Southgate called in to back Wembley sale
England manager asked to endorse troubled £600m deal after grass-roots rebellion
The Football Association has drafted in Gareth Southgate for a last-ditch attempt to push through the troubled £600 million sale of Wembley after discovering that fewer than 40 per cent of people involved in the grass-roots game are in favour of the deal ahead of a decisive vote.
Southgate was called upon to deliver an endorsement at a hastilyarranged presentation to a select group of FA Council members and county game chiefs at St George’s Park just two days before the 127-member body gathers today to discuss Wembley’s fate.
The England manager was parachuted in after a piece of FA research showed just 38 per cent of the grass-roots game supported the sale, despite assurances that every penny of the offer from billionaire Shahid Khan would be spent on the amateur game.
Southgate, whose side take on Croatia tomorrow, was said to have cautiously welcomed the deal, telling the meeting that he had seen first-hand the problems with amateur facilities.
However, one senior FA Council member, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Daily Telegraph that Khan’s offer was in “serious risk of being torpedoed” today and warned chief executive Martin Glenn to expect fierce opposition before the councillors vote on Oct 24.
The FA consultation with 22,500 people – almost two thirds of whom were connected locally to football either as players, coaches, referees or volunteers – found 52 per cent of those over 55 were “unsupportive” of the sale. One player told the FA “... it’s like selling Buckingham Palace to Donald Trump”. Overall, 45 per cent of those questioned opposed the offer, while 17 per cent said they were neutral.
The council member, who claims to have been invited just four days
before the presentation on Tuesday, said: “Southgate walked straight in off the training ground and was extremely professional in everything he said, but the very fact he was there did hint at nervousness at the FA about the apparent gulf that has opened up between the bean counters and the people on the ground. I think the deal could be in real trouble on Thursday.”
Mark Burrows, the FA’S chief financial officer, invited the council to accept the deal, saying the
purchase price was higher than could have been achieved had Wembley gone out for tender. Southgate then said his players would welcome the opportunity to play at other stadiums every autumn if Khan’s NFL team, the Jacksonville Jaguars, were allowed to take annual residence at the home of English football.
Burrows and Glenn will lead the
presentations today and are expected to tell councillors the offer is potentially “transformative” for the amateur game, and that accepting the deal would ward off future financial threats. Burrows has said Khan’s offer of £600 million in cash and £300million in retained hospitality income is the best they will get. Burrows has also warned that the FA would be faced with financing up to £72 million of upgrades if failing to sell the stadium.
The council – which includes
representatives of the Premier League, Football League and county FAS and is often referred to as the parliament of English football – has no powers formally to stop the deal. However, it is understood the FA is not minded to go against the wishes of the wider game. Glenn and FA chairman Greg Clarke want a clear mandate from the stakeholders that make up the English game. It is understood a close vote in favour of the deal would not be accepted by the
board, which has given its approval, on the basis of widespread support.
Fulham-owner Khan sent a letter to every council member this week in which he said he would be a “responsible owner and operator of Wembley Stadium”. However, his PR campaign was undermined on Tuesday when he was embroiled in claims from a former member of his coaching staff alleging “systemic corruption” relating to his bid to buy the home of English football.
The Metropolitan Police con- firmed that officers were looking at the case following a report last year of “non-recent threatening behaviour” at Fulham’s training ground. Khan denies the claims by former assistant director of football, Craig Kline, who attacked the Wembley bid, claiming the stadium was worth £1.6 billion to the Fulham owner.
Khan has been in talks to buy the stadium since April. The outline deal is said to include operational limitations, including that no sponsor can gain “title” rights, such as renaming the stadium or adding a corporate brand alongside that of Wembley.
The deal has the backing of the Government via Sport England so today’s meeting is being considered as the final hurdle before solicitors can start considering the process of exchanging contracts.
A total of £113million is owed to public bodies who contributed to the original build costs, but the FA is confident that it can service the debt under the existing terms from profits and other sources of income. The £600million would be spent entirely on grass roots, the FA insists, including the creation of potentially thousands of 3G pitches.
FA pollsters were told selling Wembley was the equivalent of ‘selling Buckingham Palace to Donald Trump’
Great to hear that the presentation for selected Football Association council members by those seeking to persuade them to back the sale of Wembley Stadium included a quotation from Albert Einstein, whose oeuvre can generally be thrown in to support any given argument one chooses.
“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity,” was the Einstein slide flashed up for the benefit of those at St George’s Park this week, a meeting to which the FA had invited the council’s most influential voices.
Although it is tempting to imagine the scenario as someone trying gently to explain Instagram to their grandfather, you underestimate the old boys at your peril. They may be disproportionately concerned with the timing of the FA Cup final lunch dessert course but after years of sitting in these kinds of meetings, they know desperation when they see it.
A personal choice for the FA’S headline Einstein quotation would have been his line defining insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, a theory that has been thoroughly stress-tested by the FA over the years. As an organisation that took 28 years and 11 England managers to win a penalty shootout at a World Cup, few beyond the FA have shown greater dedication to proving Einstein right – but that is for another day.
Back to the meeting at St George’s chaired by Mark Burrows, the FA chief financial officer entrusted by his boss Martin Glenn, the chief executive, with pushing through the sale of Wembley. In his previous investment bank role, one assumes Burrows never had to worry about the focus group opinions of what the FA calls stakeholders. Especially not one that included “male 35-44, grass-roots player” who, the FA’S pollsters discovered, thought that selling Wembley was the equivalent of “selling Buckingham Palace to Donald Trump”.
No doubt Burrows included that slide in his presentation to get a laugh but, thinking about it, the Premier League’s fit and proper persons’ test would probably be fine with Trump owning Buckingham Palace. Either way, when it came to the crunch, it was the numbers that Burrows will have found the hardest to explain to those hand-picked members of the 127-strong council that, for better or worse, still has a hand in making the decisions that shape the English game.
The decision to sell Wembley, a £600million cash deal with Club Wembley business tacked on, is designed to fund the roots of the game. Yet 45 per cent of those people surveyed by the FA who work in the grass roots opposed that outcome, against 38 per cent who supported it and 17 per cent who did not offer an opinion. That will tell the council something, a group of people who, for all their faults, do know the state of the English game better than most.
The sale of Wembley has never really been about whether the grass roots need £600million of investment, because no one doubts that they do. The annual survey of the grass-roots game becomes ever more depressing each year, with July’s findings noting that only one in three pitches at that level is of adequate quality. There were 150,000 matches called off last season because of poor facilities, a shortage of 3G pitches, even if there are doubts about whether they represent the best option for the future – and so it goes on.
The question is whether the FA is competent to spend the proceeds of a sale that can never be reversed. The council that will vote on Wembley’s future has seen so much change on the executive floor of the FA since the turn of the millennium alone – six chief executives, six England managers – an organisation that no one seems to have a handle on for long.
The trend has become for those in charge to draw up a chairman or chief executive’s bucket list before they eventually hit the scandal or the opposition that does for them. Having surveyed the fate of his predecessors, Glenn has done the same, although no one believes he will be around to see the plan through. By the time Wembley is sold, the money dispersed and the recriminations are in, at the next select committee meeting there will be a whole new set of aims and blames in place.
Building Wembley was one of the FA’S greatest triumphs, the £757 million figure quoted including the cost of buying the original stadium rather than the simple build costs cited on similar projects like the Emirates or the new White Hart Lane. By the time Wembley reopened in 2007, those who had been at the start of the project in the late 1990s were long gone and while its rising costs during the seven years of construction were a constant source of FA embarrassment no one talks of that any longer.
There is concern about how the FA will keep Wembley contemporary, although there can only ever be one Wembley and the cost to Shahid Khan of building a venue capable of housing his NFL franchise he so plainly intends to move to London would be much greater than £600 million. The previous Wembley, opened in 1923, was not intended to last much longer than the Empire Exhibition, built in part of prefabricated concrete. Instead, it stayed in situ for 77 years, by the end a hopelessly out-of-date old relic full of great memories. It was still Wembley, however, just as new Wembley will also be, regardless of whether or not it has the finest HD screens or a leaky roof.
The more pressing question is not the rush to sell – there will always be a market for the most famous stadium in the country – the question is what happens to the money. The FA’S survey tells them what the grass roots think of the governing body’s ability to spend it – and you do not have to be Einstein to see why.