Rescuing English Football
A couple of months ago I got to see my local team as I was growing up, Coventry City, take on Oxford United in the third round of the FA Cup.
We didn't know it then but it was the beginning of a glorious journey that would eventually lead to the Sky Blues taking on Manchester United in the semi-final at Wembley. After a narrow defeat in the playoff final last year, this is Coventry's fourth trip to Wembley in the last seven years. Mark Robins is being heralded as the greatest manager of the club since Jimmy Hill.
It hasn't always been this way.
I remember when Coventry were relegated from the Premier League. Years of mismanagement and failures ensued, ending up with the club not being able to play its home games in Coventry, finding itself stuck in League Two, and genuinely being concerned about whether the football club would continue to exist as a viable entity.
Now the good times have returned. Local businessman and fan, Doug King, has taken over the club, the push for promotion to back to the Premier League continues, and Wembley might as well be Coventry’s second home ground.
Sadly, this story of failures due to poor ownership is not unique to Coventry. Fans of other historic clubs like Portsmouth, Reading and Wimbledon have also suffered because of bad ownership and their stories do not have a happy ending like Coventry's.
On the pitch, English domestic football is the best in the world and there is nothing like it. However, off the pitch, this also presents a ripe opportunity for dodgy business people to make a quick buck at the expense of fans whose loyalty often dates back generations.
It is not clear why this has been allowed to happen for so long. The ‘fit and proper test’ for new owners has long been regarded as the punchline to a poor joke that was never funny to begin with.
Finally, the government has decided to act via the new Football Governance Bill that it hopes to get through Parliament before the next general election.
Under the new proposals, an Independent Football Regulator would be given statutory powers to better manage ownership. Fans would be given a say in how things are run, clubs could be fined if they are not being run in a sustainable fashion, and, in extreme cases, bad owners could be forced to divest of their interests in a particular club.
Any change in this area that is so poorly regulated has to be welcomed, but the reforms should also be treated with a degree of scepticism as well. Fans might be given a bigger voice, but it will not be in any way binding on ownership. We are a long way from the fan ownership model that is so popular in Germany.
It is also unclear how fining clubs that are already in a difficult financial predicament will benefit the club owners or fans in any way. Meanwhile, by the time that owners are banned or forced to divest, the damage will already have been done.
In many ways the financial success of English football is a poisoned chalice. On the one hand, it allows clubs to attract world-class talent and succeed in international competition. On the other hand the vast sums of money involved means that when teams fail, they fail hard.
Ultimately this is not about putting more regulation in place for the sake of it. Doing so will only have the knock on effect of making English football less competitive in the long run.
The correct way forward has to be about making sure that regulation is effective and directly deals with the problems facing English football. This means not allowing bad owners to get their hands on football clubs in the first place, and intervening straight away when it is clear that team finances are not being run sustainably.
The Football Governance Bill is a good start, but it sadly will not achieve those aims.
This week on the podcast we have a pair of cases that consider the correct operation of the European Arrest Warrant.
Episode link: https://uklawweekly.com/2024-uksc-9-10/
Make a difference today,
Marcus