor.
The FA needs to recognise the development of gambling and, indeed, your Lordships will soon be grappling with the Gambling Bill. This is by no means a new feature, as the name of the footballer, Tony Kay, will remind some noble Lords. There were legitimate concerns expressed at the level of betting on the score line of 5:2 in a recent UEFA game. Everyone concerned with the game must recognise the serious issues that will arise when football clubs attract casinos to their stadiums. Continuation of income streams means that we have the wherewithal to seize the opportunities to improve football and its image to the delight of millions.
Lord Jones: My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lord Faulkner of Worcester for initiating this debate. It has been suffused with enthusiasm and insight. On Friday last, I heard on Radio 4's "Desert Island Discs" the voice of Tyneside's soccer icon, Sir Bobby Robson. He described how, on the Newcastle team coach after a Premiership match, one of his players exclaimed, "Boss, turn the bus around. I've left my diamond ear stud in the dressing room". Sir Bobby then reflected to his host, the cool Ms Lawley, that the young professionals of the premiership were paid too much. They did not know what to do with their riches. He implied that it was not good for the sport. It is the case that the superb English player, Mr Sol Campbell, is negotiating a new contract. It is speculated that the upper limit might be £100,000 per week, or more.
There is a moral aspect here for British society. Will it be good for the sport for the financial gap between the Premiership and the rest to continue apace? Do we undervalue the wonderful work of those who locally coach those boys and girls of school age, or those who scout, teach and encourage? How shall we further these good developments? Our health Ministers are panic-stricken at the advance of obesity among the school population. Can soccer be both the medicine and the antidote? Instead of building massive leisure complexes that are expensive to run and expensive to enter, why not string plentiful, all-weather, floodlit, five-a-side pitches through the ubiquitous social housing estates? Why cannot local youth soccer coaches be honoured? They do excellent work for young people in our communities. They are unsung, little thanked and responsible adults who help countless youngsters to achieve their potential and to gain confidence and good health.
Wrexham AFC languishes near the foot of its league. The town is outraged at its soccer team's perilous future. Long-time supporters want a certain future for their team at the Racecourse ground. Currently, sadly, it is a question of planning, debts, commerce, consortia, bidders, businessmen and administrators, and 10 points down the drain. It is the talk of Wrexham. The whole town is hurting. This is not a problem unique to Wrexham in north-east Wales, where I live. It is a phenomenon known across
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Britain in today's unstable football world. The contrasts are massive, from the glamorous soccer palace stadiums of the premiership to the precarious futures of financially wrecked lower league clubs.
I believe that somewhere in this there is a moral aspect for football. Principled leadership is required, and wise decisions are need from the powers that be. In all of this, I praise my own club, Connahs Quay Nomads, of which I am patron. We of the Welsh Premier League had a great day when Sir Alex Ferguson brought one of his young teams to play our first XI. The club has an agreement with Manchester United and I found that Sir Alex was a magnet for the many youngsters at the match. From the touchline to Sir Alex's seat in our tiny grandstand, those young boys and girls queued for his autograph. Patient and agreeable, he signed throughout the entire match. Nothing was too much trouble for one of the all-time greats of soccer management and leadership. This was not the image that is so unjustly served up in our tabloid media. This was a soccer ambassador from the heights of the Premiership and the theatre of dreams.
As a one-time season ticket holder for Everton, I saw the great half-back line of Harvey, Kendall and Ball in their blue shirts. It is the case that, in north Wales, on most Saturdays, motor coaches transport Welsh men and women to Premiership matches at Goodison Park, Anfield and Old Trafford, such is the allure of those great clubs and such is the cultural and economic link between north Wales and Merseyside. Is there anything nicer than going to a soccer match with one's son? But at about £35 a seat at the Premiership, it is not an option for everybody. It is getting harder and harder.
The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester has instanced his loyalty to West Bromwich Albion and he can also be justifiably proud of Chester Football Club, if he wishes. One recollects the famed derby matches of Chester and Wrexham in the old League Division North. At the Racecourse in Wrexham, in 1968, I think, I saw the Reds grind out a grim 1:1 draw with the Cestrians. My point is that there were 11,000 people present at that derby match. Oh, that both clubs might gain such mass support again! What is the financial and footballing fate of our lower leagues? Which footballing organisation is taking the lead to devise a survival plan?
When World War II ended, millions of men of the King's army returned home in 1946 and 1947. They were fit and confident men, and many of them joined village soccer teams. They had not always been at the battlefront. They were fit and at their physical peak. My recollection of the late 1940s is of every village fielding teams led by talented ex-servicemen. I remember that competition was very considerable. The field of play was often roughly reclaimed from wartime emergency agricultural production and was often of a daunting gradient. Those teams live on in the pub teams all over Britain that hack it hopefully on Sundays. They are the lifeblood of Britain's principal sport.
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Soccer is the people's passion. It has been part of our nation's social history and part of the warp and woof of British society. At its best, the game's nobility and stirring engagement is inspiring, but we need to act very quickly to save the game from possible disaster.
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