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“Any club owner is merely the latest in a long line of temporary custodians of a community asset...” So states the recent Fan Led Review of football. The Review was set up in April 2021 to ‘explore ways of improving the governance, ownership and financial sustainability of clubs in English football’. The review was triggered by three main things.
The collapse of Bury FC after 130 years as a football club, and which led to a 2019 Conservative Manifesto commitment to a review of football. The Covid19 pandemic highlighting the perilous position of all but the very super-rich clubs. The failed attempt to set up a European Super League in April 2021.
The case for reform is well understood by most fans across football and is comprehensively detailed within the review, covering football governance, owners and directors, equality diversity and inclusion, distribution of wealth, fan engagement, the women’s game and player welfare. The ‘highlights’ of evidence for the case for reform include:
Since the 1999/2000 season, 17 out of 21 seasons of the Premier League (80%) have seen collective pre-tax losses, cumulatively almost £3billion.
Since 2010/11 all Championship clubs have made a loss every season, amounting to almost £2.5billion.
UEFA state that total wages as a proportion of turnover should not go above 70%: in the Premier League it is 73% and 87%
if the ‘top six’ clubs are excluded. In the Championship, it’s 120% and for some clubs it’s almost 200%.
Numerous examples of where the ‘fit and proper persons’ test has proved inadequate (don’t have to look too far for this in the North East!).
A lack of diversity in some areas of football (very few openly gay professional footballers, just ten British Asians out of 4,000 professional footballers, one Black or Asian professional referee, no Black managers out of 92 professional football clubs, 7% of board directors female).
The top team in the Championship receiving just 9% of what the bottom team in the Premier League gets – e.g. £8.5m compared to £96.8m in 2018/19.
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