Football Governance Bill [HL]

Lord Addington Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments and / or reasons
Tuesday 15th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moynihan of Chelsea (Con)]

The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, is absolutely correct—and what happened? Within a few days, all that went away. They had a look and it went away. As I mentioned, I wrote an article on the very day the idea came out, as did many other people, saying that it would not work. The clubs involved looked at that and said, “Yes, this is true. It’s not going to work”.

The noble Lord talked about Wimbledon. We are now saying, in the Bill, that clubs cannot move and there can be no dynamism. Yet I quoted a study in the debate last night that said that, when we restrict, clamp down and prevent things happening, that is when societies disintegrate. We cannot expect to have success if we say, “We know best and we’re going to stop this, that and the other, and impose this, that and the other”. I am just putting a warning down: one of these days, somebody will be in a position to say that this was an extraordinarily bad idea.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I will say a couple of words to wrap up from these Benches. When we did the Bill, my first comment was, “I am not of your tribe when it comes to being a football fan”. I encourage everybody to watch a decent sport on Saturday morning, when the Lions have their first Test, but we have got that out of the way now. The thing about this is that football clearly touches people’s lives because it is their local team. What the Bill does is get better management and better structures in there. It means that somebody is overseeing them.

It may be that the market will ultimately do something or run away, or we will all end up playing ice hockey on artificial pitches or something when people get fed up with it. Who knows? But at the moment, football speaks to many communities, and the fact that we will have these clubs, which are a part of the fabric of their local society and its interaction together, surviving better, or at least standing a chance of so doing, is something for which we should actually be very grateful.

In the end, the argument about these amendments is probably over how we divide up the loot. Let us face it, we did this because bits of football were fighting with each other about money; that is where we got to at the end. The Cross Benches came up with a solution that was, I felt, a little too elegant—that congratulation is really what I felt the whole time—as opposed to a rather brutal solution by the Government. We went brutal. But we have something here that looks like it will work and have general agreement.