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The great strength of football is the extraordinary
passion it excites in its followers and supporters. It is tremendous
that we all feel so passionately about it. Everybody feels they
own a part of it and have an opinion on it. And so they should.
Football, after all, is the world’s greatest spectator sport. Some observers argue that in purely financial terms
football is still a very minor industry. However, it is important
to remember that its central role in people’s lives lends it an
importance in national life over and above the financial value of
the clubs themselves. That is why people like Alan Sugar and Sir
John Hall are attracted to owning clubs, because the publicity value
of such ownership has a value beyond any direct financial profit
made. So I believe football is and always has been big business.
That is why it is so important that it is governed and regulated
in an appropriate way. Players’ Wages Two major interlocking themes in the current debate
about football are the huge scale of the infusion of television
monies which has recently come into the game and how this has been
distributed, and the recent dramatic increase in players’ wages.
As chief executive of the players’ union, the PFA, representing
over 4,000 professional footballers in England and Wales, I have
some views on these issues. The first point I would like to make
is that football is a tough game and has not always been financially
rewarding for players. By way of illustration: I remember when I
played at Bolton Wanderers in the early 1960s just before the maximum
wage was removed. The tough-tackling full-back Roy Hartle used to
say, ‘Never mind the ball, let’s just get on with the game.’ A recurrent theme in the writings of many commentators
on recent developments in football is that players are being too
well rewarded. I think that it is worth remembering at this point
that ultimately the game is about players, and they should get some
credit for this. I detect, sometimes, an undercurrent of envy about
players earning good money, while at the same time there is no envy
of our top film, TV or popular music stars earning a lot. I recall
the fears when the maximum wage was removed in 1961 about how this
move would damage the game. It had to be removed because it was
infringing basic rights and freedoms, represented a restraint of
trade, and was beyond the law. Five years later England won the
World Cup. It is therefore quite ironic that nearly four decades
later we have the Bosman ruling (which ensures freedom of movement
of players who are out of contract) which in the essence of the
spirit of its judgement only reflects what Judge Wilberforce said
back in 1963 when judging the retain-and-transfer system to be illegal.
Now clubs and governing bodies are saying that the Bosman ruling
has unleashed unsustainable wage inflation to the extent that some
form of salary-capping is being seriously discussed as a counter-measure.
I would see such a measure as also a restraint of trade and the
PFA would oppose it vigorously. I can recall the regional meetings about removing
the maximum wage and one particular delegate stood up and said,
‘I don’t see what the problem is with a maximum wage of £20. My
father works down the pit and earns a lot less than that.’ And Tommy
Banks, in his broad Lancashire accent, replied: ‘Yes, I hear what
you say. I admire your father’s profession. In fact I’ve been down
the pit, I’ve done his job. But you try and tell your father to
come up out of that pit and mark brother Stanley Matthews next Saturday.’
The point I want to make is that being a footballer is a very special
skill and it is only right that the players should be rewarded fairly
for that. On the other hand we are trying to introduce a
sense of responsibility amongst the profession along with other
interested parties in the game such as supporters, the FA and the
government, through the PFA in England and the International Players
Association (FIFA-PRO). We are trying to develop a recognition that
the problems of football cannot be solved by one interested party
alone, but only through a coming together of what other authors
in this collection might describe as stakeholders. By way of illustration,
if you think back to the 1980s when the game reached its nadir and
we had the Bradford, Heysel and Hillsborough tragedies, it is important
to note that football on its own could not have resolved these problems.
It would therefore be naïve of me, as a football administrator,
to think that we, or any other interested party, can operate purely
on the basis of the pursuit of their particular constituency’s self-interest.
You need to be aware of both global and local perceptions of your
organisation and its members. You need to keep abreast of legal
developments: government has to be actively involved in the football
industry, for example with respect to such issues as health and
safety, particularly at stadiums; or in relation to the granting
of work permits to overseas players, a particularly important issue
for the PFA. The Role of Supporters’ Groups The importance of the involvement of a wider range
of interested parties is nowhere better illustrated than by the
very positive influence brought to the game when, after Heysel and
Hillsborough, football supporters started to get themselves better
organised. This had the effect of reasserting the central role of
supporters in the theatre of the game. By way of example: as a player
you used to think you were responsible to the manager, who you perceived
as having the easier job as your situation was very insecure. The
manager was responsible to the board and it stopped there; there
was no sense of any network of obligations beyond that. But of course
it doesn’t stop there, because every board of directors is responsible
to its supporters if not to its shareholders (and both if its supporters
are also shareholders). And I would not like to think that the game
could ever be taken away from the influence of its supporters. The
game has to be about packed stadiums. The way supporters responded
after Heysel and Hillsborough should never be forgotten. The fact
that since that time supporters have been involved, together with
the Football Trust, local authorities, the police and many other
bodies in addressing the issues of ground safety and improving the
quality of the experience at football grounds, has been very important
in laying the foundations for football’s renaissance. It is important
to remember that in 1986 Margaret Thatcher would have closed down
football quite willingly, and a sizeable minority of the public
would have supported her in doing so. But it was the work of the
aforementioned fans’ groups and other interested parties which has
contributed to the game’s rebirth and to making it so popular today.
This success is the reason why there is so much interest in the
game today. As a consequence, everybody feels they have a piece
of it and everybody wants to mould it in their own particular way.
But they all have to remember that to maintain the current level
of success we need to continue to treat the interests of all these
interested parties in a balanced way so that no one group’s interests
dominate. For example, we cannot and should not ignore capital coming
into the game, via individuals like Jack Walker at Blackburn Rovers;
on the other hand you do not really want any particular club to
become too dependent on one individual, which is unhealthy. The Role of TV Similarly, with reference to Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB’s
attempt to take over Manchester United, you have to acknowledge
that while there were problems with this particular case, the influence
of satellite TV money on football has largely been beneficial. In
the 1980s, when the game needed television money, it was completely
dependent on contracts with the terrestrial networks. At one point
the FA and the Football League thought there were too many televised
games and that this was affecting attendances. For a period of some
months, between contracts, there were no televised games and at
this point the FA, the Football League and the clubs realised they
needed the TV money. They then had to go cap in hand to the BBC
and ITV (this was in the era before the introduction of satellite
TV) for a £1 million a year deal, a very small sum of money indeed. While it may be an unpopular thing to say in some
circles, I feel you do have to give some credit to the satellite
TV companies for the way they entered the televised football marketplace.
They took a gamble on football. At the time BSkyB was not trading
profitably. Rupert Murdoch saw what a lot of his competitors, as
well as nearly all the commentators on the game, did not see at
that time, which was the value of sport as a television spectacle
because of how much it meant to people, how important it was in
our social fabric. And BSkyB’s dedicated sports channels have been
particularly successful, a success they deserve. However, while acknowledging the contribution of
satellite TV to football’s rebirth, I am not in favour of BSkyB
achieving an undue, monopolistic dominance over the running of the
game, similar to that which they currently enjoy over football broadcasting;
particularly through taking over a football club. There were many
people who felt it was inevitable that BSkyB would be allowed to
take over Manchester United and that such a development was not
problematic. But the PFA made clear at the time, through its submission
to the MMC enquiry, that it felt that such a move would be unhealthy.
Firstly, it would have dramatically increased the competitive power
of one club, Manchester United, to the point of an unhealthy unchallenged
domination, a point I discuss in more detail in the next section.
Secondly, a TV company controlling a very desirable club would have
a totally unfair advantage over its rivals, and for all intents
and purposes would dominate any future negotiations over TV rights
and the division of TV revenues. This would soon result in many
small clubs either having to be wound up or being absorbed as nursery
clubs into the dominant clubs in their particular areas. At present,
football is a social sport enjoyed by large numbers of people every
week; the fear was that it might become a TV sport where people
wishing to view top-class football had no option but to stay at
home and watch the same dominant clubs playing each other each week.
We therefore welcomed the recommendation of the MMC, and the decision
of the government, to block the bid. The Restrictive Practices Court Case and the
Importance of Competitive Balance A key reason that the MMC gave for rejecting BSkyB’s
bid for Manchester United was that it would increase polarisation
within the Premier League by opening the door to a handful of clubs
with financial links to media companies to become much more powerful
than the rest, an analysis with which I would agree. It is therefore
doubly ironic that it is another government agency, the Office of
Fair Trading (OFT), who, through their decision to challenge the
right of the Premier League to negotiate collectively on behalf
of its member clubs by taking a case to the Restrictive Practices
Court (RPC), came very close to undermining the ability of football
to try and maintain the fairest and highest level of competition
within the game. The OFT proposed that the Premier League’s exclusive
rights to negotiate broadcasting rights for all its members was
a restraint of trade and that individual clubs should be free to
negotiate their own deals. If they had been successful in their
case, they would have unleashed a free-for-all which would have
created an imbalance in resources among the Premier League’s membership
and destroyed competitive balance. Thankfully the RPC rejected the
case. If you are serious about regulating football efficiently,
your top priority has to be to ensure that competition is as healthy
as possible so as to create maximum uncertainty in results. Now
that particular job is becoming more difficult. England is unique
in the world in that it has 92 full-time professional clubs. We
also have the highest aggregate attendances. More people watch football
live in the Football League than in the Premier League. You cannot
ignore those statistics, which are a credit to our game. The reason
supporters go to our games in such large numbers is because both
the Football League and the Premier League are so competitive. We would not be doing our job in sport if we allowed
the erosion of uncertainty of results; if we undermine a system
that, prior to the formation of the Premier League, in the last
30 years saw 50 different clubs in the top division; if we allow
to continue a system where the three clubs that get promoted into
the Premier League from the Football League each season are odds-on
with the bookmakers to go down after one season in the top flight.
In that case I would not be doing my job as a sports administrator
and neither would the FA, the Premier League or the Football League.
Such a scenario is not in the best interests of the game because
it is counter-productive. The only way we are going to maintain
an interest in football is by keeping high level of uncertainty
of results. That is why it is doubly important that we do not see
the Premier League dominated by a handful of clubs and where there
is no effective and long-lasting mobility from the Football League
to the Premier League. In this respect, the recent blanket dominance
of the domestic game by Manchester United does raise the question
as to how healthy the competition levels are in the domestic game
when United are able to consistently dominate the main domestic
competitions. Proof of the imperative to have aggressive regulatory
structures in your league in order to maintain a high level of balance
and competitive uncertainty is provided by that arch-capitalist
country, the United States of America. I regularly visit US sports
associations and see how they genuinely try to give the bottom club
the very first choice of the college football draft pick system
in order to make them more competitive; the way that the National
Football League (NFL), for example, organises commercial income
and then distributes it equally to the League’s member clubs to
ensure that clubs have sufficient resources at their disposal to
remain competitive. That is why it is imperative that football’s
main world governing bodies, UEFA and FIFA, curb the political in-fighting
that has bedevilled them and concentrate on the main job in hand
maintaining a high level of competitive balance in the game at all
levels. The success of football depends on a strong infrastructure
with effective and independent governing bodies. If financial and
administrative control of the game were to be concentrated in the
hands of a few clubs and TV companies worldwide, the game would
suffer. The Influence of the European Commission It is imperative that UEFA concentrate on the problem
of creeping imbalance within the game because of the stance that
has been adopted by the European Commission in relation to the development
of young talent. The European Commission believes that sport and
football, in terms of competition legislation, should be treated
exactly the same as any other business. But it never has been, and
in my opinion, it never will. In order to be successful, sports
leagues need to foster a high level of competition; in conventional
business sectors the emphasis is on eliminating your competitors.
It was interesting to reflect on the outcome of
a recent Belgian court case involving a Finnish basketball player
playing in Belgium. The court decided that it was good for the competition
to have windows of time when players cannot be bought or sold to
avoid, for example, the richest club suddenly buying in a number
of expensive, high-performance players in a desperate bid to avoid
relegation. It is also interesting that the Court of Arbitration
for Sport (CAS), the leading international court for sports issues,
is still considering whether it is appropriate for football that
one owner has more than one club in the same competition. This is
in response to an appeal by ENIC, an investment vehicle, which combines
interests in four clubs – a majority stake in Slavia Prague (the
Czech Republic), a minority stake in Rangers (Scotland), and full
ownership of Vicenza (Italy) and AEK Athens (Greece) (see also Chapter
8 by Adam Brown). ENIC challenged UEFA’s ruling that only one of
its clubs could compete in the same competition. Now, I find this
episode extraordinary. Look at what happens in Formula One motor
racing, where it is not unusual to see a number-two driver on the
point of winning a race take his foot off the pedal to let the number-one
driver pass to win. Similarly, in horse-racing, you see what happens
when an owner has two horses in a race and the outsider usually
wins, to the extent that in France they quote the prices of the
two horses together. The FA’s own rule prohibiting multi-club ownership
came about because of the way in which Robert Maxwell took control
of Derby, Oxford and Reading, and the consequent fears of the implications
of this move. You would not think you would have a difficult job
convincing politicians of the undesirability of having one owner
with more than one club in the same competition. But because of
politicians’ central role in determining competition policy, it
is critical they are involved in this debate, as there are a number
of siren voices out there who are arguing that multi-club ownership
is not a problem, which it very definitely is. Politicians need
to understand the imperative of maintaining competitive balance. Similarly, administrators need to take on board
the views of everybody – supporters’ organisations, business and
television which, after all, has been the driving force of all this
new income. Fortunately, because of the Taylor Report, that money
has not been totally wasted. But I would say that any administrator
needs to convince his club that a certain large percentage of any
future income needs to go into capital projects for the future;
in youth development programmes; in positive community work such
as drug-awareness programmes where my players do their best to act
as role models; in anti-racism programmes. And particularly that
they concentrate their efforts on ensuring that the next generation
of supporters will be able to afford to enter the grounds. We need
full stadiums and we cannot afford to let football become an armchair
spectator game. We need to address the issue of low-income fans,
families with young children, the disabled, the unemployed being
excluded or priced out of the grounds, because this is where a large
section of the next generation of supporters is going to come from.
We ignore this fact at our peril. We need live spectators in the
grounds for a healthy game. A purely television spectacle will not
work. Conclusion Finally, I would make this point: public companies
say their first priority is to their shareholders. I don’t agree
with this proposition in the context of football clubs. If a football
club is a public company in a professional league then the FA must
say to them that their first priority is to their football supporters
and not to the shareholders. Ultimately the successful clubs are
the ones which are centred in their local communities, and that
is as it should be. That is why the football authorities should
not allow schemes such as Wimbledon’s proposal to move to Dublin. This link between football and community is what I think of when I remember living in Manchester at the time of the Munich disaster and all the sadness surrounding it. Yet that club, just a few days later, provided a team that still stayed in the FA Cup and still stayed in the European Championship. Contrast that with the 1999–2000 season when the same club was offered an exit for commercial and political reasons and withdrew from the FA Cup. If that illustrates the way the game is going, it is certainly not going down a path which I would want to travel. |
