Funding for grass roots makes sale a no-brainer

Deal could liberate the England team and help to build world-class facilities at local level

Houston, we have lift-off. Martin Glenn could have been forgiven for doing cartwheels when Shahid Khan first proposed the possibility of buying Wembley Stadium. It was February 2017 and the Football Association chief executive was in Texas’s biggest city for Super Bowl LI with Khan, the owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars, as well as Fulham, wanting to share an idea that “popped into” his head. That idea almost appears too good to be true. On the face of it, it is certainly too good to turn down.

The details are still to be fully worked out – especially the guarantees the FA will seek to put in place – but the broad outline of the financial package was explained to the organisation’s board yesterday morning.

In principle – and, crucially, if all is as presented – it makes absolute sense to sell Wembley, just as it did not make any sense for the FA to own the stadium in the first place. Not at a crippling cost of £757million and especially when it had not always owned the old Wembley.

In fact, the FA has owned the stadium, old or rebuilt, for just 19 years. And there has been a Wembley – or a Wembley building site – for 95 years.

It is hardly selling off the crown jewels. It is not a betrayal of tradition. It will remain the home of English football.

Let’s cut to the chase. Since it was rebuilt and reopened in 2007, Wembley has been an albatross, a drain, a millstone around the FA’S neck and a symbol of how money is misspent in English football; a misguided idea from start to finish. The headline figures suggest that the FA will be guaranteed £600million in cash for selling Wembley, with up to another £350million to come in income. That is close to £1billion to relinquish responsibility for a stadium it does not need to own, with that money now being spent where it needs to go: into the grass roots of football. That is the crux of all this.

It is a national disgrace that the richest football country in the world – through the FA and the Premier League – does not have adequate facilities to play the game at every level. It is a disgrace that children are forced to play on mudheaps, or cannot play at all through lack of pitches, inclement weather or poor upkeep. It is embarrassing that we have so many waterlogged, neglected, vandalised municipal facilities. In 2014, there were 639 high-quality, publicly available artificial pitches in England. In Germany, there were 3,735.

Every village, never mind every town, should have the sports facilities to allow its children to play – and its adults. And that includes 3G and 4G pitches. Pass through Holland or Germany and those facilities exist, even for the smallest of communities. In England, that is not the case.

The FA has commissioned a plan for 330 new pitches over the next 10 years. If Wembley is sold, it will have the money to massively expand that plan and go even further if the various public bodies, including Sport England and the Government, waive the £113 million owed to them. There is talk of 1,500 pitches, it could be more, in the same time-frame, while the FA should put significant investment in coaching courses, refereeing programmes, the women’s game; investing in people, not servicing bricks and mortar in a grandiose stadium it does not need to own.

Spain and Germany do not have a national stadium and it has not done them any harm – not that anyone is even suggesting Wembley will no longer fulfil that role. It will just mean it does not always have to be used and paid for and maintained by the FA, which estimates it needs to find around £10 million a year for its upkeep – £10 million that can also now be spent elsewhere.

It felt like the FA only built it because it had to, the logic being it would be the centrepiece of a successful World Cup bid. But we

Spain and Germany do not have a national stadium and it has not done them any harm

know what happened there. And, anyway, that World Cup hope was not a good enough reason, with world-class stadiums being built all over the country.

There are so many pluses to selling Wembley. The England team can go back on the road for their autumn fixtures at least and reconnect with the whole country. FA Cup semi-finals will no longer have to be played at Wembley, thereby instantly banishing the notion that the competition is being undermined and fans ripped off. It is about putting people first and not about owning a huge stadium and fretting about it.

Selling Wembley is not only forward-thinking and smart but liberating. Wembley was a vanity project to try to artificially reflect England’s standing in world football at a time when that was heading towards rock bottom.

Selling it is the opportunity to build something more important. From the grass roots up.