by Tom Bower
Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell agreed that their constituents were angry about the state of the sport. Fans had been encouraged to buy shares in their clubs at high prices from the chairmen, who had obtained the same shares for a pittance. After the flotations most of the share prices had fallen, hurting the fans, while the chairmen remained rich. The cake had grown but, due to the greed of the Premier League clubs, a declining number of clubs were enjoying the benefits. In their animated conversations with Gordon Brown, another football fan, Blair and Alastair Campbell criticized the ‘obscene’ wealth at the top and the penury at bottom. ‘We’ve got to stop the fans getting ripped off,’ was Alastair Campbell’s message. ‘They’re getting a raw deal and the game is suffering.’
That sentiment had motivated Alastair Campbell to write an article appearing under Blair’s name in the Mail on Sunday on 15 January 1995. The peg was the record transfer of Andy Cole, reported to be for £7 million, from Newcastle United to Manchester United, although the transfer price was registered as £6 million. The article’s headline was ‘How our soccer idols are betraying Britain’. Written from the heart, it was Campbell’s purest expression of fear: ‘I feel unease about what is happening in British sport . . . [not least] the get-rich-quick, something-for-nothing philosophy.’ The article was a declaration of war against those who ‘neglect sport at the grass roots, . . . because they are . . . obsessed with the commercial gains’. Targeted at ‘some of the people at the top of our national game who think nothing of loyalty to club and community’, the article was New Labour’s warning that football was destined for ‘sporting and social decline’.
‘I was at first shocked, then puzzled,’ wrote Campbell/Blair about Andy Cole’s transfer. ‘Shocked that he was going. Puzzled that, good though he is, lottery type money could be spent on a single player . . . But as a reflection of our society’s priorities, Andy’s transfer fee was as devastating as any hat-trick he scored.’ Campbell/Blair complained about ‘the sport’s growing obsession with money-making . . . Loyalty doesn’t seem to be enough anymore; rather it is exploited to make us pay more.’ The article mentioned that after the transfer of Stanley Matthews from Blackpool to Stoke in the ‘golden era’ of 1961 for £2,500, the attendance had increased by 25,000. ‘Could Andy Cole put 25,000 on a crowd?’ Campbell/Blair asked rhetorically. Football has, they continued, ‘a unique place in our culture and one that we must treasure. And yet I worry that the game . . . may lose touch with its roots . . . Fans are taken for granted, TV deals are ignoring the smaller clubs which desperately need support . . . and I worry that some of the allegations of illegal backhanders may be true.’ In their morality sermon, Campbell/Blair condemned players who lacked shame, swore too easily, cheated, fouled and abused referees and who only thought about winning for ‘the money it will bring’. The article was the foundation of the critics’ manifesto for reform.
One week later, Alastair Campbell arranged for Tony Blair to be interviewed about the same theme: football was in danger of succumbing to commercial imperatives and was becoming distanced from the people. ‘I do share the concern that the kind of money now involved in transfers could alienate those who follow it . . . I sometimes worry that the game is too much driven by money and not enough by the sporting spirit.’ Critically, Blair supported ‘safe standing’ on terraces, an important demand by football’s traditionalists. However, he added, while a government provided a framework for success, ‘it is not the job of government to interfere in the daily running of football’. The solution was for football to listen to the fans’ representatives.
Graham Kelly at the FA was unimpressed, especially by Blair’s mischievously implausible assertion that, aged eight, he had visited Roker Park to watch Jackie Milburn, Newcastle United’s legend, play in a match. Milburn had stopped playing for Newcastle when Blair was four years old. Kelly, like other football executives, was similarly underwhelmed by Blair’s second newspaper article bemoaning the state of football, published on the day he would attend Stanley Matthews’s eightieth birthday party. A succession of newspaper photographs reinforced his scepticism. Gordon Brown was photographed with Geoffrey Robinson, the local MP and millionaire, at Coventry City; Tony Blair was filmed playing ‘keepy-uppy’ with Kevin Keegan; and Alastair Campbell was recorded in the royal box at Wembley stadium with Tony Blair and their children close by. The image conjured by Campbell was of New Labour embracing football as part of family and national life. Kelly hated politicians using football for self-promotion.
One year later, in 1996, a committee including councillors and representatives of professional football was assembled in the House of Lords to formulate the Labour party’s manifesto commitments on football. Among its members were Tom Pendry, Jack Cunningham, the ambitious north-eastern MP, and Richard Faulkner, the vice-chairman of the Football Trust, an organization distributing money provided by the football pools companies to improve the sport. ‘There’s a revolution in our game,’ said Richard Faulkner, ‘and that’s an opportunity for change. The question is whether the change will be good or bad. If the share prices fall further, the fans will feel duped.’ Most of those present would proudly claim fatherhood of the Football Task Force. They were united by their commitment to a Labour victory but divided by their personal ambitions and forceful personalities.
Tom Pendry, the shadow minister, drafted the manifesto section promoting New Labour as the natural party for sport. ‘We must strive to put Britain back on the sporting map,’ promised Tony Blair, criticizing the Conservatives’ ‘“laissez-faire” approach characterized by complacency and neglect’. Even football, complained Blair, was besmirched by Tory sleaze. New Labour’s ‘Charter for Football’, Blair pledged, would allow the voice of ordinary supporters to be heard in the clubs. Market forces would not be allowed exclusive control of football’s fate. ‘Ideally,’ Blair argued, ‘football should regulate itself’, but if the sport’s owners and administrators ignored the warnings, a Labour government would impose an independent regulator.
Four days after Labour’s election landslide on 1 May 1997, Tom Pendry was watching a football match at Millwall’s ground, impatiently waiting for the telephone call from Downing Street. Like everyone, he assumed his automatic appointment as sports minister.
Inside the Cabinet room, Blair was consulting his trusted advisers. Alastair Campbell sat at his side. Sally Morgan, the prime minister’s political secretary, disliked Pendry. The Old Labourite, she sensed, was a flirt and unpalatable for feminists because of his friendship with Aimi MacDonald, the actress. Alastair Campbell agreed, murmuring that the politician had ‘an uncomfortable background’, which some interpreted as criticism of his record as a businessman. No one spoke in Pendry’s favour except Blair, and he preferred not to fight.
At Millwall’s ground, Graham Kelly noticed Pendry was ‘mortified’ when the telephone did not ring. The telephone call from Blair on Monday morning was short. ‘Tom, I’m sorry. I’m not going to give you the job.’ ‘Why?’ asked Pendry. ‘Because it’s time to move on.’ ‘You can only move on if the right man is in the job,’ Pendry shot back. Blair muttered something incomprehensible and the line was dead.
Tom Pendry was pole-axed. The news that Tony Banks had been appointed as sports minister paralysed the disappointed aspirant. Banks had been notorious as a representative of the loony left on the Greater London Council; he was a vociferous critic of capitalism and journalists; and he lacked the self-discipline required to manage a government department. Pendry blamed himself for allowing Banks to accompany Blair and Alastair Campbell to the Chelsea v. Newcastle match on the eve of the election. Tony Banks, an eyewitness related, was ‘on such good behaviour. Charming. No swearing or drinking.’ Alastair Campbell, Pendry believed, had delivered his revenge. The rejected politician’s bitterness remained unabated for months. An unpredicted consequence was the destruction of Labour’s commitment to neutralize the power of money in football, challenge corruption in the sport and, criticall
y, to abide by its pledge to impose an independent regulator.
Bruce Grobbelaar’s uncelebrated second acquittal in August 1997 brought football into the spotlight again and showed the need to find a solution to football’s problems. The following month, Graham Kelly, under pressure from the new government, announced an inquiry ‘into the manner in which football regulates its financial affairs’ and to recommend how football could maintain its integrity and accountability.
Graham Kelly’s choice as investigator was Sir John Smith, the 59-year-old former deputy commissioner of Scotland Yard. Smith assumed the FA was intent on discovering the truth about match-fixing, players betting on the outcome of their own matches and the finances of football. The reality, as the affable public servant soon discovered, was different. ‘I think that I should look at the FA’s ability to police the game,’ Smith told David Dein during an interview. ‘That’s not in your terms of reference,’ replied Dein. To conceal the FA’s impotence, Kelly preferred Sir John Smith to work within narrow terms of reference. ‘You’re unsure if I should go ahead,’ Smith challenged Kelly. ‘That’s not true,’ replied Kelly unconvincingly. ‘The FA is a bad regulator,’ Smith snapped. ‘You don’t want anyone to rock the boat.’
Sir John’s misgivings extended to the Task Force, which he joined soon after his appointment. Fifteen organizations were represented. Mired in personal rivalries, its composition had proved to be unwieldy and ill conceived. David Mellor proposed to create a smaller working group to complete their reports swiftly. John Smith, sharing Mellor’s concern to root out corruption, joined the working group just as a decision in Downing Street inadvertently threatened the Task Force’s credibility.
Tony Blair felt guilty about disappointing Tom Pendry. To compensate the party stalwart, he agreed in October 1997, with the recommendation of James Purnell, his special adviser, that Pendry would be an ideal chairman of the Football Trust, administering £40 million provided by the football pools companies. Through the Trust he would also supervise the Task Force. The appointment would be announced in March 1998. Pendry’s gratitude was eclipsed by the fury of Richard Faulkner, the Trust’s vice-chairman, who had expected promotion to the chairmanship. ‘A political fix,’ seethed Faulkner, an agile lobbyist representing Littlewoods, the biggest pools company financing the Football Trust. ‘Nothing to do with me,’ replied Tony Banks. ‘It’s Number 10.’
Tom Pendry, in retaliation against Banks, whom he despised, and Mellor, whom he loathed, was reconsidering his allegiance to the fans, football’s owners and the regulators. From his offices in Westminster and Euston, Pendry began sniping at the Task Force while Faulkner retaliated by agitating against the FA and the Football Trust. In the middle was Banks, not renowned for his diplomacy; he was principled on some issues but uncommitted to the enforcement of regulations. ‘In the end,’ he explained, ‘football is entertainment. Theatre. Keep it in its context. Football doesn’t amount to a great deal. All that matters in football is that your team is playing well – whether money is sticking to a manager’s hands doesn’t matter. In football, the element of the dodgy is always present. Football has honest crooks. Good people do compensate for the bad they get up to. I’m not stupid. All sorts of dodgy stuff goes on but more good has come out of it.’
Proudly, Banks paraded himself as a non-Blairite, unwilling to climb the greasy pole. ‘They wanted profile and I gave them profile plus,’ he said. ‘I love sport, but it’s a hobby, not life or death.’ The following year, he would reject a seat in the VIP box at the Cup Final explaining, ‘I do not want my enjoyment spoilt by sitting next to royalty.’ The vanity and conflicts of New Labour’s personalities were turning the government’s policy towards football’s finances and politics upside down.
The effect of Banks’s nonchalance was similar to the indifference towards sport of Chris Smith, the minister of culture and sport. Smith did not believe that the nation owed a living to football but he was keen to cater to Downing Street’s notion that New Labour was the party of fun, caring about the people’s everyday concerns. Listening carefully to James Purnell, the special adviser speaking from Downing Street, Smith understood the political importance of football, despite one unkind critic’s quip, ‘What Smith knows about sport can be written on the back of an opera ticket.’ Smith also lamented his perceived misfortune to be served by inadequate civil servants. Intellectually challenged, they were unknowledgeable about sport and ‘hostile’ to the agenda of the Task Force. Led by Robin Young, a socialite criticized for his department’s slipshod management of the Dome, the redevelopment of Covent Garden, the bids for the Lottery and the management of Britain’s museums, the subordinate officials were equally uninspiring. Colin Jones, Neil McKenzie and later Philippa Drew, Chris Smith complained, gave poor advice. Since neither Smith nor Banks had any confidence in their officials, Smith remained unguided while Banks appeared to be undisciplined, reluctant to read official papers or diligently attend meetings.
As Mellor marshalled his Task Force committee to research and quickly write the uncontroversial reports stressing the need to remove racism and accommodate the disabled, the urgency to produce the third report about ‘investing in the community’ and the final report about regulating football became pressing. Both topics were contentious although even the Conservative veteran of Westminster’s intrigues did not anticipate the eruption of bitter enmity among football’s vested interests.
The commercialization of football had politically polarized its supporters. Adam Brown, the senior research fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University, was typical of the educated Labour supporters who expected the new government’s promises for the fans to be implemented. Before 1997, Brown had become aggrieved by the FA’s failure to fulfil its promises to supporters. Ticket prices had increased by 16 per cent in 1997, four times the rate of inflation, and in some clubs by 400 per cent over the previous five years. Brown was also agitated by the continuing ban on terraces. All-seater stadiums had become, in his opinion, a ruse by the Premier League to increase their profits to the detriment of the traditional supporters. The fans at matches were now dispersed, ruining the chance of watching with friends, excluding casual supporters and causing the new danger of fans standing in seating areas. (The latest German designs guaranteed safety on the terraces.) Tony Banks’s abject refusal even to listen to the arguments for safe terraces – ‘That’s not on the agenda,’ he snapped – irritated Brown, who had embraced the Task Force as a political mission. His commitment alarmed the representatives of the FA, the Premier League and the club owners. In their opinion, Brown and his kind were interfering in their private business. ‘The Task Force is flawed,’ concluded David Davies, the FA’s director of publicity, but his opinion was not voiced in public. Since the new government had a landslide majority an appearance of enthusiastic cooperation was required.
David Davies had been delegated to deal with the politicians by Graham Kelly. Davies had become close to Tom Pendry, Anji Hunter, the prime minister’s assistant, and Alastair Campbell while working as a journalist at Westminster for the BBC. He joined the FA in 1994 and was pleased to be ‘the point man’ between football and the political parties. Davies wanted to prove that politics and football could mix. The lubrication of those relationships was helped by providing tickets to the best national and international matches. On those occasions Davies undertook to explain the new government’s attitude to the FA’s members. Football, he reminded the clubs’ chairmen, received a lot of money from the government. Public money was financing the construction of a new stadium at Wembley, the new stadiums for clubs, and one-third of the cost of the bid to host the World Cup in 2006 was financed by Whitehall. Presenting himself as the man leading the FA towards reform, Davies warned the chairmen that the government would intervene if football did not properly regulate itself. The next test of the FA’s commitment to veracity and proper regulation was the publication on 13 January 1998 of Sir John Smith’s report, ‘Football, Its Values, Fi
nances and Reputation’. In summary, the former police chief urged the FA to ‘put its house in order’ but, to the satisfaction of his targets, he failed to provide a convincing indictment of his paymasters.
Sir John Smith’s attempt to ‘highlight malpractice’ had become handicapped by the lack of evidence. He had accepted the task without the power to demand documents or compel witnesses to testify, and the FA had refused to provide an assistant or adequate finance. He assumed that because football, unlike gambling and racing, presented itself as part of the community rather than a business, he would receive the cooperation of witnesses willing to be named in his published report. That cooperation had not materialized. ‘The witnesses are guarded,’ he admitted, and he had been denied access to files. The result was an admitted lack of ‘hard information’ proving corruption. Nevertheless, his general impression was that ‘things were not right’. Those he suspected, and those who refused to cooperate, would fail any ‘fit and proper person test’. Former bankrupts and ex-criminals had influence in the management of the game – or worse, were owners of clubs in the lower leagues – and the FA appeared to be unwilling to investigate their financial affairs. Sir John Smith’s solution was radical. He proposed a ‘compliance and monitoring unit’ to ‘oversee the game’s integrity and reputation’; he advised the FA to appoint an ‘Ombudsfan’ to investigate complaints by the fans with powers to demand evidence and to impose sanctions; and, to satisfy the activists, he recommended the nomination of an independent regulator. Since those recommendations precisely matched the government’s policy, Smith was optimistic that the FA would adopt his ideas.
