Now the elite must step up to help save amateur game
Failed Wembley sale has at least shone light on desperate need for grass-roots support – and how Premier League has a duty to spread its wealth around
Selling Wembley Stadium was always a stark choice for the 127 members of the Football Association Council and, in the end, it was the choice that they rejected, rather than the £600million that was promised for the grass-roots game they know as well as anyone.
The decision to sell Wembley to Shahid Khan was not in the hands of the FA Council, it was simply that – as Khan himself said in his statement declaring his withdrawal from the proposed purchase – the FA executive had made the sale contingent on the council’s approval. The main board could have pushed through the sale independently but Greg Clarke, the FA chairman, asked for the council’s support and that was the beginning of the end for this sale at least.
The decision should never have been a case of the FA Council choosing between saving the grass roots and selling the FA’S greatest asset. The grass-roots crisis, the 150,000 matches cancelled because of sub-standard matches, the deficit of 3G surfaces (if, indeed, 3G is the answer), is not a problem that could be reversed only by the FA selling Wembley. The grass-roots crisis is a problem for all English football, and no one – especially not the country’s wealthiest clubs – should be allowed to convince anyone otherwise.
For Martin Glenn, the FA chief executive, and Clarke, it was an offer that they could not ignore and they went to considerable trouble to try to convince the FA Council and the wider world of its benefits. They failed to do so, although privately the FA was more hopeful of support at the council meeting next week than Khan evidently was.
There were strong arguments on both sides and at the very least the FA was prepared to test its own convictions rather than to take the sale to a point of no return before revealing its hand.
It is the belief of every FA leadership that theirs will be the one that changes the world. The problem is that very few get to run the full course and the members of the council have lived long enough to see most of them rise and fall. They could see the problems with distributing the legacy of any Wembley sale and how, over the years, the money could be frittered away, the buck passed and the blame placed on ousted regimes and individuals long departed.
Too much has changed at the FA just in the period from the demolition of the old Wembley to the building of the new one for there to be any firm belief that the organisation has the stability to spend and conserve the greatest windfall it has ever had. It is not that the council, the volunteers who run the game, do not want the money. They just do not want to sell the family silver to get what the game could easily provide through other means.
There will be a market for Wembley as long as there are NFL owners who are in the race to be the first franchise in London. A European NFL franchise opens up huge markets, including Africa and Asia, by virtue of playing on Gmt-friendly time alone. That is before one considers that all NFL teams are permitted a 75-mile radius territory in which they can strike sponsorship deals that do not have to be shared with the rest of the league, making London extremely lucrative for whoever becomes its first franchise.
Khan is one of the NFL’S richest owners, in possession of Jacksonville Jaguars, one of its least valuable franchises, albeit one that has doubled in value since he bought it in 2011. It is generally accepted that north and central Florida can accommodate only one NFL franchise, and that either the Jaguars or Tampa Bay Buccaneers, owned by the Glazer family, would have the most to gain by relocating to the United Kingdom.
For the Glazers, the owners of Manchester United, buying Tottenham Hotspur – soon to have the only other Nfl-ready stadium in the UK – is out of the question. They, too, would need a permanent home and other than building a new Nfl-ready Old Trafford, it is hard to see where they go other than Wembley or striking a deal with Daniel Levy, the Tottenham chairman. Khan’s bid for Wembley was pre-emptive but the question of where a UK NFL franchise would play has not gone away.
In the meantime, the message to the rest of football is that the solution of its grass-roots crisis cannot be borne by the FA alone. Richard Scudamore’s successor as the chief executive of the Premier League will be under pressure to keep revenues for his clubs rising, and at what expense? Scudamore has held the 20 together and insisted they contribute through the Football Foundation. How much will a league that is irreversibly global in its outlook be prepared to spend on the playing fields and changing facilities of the English game?
The grass-roots crisis cannot be solved by the Premier League alone but it is time they stepped up. As pointed out by the Football Supporters’ Federation chairman, Malcolm Clarke, himself a council member, the game paid £250 million to agents alone each year. In the select committee hearings into the Wembley sale, Gary Neville suggested a levy on agents’ fees, and there is no question that his idea has struck a chord.
Every player, supporter and coach comes from the grass roots first and it is the English grass roots that pays the bulk of the subscriptions that have turned the Premier League into such a phenomenon – about £5.5 billion of the £8.3 billion 2019-2022 rights deal is domestic income. If the proposed sale of Wembley has one happy consequence, then it should be that the game has acknowledged that money must be spent on the basics that support the elite – and that the elite should pay its share.