A confession: I am not a football fan. I have never even been to a game. This does not mean that I am ignorant of the size of football’s fanbase, or the financial scale of the game. On the contrary.
Association football is an English creation, emerging from English public schools, and the Football Association, still the English game’s governing body, was formed in 1863. Sheffield FC, which predates even that, is acknowledged as the oldest football club in the world. But it was the creation of the Premier League in the early 1990s, and a then-revolutionary deal with Sky over broadcast rights, that turned English football into today’s financial behemoth.
Money attracts politicians. Football exercises an additional pull because its popularity promises a reach beyond the boundaries of politics, to issues that resonate emotionally with voters. Bill Shankly, the charismatic, driven Scotsman who managed Liverpool FC, was at least half-serious when he remarked: ‘Somebody said that football’s a matter of life or death to you, I said: “Listen, it’s more important than that.”’
With politicians comes the desire to regulate and control. In April 2021, Oliver Dowden, then Culture, Media and Sport Secretary, established a ‘fan-led review of football governance’. It was instructed to ‘explore ways of improving the governance, ownership and financial sustainability of clubs in English football’, and Dowden appointed former sports minister Tracey Crouch as its chair.
Crouch delivered the review’s report in November 2021 and the government responded in April 2022, accepting all its recommendations. In March this year the Football Governance Bill was introduced in the House of Commons, and had reached committee stage when Parliament was dissolved for the general election. But it had enjoyed cross-party support, and the new Government recently brought in its own Football Governance Bill, this time in the House of Lords. A date is yet to be set for the first debate on its provisions.
The bill establishes an Independent Football Regulator (IFR), a public body which will examine the sustainability of English football and produce regular ‘State of the Game’ reports. It will also oversee a scheme of operating licences for clubs, with rules on ownership, financial dealings and other matters.
Do not be reassured by the smooth, accentless prose of parliamentary draughtsmen: this bill is an extraordinarily coercive measure. It proposes a public regulator, with significant investigatory and enforcement powers, to oversee a sport, a sport more popular and more lucrative than darts or badminton or curling, but a sport nonetheless. A game.
This is not some paper tiger. The IFR, by overseeing licensing, will regulate where football teams play, how they administer their finances, even the process for changing their crests or the colour of their shirts. Let me repeat that: the Government is creating a statutory public body which will regulate ‘the process to follow when looking to change the team’s crest, [or] predominant home shirt colours’.
I do not know whether a regulator will ‘protect and promote the sustainability of English football for the benefit of fans and the local community football clubs serve’. It seems prima facie implausible, on my general principle that state intervention is usually the worst way of achieving anything, but sometimes the only way. The Premier League alone is a multi-billion pound industry which has flourished through dynamic private enterprise since it replaced the old First Division 32 years ago, and there is no reason to think that government regulation will make it healthier or more prosperous.
You do not have to be a minimalist-state, do-what-thou-wilt libertarian to think that the state has no business extending its control to the colour of football strips. We live in a time of profound questions about the capabilities and extent of the state. I am persuaded by the argument, as articulated by Kemi Badenoch in her bid for the Conservative Party leadership, that ‘Government should do fewer things but better. And what it does, it should do with brilliance.’
Britain is struggling under the heaviest tax burden for 70 years, with the state taking more than 36p in every pound. We are so highly regulated that the application process to build the Lower Thames Crossing has already cost £295 million without a single spade hitting the ground.
It is not often I agree with self-appointed keeper of the Tory conscience Lord Frost, who criticised the Government’s plans recently in The Daily Telegraph. But he was right to identify the danger for the proposed IFR of mission creep. Once public bodies exercise a degree of control, they always want to expand, never retreat. This is not just about football, but a microcosm of a state which is addicted to regulating and exerting influence.
It seems like the darkest of jokes now that Keir Starmer began his premiership promising a government that would ‘tread more lightly’ on our lives. His and his party’s instincts run strongly in the opposite direction, on the economy, transport, education, healthcare, the arts. But it beggars belief that they have considered recent political history and concluded that the solution is more government. The Football Governance Bill should be a watershed. It was a bad Tory measure and it is a bad Labour measure. Drop it, and let sport proceed in peace.
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