Professional Football (Regulation)

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and that is central to what I want to get across. It is about the whole of football. Yes, it is about the big clubs such as Manchester United and Liverpool, and my hon. Friend is right to say that the sheer volume of debt that has been dragged into those clubs puts their very basis at risk. However, the same applies to the minnows—I do not use that word dismissively—in football, which are absolutely vital to the long-term future of our national game. In the context of Manchester United, may I just say that their support base is aggrieved? Last Saturday, tens of thousands of the 75,000 supporters were waving green and yellow flags—as my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Central (Mr. Caborn) is demonstrating—to show their unhappiness, anxiety and concern about their club, which was once free of debt. The takeover by the Glazer family in May 2005 cost £810 million. Of that, some £540 million was in loans. In the period since the takeover, £340 million has left the club to service the debt that was brought in to finance that highly leveraged deal. That is a preposterous amount of money to be leaving a club such as Manchester United, even though the club, along with Real Madrid, lays claim to being the biggest or the second biggest sporting venture on the globe. That money has been put in week after week by supporters and customers. Last year, Manchester United reported a profit of £32 million. Only the sale of Ronaldo for £80 million—he was clearly an asset, but I was not necessarily sorry to see him go, given the saga that took place—turned a loss of £48 million into a profit of £32 million, and arguably that was in the most financially successful playing period in English football in recent times. I do not say this with any happiness, because it is clearly a very unhappy situation, but the situation has become even more perverse, with the club floating a bond of £500 million to retire some of the debts. We are told that as a result of that, and of the commitments that have been made, the Glazer family can take £172 million out of Manchester United next year, which is a phenomenal amount of money for a club with a sales turnover of £280 million. Such figures do not add up in the long run. It might be that the Glazers have a cunning plan, but nevertheless I must say to my hon. Friend the Minister that we now need transparency at club level to ensure that the supporter knows what is going on. If there has been a failure at club level, there has also been a failure at league level. We see so many clubs—the ones that we have already talked about up and down the country—in difficulty, and that is felt at a national level. A sad reality is that it makes economic sense for clubs to scour the world looking for nearly-ready talent to come into our game, rather than putting the money into the development of the next generation. That is why the smaller clubs matter in football. Clubs such as Chester City and Stockport County were the feeders for the bigger clubs, and then the bigger clubs were feeders to the even bigger clubs.