Professional Football (Regulation)

My hon. Friend anticipates part of what I am going to say. He is absolutely right: if we do not have an international dimension to all this regulation, we fail our national game, because there is no doubt that at every level—not just the top level—the interrelationship of clubs across Europe and around the world matters. Even in the lower leagues in England, we see players being drawn in from south America or Africa. Our game is global at almost every level and that is why we need to internationalise the regulation. At no point would I argue that there is no room for debt in football. Debt is probably a necessity when clubs—whether Runcorn or Liverpool—are looking to develop new stadiums. It is quite possible that the introduction of some debt is legitimate. I am also not arguing against foreign ownership and least of all against foreign players coming into the English game. There are good examples of foreign owners. Randy Lerner at Aston Villa is an American and he has shown a real commitment to the game of football, to Aston Villa and to all that the club means to the people of Birmingham and beyond. However, we must now have something that begins to bear down on the excesses that have taken place in football. My right hon. and hon. Friends in government—our Ministers—have a responsibility to look seriously at the Government's role. We can no longer accept a hands-off approach from central Government. Football is our national sport and an international issue, and if we are taking this argument into Europe and around the world, we need the Government to be behind it, as they are, for example, rightly behind the campaign to bring the World cup to England in the years to come. We need to look at establishing some principles. We need to say that the development of the national game is vital, so that any strategy for football must look at the game as a totality and not just at the individual clubs. We must look at the need to develop home-grown players and at how we bring those players through the system. We also must look at the role of the supporter. My hon. Friend the Member for City of York (Hugh Bayley) raised the issue of the supporter, and we have to put the football fan at the centre of the football family. There is a paradox: 10 years ago, the football taskforce produced a very sensible report. Its majority report made very sensible recommendations; yet a decade on, we are still waiting for their implementation. In fact, the all-party group on football, which includes a number of Members who are in Westminster Hall today, including my hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester, made very sensible recommendations a year ago about the future of football. In that sense, there is nothing new in what I am about to say. However, what is frustrating is that we have seen so little action on this issue, although football is now arguably in a state of financial crisis. We have to put the Football Association back in charge of football. However, it must be an FA that, first, is not cowed by the money in the premier league or the Football League and, secondly, does not express the complacency that I evidenced earlier and begins to say that it will stand up for the stakeholders in modern football. We have got to give some reality to the question, ““Who is a fit and proper person in the game of football?”” With Portsmouth, for example, nobody even knew who the owners of the club were, never mind whether they were fit and proper people to be in football. Clearly, the concept of a fit and proper person is way beyond not only the ordinary supporter but the wider stakeholders in football. Within that concept, we have to include the idea that financial stability and credibility is part of that matrix of fitness and properness. That financial stability and credibility must include the capacity to absorb debt, or rather not absorb debt, into the club. There is nothing anti-capitalist in this argument—I say that for the benefit of my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington.