Today features the final article of the series where Matt Davis looks at football related questions that you could ask if a candidate turns up at your door, or if you wish to email them and ask directly!

The articles are paraphrased from the Football Supporters Federation web site with today’s article turning the spotlight Competitive Balance & Wealth Distribution and Inclusion & Accessibility

Competitive Balance & Wealth Distribution

Facts:

• The distribution of football’s wealth has changed the whole nature of our national sport as a meaningful competition.
• The uneven distribution of TV revenue within the Premier League has produced a self-perpetuating monopoly amongst very few clubs, demonstrated by the fact only three teams have won the Premier League in the past 14 years, with no signs of this changing imminently.
• The situation is exacerbated by additional income from European qualification awarded to these few clubs, which increases further their competitive advantage.
• As a result, other Premier League clubs are incurring massive levels of unsustainable debt in an ill-judged attempt to compete– or at least to remain at the financial top table.
• The financial chasm between the Premier League and the rest of the football pyramid is massive……

• This means that teams promoted to the Premier League are unlikely to be able to compete effectively and will concentrate on survival.
• Meanwhile, despite the concentration of money in the Premier League, football clubs at all levels of the game, many of them invaluable community assets, are suffering financial crises for want of relatively small sums.
• Numerous clubs across the country, especially those below Football League level, have gone into liquidation or have even been wound up, with 53 insolvency events in the Football League alone since the Premier League was founded.
• Although the Premier League does distribute small amounts to the Football League as “solidarity payments” the sums involved are insignificant – £31.8M in 2008/09, compared with £51.5M in prize money awarded to Manchester United alone, out of a total of £790M distributed as prize money to the 20 Premier League clubs.
• The strength of English football is the breadth of the football pyramid, and that it is extremely unhealthy for our national game to have so much wealth concentrated amongst so few clubs.
• This will continue to make matches and competitions less competitive as well as leading to fewer football clubs in communities across the country.

Required:

• The Premier League should recognise that the income they earn should be distributed far more equally across all levels of the English game, in order to benefit the whole of English football, rather than being concentrated on a handful of elite clubs who continue to prosper whilst the base of the football pyramid withers and dies beneath them.

Question: Do you agree with this analysis and prescription and, if so, what would you do in Government to bring about such changes?

Inclusion and Accessibility

Facts:

• Despite vast sums of money coming into the professional game of football over the past ten years, since the Football Task Force Report, very little of this money has been used to keep the cost of attending football games down to reasonable level.
• It now frequently costs a family well over £100.00 to attend JUST one game.
• As a result, we are seeing a change in the demographic profiles of those attending matches, as the young, old and less-affluent are priced-out of attending matches.
• A whole generation of children is effectively missing the chance of top-flight football on anything other than an occasional basis
• Crowds are becoming older and more affluent as a result, diminishing the whole atmosphere of the game at many grounds – the famous “prawn sandwich effect”.
• The Football Task Force recommended in 2000 that there should always be a wide spread of pricing, with a range of cheaper tickets ensuring that matches were accessible to all classes, ages and economic backgrounds.
• Instead, football has been given a free-hand to set its own pricing level without any restriction, and as a result supporters have seen years of above inflation price rises over this period.
• In addition, facilities for disabled supporters cost more to provide than facilities for the able-bodied, and also occupy space that could be sold at a greater profit to able-bodied supporters. As such, provision for disabled supporters at many grounds is wholly inadequate, frequently with poor sightlines, access difficulties and insufficient facilities.
• Similarly, the numbers of tickets available for disabled supporters is frequently very low, and wholly disproportionate to the demand for these.
• Supporters are fed up with being ripped off and treated as just commodities, whilst attending live matches is an experience being lost to a whole generation of supporters, which has potentially dire consequences for the game in future years.

Required:

• The time has come for there to be some regulation of ticket prices in order to ensure that tickets to football matches are fairly priced to ensure the game is accessible to as many as possible, and also to enforce existing ticketing rules which are abused by clubs – for instance to exploit fans of well-supported clubs.
• Clubs should be forced to provide sufficient numbers of properly designed and reasonably-priced facilities to allow disabled supporters full access to the game.

Question: What efforts would your party take to ensure the game is accessible to as many supporters as possible, both by ensuring pricing levels are affordable and that sufficient and appropriate facilities are provided for all supporters?

We hope you found this series of articles of interest and found them of some use when political parties came knocking at your door