Professional Football (Regulation)

I spent a happy and productive afternoon at Macclesfield football club when I opened its centre for technology and development, which is still being used. I also represent Sheffield, which has the oldest football club in the world, so I have something of a vested interest in this issue. On political intervention, I disagree with my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Central (Tony Lloyd), which I rarely do. In 2005, when I was Minister for Sport, this country had the presidency of the European Council. We held a meeting in Liverpool with members of the European Commission, Members of the European Parliament and Ministers for Sport from all member states to look at the state of football and how we could address something called the Nice protocol. Heads of Governments had said that sport was different from business and the commercial world, and that it had a specific value, and the question was how to translate that into practice, because there was no legal base in the European Union to help us do so. However, with the support of UEFA, we set up an independent European sports review, which produced the Arnaut report. That resulted in a European white paper and a number of moves from UEFA that I will describe a little later. There was real concern about how we would tackle sport in the European Union, and that was particularly true of football because its regulations were being settled in the European courts and the Bosman and Charleroi rulings were having a profound effect on how football was being governed. We had to determine whether football was a business, because if it was not, the question was how it would be governed. Interestingly, there was some political intervention, because Ministers for Sport were looking at the good governance of sport. Rugby league and cricket modernised their governance. Cycling, which was bankrupt, also did so, and its progress has been fantastic from then on in. A whole series of governing bodies looked at themselves and asked, ““Are we fit for purpose as we move into the 21st century?”” The FA set up the Burns report and a structural review. Had the report been implemented—Terry Burns said that it was the absolute minimum that the FA would have to undertake to become a fit-for-purpose governing body—we would probably not be facing some of the problems before us. If I make one plea to the Government and sport in general, it is that football should modernise its governance, otherwise we will deal with the symptoms but not the cause, which is the problem that football does not have good governance and good regulation because it has not implemented the Burns report or something like it. Such modernisation will be fundamental if football is to be governed in the way in which many people want.