Andy Burnham: The Football Years
Starmer's rival for PM has deep grounding in football culture, both as a fan and a politician.
During the research for my book ‘Where’s The Money Gone? The Battle For The Soul of English Football’ I interviewed the UK’s political man of the moment Andy Burnham - Mayor of Greater Manchester and the new Labour MP for Makerfield. Unfortunately, our conversation came too late in the process to be included in any substantial way, although it did inform the chapter on the development of Supporters Direct, an attempt by the Blair government to give power to fans about the direction of their club. Burnham was Chair of SD, and later served as Culture Secretary. This extract explains how the opportunity to create an independent football regulator was missed more than a quarter of a century ago; and how Burnham continued to fight for a fair deal for supporters in the years that followed and was a key figure in the campaign to secure justice for the Hillsborough 97.
Lord Faulkner - “call me Richard” - ushers me into his central London flat, and we sit around a kitchen table, cluttered with files and documents.
If David Mellor was the public face of the Football Task Force - which initiated Supporters Direct - Faulkner, its Deputy Chair was the power behind the throne.
He’d worked unpaid on Tony Blair’s comms team during the 1997 election, having previously served as a councillor in south London.
His CV also included a lengthy stint as deputy chair of the Football Trust, a quango for funding stadium redevelopments which he helped set up in the 70s.
The Labour establishment regarded him as ‘a safe pair of hands’, so when the Task Force was created, Faulkner was a shoo in for a senior role.
As we sip coffee, the ruddy-cheeked elder statesman reflects on the organisation’s genesis in the late 1980s and 90s.
“There had been a number of crowd control tragedies…Hillsborough the Bradford fire, Heysel…there was a feeling that stadiums were not safe and desperately needed modernization” he said.
“But the governance of the game was not healthy either. There seemed to be rather too much concentration on making money for a small number of very rich clubs, which was the main reason for the establishment of the Premier League.
“It meant that clubs lower down the Football League were largely ignored.”
The creation of Supporters Direct was perhaps the most radical outcome of the Task Force, but there were several other commendable achievements.
They dedicated an entire report to improving facilities for supporters with disabilities, and Faulkner observes, “I think we made a real difference.
“It feels as though clubs and the game as a whole have accepted the principle that because you have a physical or a mental disability, you shouldn’t be prevented from attending football.
“It’s not perfect yet and there’s still a lot to do. There’s a particular problem with older stadiums, which can’t be easily adjusted, but there has been a major step forward in this area.”
Another Task Force report recommended that individuals should be individually liable for prosecution for racist chanting at matches, even if they were joining in as part of a group That’s now on the statute books.
Calls for more funding for junior football were heeded, too. The Premier League has become a key partner in the Football Foundation, a charity which has awarded more than £1 billion to improve grassroots facilities since 2000.
On all of these issues, English football was able to present a progressive, united front.
The one stumbling block was the question of how the game should be regulated.
Although the government called for consensus, none could be reached, with the Task Force polarised to the point where it was forced to issue two separate and starkly conflicting reports in December 1999.
The majority report, backed by Faulkner, highlighted the lack of unity in the game’s administration.
It identified the creation of the FA-backed Premier League as a moment when a significant rupture emerged in an already fractured sport.
It offered football one last shot at self-governance, calling on the FA to reform itself and create a new Football Regulation Authority “capable of taking independent and objective decisions”.
The FRA would consist of eight members - four from inside football, plus a supporters representative, and three independents, including a chair appointed in consultation with the government.
No one who reads the report could be left in any doubt about what it was implying; the FA - which should have been a growling watchdog with sharp fangs - had become an obedient poodle answering to the commands of the Premier League.
Had the majority Task Force proposal been accepted, the FRA would have created a code of conduct for clubs, and held them accountable for ticket prices and accessibility for young fans.
Owners would have also been forced to consult with supporters over stock market flotations and major share sales.
It proposed a monitoring and compliance unit to protect the game’s financial integrity, weed out rogue directors, and reduce inequality between large and small clubs.
The ultimate penalty for non-compliance could be “suspension or expulsion from a League or FA membership, or the expulsion of individuals from being involved in clubs.”
These recommendations were backed by all of the ‘great and good’ on the Task Force, including Sir John Smith (an ex Metropolitan Police chief) and Sir Herman Ousley (former chairman of the Commission For Racial Equality).
As Faulkner says, “we were all of the view that something needed to be done in order to establish a proper regulatory framework for football.”
Adam Brown, an academic and football writer, helped compile the majority report.
He wrote later that “the basis of these arguments was the belief that the nature of consumption in football is qualitatively different to consumption in other sectors, based as it is on a ‘brand loyalty’ and emotional attachment which (in most cases) far outstrips brand quality.
“In other words, football clubs have a captive and loyal consumer base and, in the 1990s, have exploited this local monopoly to great effect.”
There was even a call in the report for the government to step in if its suggestions went unheeded.
“If in a period of two years, sufficient progress has not been made to implement the specific recommendations in this report…we recommend that the Minister appoint a regulator by legislation.”
The only members of the Task Force to object were the FA, the Premier League and the EFL, who produced their own minority report.
Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore insisted that his organisation was committed to “making the game transparent, accountable and responsible.”
But he predictably described external supervision as unnecessary and cumbersome.
“It would be another layer of regulation, it would be an interference and it’s not been clearly thought through.”
Sports Minister Kate Hoey encapsulated the government’s dilemma, saying that “one of the tasks of government is to help…strike a balance between the necessary business interests of clubs and those of supporters, without whom clubs would not exist.”
In the event, there was no balance. Tony Blair’s business-friendly government sided with Scudamore, leaving football to carry on much as before, ushering in an era of oligarchs, oil states, and structural financial instability.
As missed opportunities go, It was the equivalent of receiving a pass two yards from an empty goal, and blazing it over the bar.
The only practical outcome of this clash on governance was the creation of an ‘Independent Football Ombudsman whose scope was strictly limited.
Despite their grand title, the ‘Ombudsfan’ adjudicates only on individual supporters’ grumbles (about poor stewarding, for example) but has zero say on the overall strategy of the game.
Faulkner recalls: “The Department for Culture, Media and Sport and, I believe, 10 Downing Street heard the case that the Premier League was still in its infancy, and hadn’t really demonstrated what it could do for English football.
“They thought it would make no sense to kill the goose that was laying golden eggs.”
Was the government ‘nobbled’? Did the Premier League sabotage the FRA?
Faulkner phrases his response diplomatically.
“I think the Premier League successfully used their influence at the highest levels in government in order to get their point of view, first of all, understood and then supported.
“They wouldn’t call it sabotage. They would say they saved the game from what they felt was going to be ruinous regulation.
“ I don’t believe it would have been ruinous then, and it certainly won’t be ruinous now.”
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In the years that followed, politicians intermittently called out the Premier League’s financial extravagance.
Former Task Force administrator Andy Burnham warned in his role as Culture Secretary, that “the time has come for football to reassess its relationship with money and with its supporters.”
Speaking at the Supporters Direct Conference in London in 2008, he argued that “despite the levels of money in the game, football must be a sporting competition run like a business and not vice versa.
“The game makes money because of the way it began - because of the fierce rivalry between fans and the history of civic pride and local allegiance forged over a century or more.”
It was, he warned, “becoming increasingly polarised. The top clubs who build on global success are in danger of becoming detached from the communities that build them.
“We need to ensure the flow of finance furthers football’s interests as a sport.”
Burnham argued that the ‘Fit And Proper Persons Test’ (by now the Owners And Directors Test) originally introduced in 2004, should be strengthened, following Thaksin Shinawatra’s controversial purchase of Manchester City.
He also suggested a quota system for home-grown players and demanded a rebalancing of the game’s finances to promote more equal competition.
“Having strong competition as a primary goal is the way to ensure commercial success”, he said.
“Football clubs do not exist to be pure businesses. They do not exist to put each other out of business. The product is the competition.
“Football has special characteristics and a fundamental role in our community.”
It was a clarion call for change from a senior politician echoing the majority report of the Football Task Force, to which he had been a party almost a decade earlier.
The FA’s progressive chair chair Lord Triesman drafted a 26 page draft response to Burnham.
He proposed that the FA should oversee a new system of financial regulation for the Premier League, and that clubs should enter formal relationships with supporter groups and share money more equally.
Under his proposals, clubs would also have been encouraged to nurture the development of a greater number of young English players.
Triesman’s missive never saw the light of day because - as David Conn at The Guardian revealed - he was ordered not to send it by the FA Board.
Representatives of grassroots clubs were said to have been ‘reminded’ by Premier League rep David Richards that a significant amount of their funding came from the top flight.
With a nudge and a wink, Triesman was forced on the retreat. Instead of positively engaging with the Culture Secretary’s demand for change, the FA’s official response blandly stated support for the status quo.
As Conn put it, this episode “encapsulates English football’s lopsided organisation: an FA, the governing body, instructed not to send even a meaningful reply to government questions about the running of the sport.”
It was to be another two decades before politicians would seriously grapple again with this issue of how football should be regulated.
You can buy ‘Where’s The Money Gone? The Battle For The Soul of English Football’ here.