CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE
To be published as HC 792-v

House of commons

oral EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE THE

Culture, Media and Sport Committee

Football Governance

Tuesday 22 March 2011

Mr Ian Watmore

Mr Richard Bevan, Mr Steve Coppell AND Mr Martin O’Neill

Evidence heard in Public Questions 346 - 447

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

1. This is a corrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.

2. The transcript is an approved formal record of these proceedings. It will be printed in due course.

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee

on Tuesday 22 March 2011

Members present:

Mr John Whittingdale (Chair)

Ms Louise Bagshawe

Dr Thérèse Coffey

Damian Collins

Philip Davies

Paul Farrelly

Alan Keen

Mr Adrian Sanders

Jim Sheridan

________________

Examination of Witness

Witness: Ian Watmore, former Chief Executive, Football Association, gave evidence.

Chair: Good morning. This is a further session of the Select Committee’s inquiry into football governance and I would like to welcome, as our first witness this morning, Ian Watmore, the former Chief Executive of the Football Association. Can I invite Louise to ask the first question?

Q346 Ms Bagshawe: Why did you resign as Chairman of the FA?

Ian Watmore: I didn’t resign as Chairman, I resigned as Chief Executive.

Ms Bagshawe: Chief Executive, I am sorry.

Ian Watmore: That’s okay. I think the words I used at the time were, "Well there was nothing chief or executive about the job", and that is why I left. I was frustrated about a number of things that you just couldn’t do and in my experience the Chief Executive of any organisation would have been able to have just got on and done some stuff and most of what I was trying to do either hit the buffer of treacly governance or just wasn’t possible to do at all because we didn’t have control of our money and our resources.

Q347 Ms Bagshawe: Can you elaborate on some of those things that you found impossible to enact?

Ian Watmore: Yes, first of all I sent a note to the Committee in which I argued that the board of the FA should be independent of all its vested interests and the reason I argued that is because I think an organisation like the FA is seen to be the governing body of football in this particular case and yet it has got people on its board who have a severe conflict of interest. They may be very good people, they may have a lot of knowledge and experience and so on but they are conflicted and I think the usual analogy that I use is you wouldn’t want to be running Ofcom with Sky, BT and the BBC on your board, it is that kind of sense.

The governance was a problem; the staff were not a problem and a lot of people write about the dysfunctionality of the organisation and I think one thing I would like to put on record is that the staff that I worked with at the FA were absolutely fantastic and they are so not the image that they get portrayed with. They are very knowledgeable, they are very energetic, they achieve an awful lot behind the scenes that you know nothing about and they were great to work with, so that wasn’t a problem.

One of the other problems I found was that the organisation’s money wasn’t under control of the executive team so we raised whatever money we raised-usually about £200 million a year, through TV deals and sponsorship deals-and then once we had spent our core costs for running the actual association at Wembley the rest was distributed 50-50 to the professional game and the national game.

Apart from the fact I begrudged giving FA money back to the professional game-because I didn’t think they needed it and the national game did and I thought it would have been much better to have channelled the money in that direction-the sheer fact was that we didn’t have responsibility for how that money was spent. A number of the programmes and projects that you would want to do just weren’t possible to do because you didn’t have control.

Q348 Dr Coffey: Can I ask specifically about the independent board? You have used the analogy of Ofcom, where the Government appoints a regulator to manage private competition. What it suggests to me, your suggestion, is more the civil service utopia perhaps, of having a Government with no Ministers because they are pretty inconvenient, because they speak to constituents and make policies, whereas if the civil service ran it all it would be fine and so that independence would have a tickety-boo gain. I am not sure that is really true.

Ian Watmore: I am not sure that would be the civil service utopia anyway, and I am certainly not going to say it even if I thought it. The reality is that I think when you are in one of those leadership jobs in an organisation like the FA, to use the analogy, you are as much like a Minister as you are the civil servant; you are the person on public display, you are the person that the public thinks and expects to make the key decisions and I think both my Chairman at the time, Lord Triesman, and I felt that we were seen to be responsible for a lot of things but not with the ability to make the decisions and actually carry them through.

Q349 Ms Bagshawe: You are hardly the first Chief Executive of the FA to resign recently, given there has been such an enormous turnover of FA Chief Executives since Graham Kelly left the job. Would you say it has become an impossible job for the reasons that you state; there is no actual decision-making power in the job?

Ian Watmore: I felt it was impossible for me and that is because I was used to, both in the private sector and in Government, a different form of governance that supported what you were trying to do and so I didn’t feel I could carry on. I think it would be for others. I wouldn’t want to say it was impossible for anybody to do what they wanted to do in the job but for me it wasn’t right.

Q350 Ms Bagshawe: Do you feel that the resignation of past Chief Executives was motivated by the same concerns though that you have just expressed?

Ian Watmore: Interestingly I went to see them all when I got the job; I went back as far as Adam Crozier. I didn’t meet Graham, I probably should have done but I didn’t. Anyway, I met the others and of course everybody has a different perspective on why they went and different reasons but I think the common theme is that around the board table, you have got all of the people from the counties in the professional game and they all have different interests in what they are trying to achieve and there is no independence and clarity that emerges from that and that gets very frustrating as the Chief Exec, whether you’re picking a new manager or trying to spend a relatively small amount of money on something quite unimportant in the big scale of things; all these issues blow into one when you’re sitting in the middle of it all.

Q351 Ms Bagshawe: How would you characterise the relationship between the FA and the Premier League?

Ian Watmore: One of the interesting questions; who, for this purpose, is the Premier League? When I met with the key club members, the sort of people who run and manage the clubs, the relationship was very good. All of these clubs belong to the FA as much as they belong to the Premier League but they have been, over many years, grouped in a sort of pack around the league that they play in, so individual clubs, no problems at all. When we got the collective things it depended on what the issue was. Some things we had real strong agreement with, for example, goal line technology where our common enemy, if you like, was FIFA who wouldn’t sanction that; we joined up very well on that.

On other issues we might be miles apart or have a disagreement over whose responsibility it was. I think that my Chairman at the time mentioned in his evidence that football regulation, in the sort of financial regulation sense, was deemed by the leagues not to be something for the FA, it was deemed to be something for them and Lord Triesman disagreed with that and that is where the tension first emerged between them. I think it is issue by issue.

On a personal level Richard Scudamore-who is possibly one of the best operators and runners of anything in football-and I got on, I think, pretty well. We had our sort of Roy Keane-Patrick Vieira moments and things but afterwards there was kind of sort of mutual respect I think and that wasn’t an issue.

Ms Bagshawe: Okay, thank you.

Q352 Chair: You say you got on fine with Richard Scudamore. You will have heard the evidence of Lord Triesman that he had rather greater difficulty getting on with the Chairman of the Premier League whom he found to be aggressive, was that your experience as well?

Ian Watmore: I kind of take the view that David said what he said then and I think that is probably the most evidence you need. I think there is a football saying, isn’t there, what goes on in the dressing room stays in the dressing room and I think probably I would rather stick there.

Q353 Paul Farrelly: So you wouldn’t contradict it?

Ian Watmore: I wouldn’t contradict it.

Q354 Jim Sheridan: Can you just explain what you mean by these people who have conflicts of interest. Who they are? Give us a flavour for what these conflicts of interest were and perhaps give us a tangible example of what that means?

Ian Watmore: Okay. As you probably know the current FA board-or the one that has been in existence for the last few years-has five members of the professional game through from the Premier League, two from the Football League and five from the counties and then an independent Chair and Chief Exec. You might get an issue. Let’s take the one that we talked about which is the financial and debt position.

It is very hard to have a sensible discussion around a boardroom discussion when the Chief Exec of Man United is one of those board members and his house is being daubed back at home green and gold by the fans who oppose the Glazer ownership. He is a great guy, David, I have lots of time for him but on a topic like that he is conflicted. If we talk about where the international game might benefit from perhaps the FA being tougher about calling up younger players so that they always played for the England teams rather than went off on club tours and so on, then the club people are, by definition, conflicted on that. It is great when they do have a really successful international player but they are juggling different interests whereas we, as an FA, are thinking purely and simply about how to develop the national team.

On the other side of the fence the county people who do wonderful work on the ground, and I can’t speak more highly of them about what they do, they give up their time year after year after year and make all sorts of things happen in communities where football is really socially cohesive and it really binds people together. But they are worried about losing out by picking a fight, being seen to pick a fight with the big guys from the Premier League or the Football League or whatever.

There is this kind of tension that really exists between them and the consequences that unless it is a common enemy type of topic, like goal line technology-where everybody can get round the table and agree on it-you find everybody is coming at it from a slightly conflicted position, which is why I think you either go to the German model where kind of everybody is in one entity and it is all part of one entity but I suspect we are a long way from that, or else you go for independence and that is what I would like to see.

Q355 Jim Sheridan: Are you suggesting then that the FA would be far more effectively run if we didn’t have big clubs like Manchester United represented on the board?

Ian Watmore: On the board, yes. I think very strongly that we can have all the dialogue with the big clubs that we need. If I wanted to pick up the phone and talk to any one of any of the clubs in this country or go and visit them or see them on a Saturday or whatever, it was no problem at all. You get access to everybody when you need it and I think we could involve them and get their opinions and understand what they wanted and all the rest of it, as we do with other people who aren’t on the board. We go and talk to Gordon Taylor at the PFA or Richard and his colleagues at the LMA and a whole variety of other places; you can get inputs from a variety of sources. But when it comes to making hard decisions I believe the best board is one that is made up of the exec teams of the organisation and independent non-execs and that is what I would recommend.

Q356 Dr Coffey: What was your vision for the FA?

Ian Watmore: I ended up just encapsulating the vision. I called it football first and the reason I did that was because I remember somebody earlier on said to me, "I quite often go to meetings in the FA and the word ‘football’ never crops up and it is always about money or something else and the essence was not to put the football first". A really good concrete example of that was Stuart Pearce who, running the under-21 team, came to me and he said-they usually play the under-21 games in one of the clubs around the country, grounds around the country-"I would really like to play at Wembley. I think these guys would benefit from playing at Wembley so that when they come up into the first team and play at Wembley-".

The crowd size at Wembley is likely to be much too small for the thing to even break even, let alone be profitable so it is going to cost us money to put on the game and in the past I think that would have been blocked for that reason whereas I said, "Yes" because it seemed to me it was more about the football and less about the money; this was about trying to grow the talent, so putting football at the heart of everything. I was very strong on the Wembley pitch, for example, and I thought the history of Wembley has been dogged with controversy-and I don’t want to go back over that-but the stadium itself physically is great but at the time the pitch was terrible and it seemed to me that people were more worried about the business case of Wembley than they were about the quality of the football in it and I happily-well not happily for me as an Arsenal fan-went to the Carling Cup Final as an Arsenal fan to see my team humiliated in the last minute but the pitch was absolutely stunning because they have now done exactly what I think they did at the Emirates and other places with this new pitch technology.

I was trying to just inject in every decision and every thinking about what the FA stands for, to put the football at the heart of it and then let the other things take care of itself. That then cascades right across the game from international football at the highest level to kids playing on a Sunday morning, and I could talk for hours about where we go with that but that was the essence of it.

Q357 Dr Coffey: Just to refer to the stadium or aspects of the stadium as your first two responses to the vision of football and how you use that, the stadium has been criticised as being a debt-heavyweight around the neck of the FA. What changes would you perhaps like to see to that? Is it a conflict of interest that David Bernstein is both Chairman of the FA now and of WNSL?

Ian Watmore: Wembley is kind of a subsidiary of the FA so I don’t think there is a conflict and David is one of the people who helped save the Wembley project when it was going in a very bad direction. I think he has got huge experience and he was also very successful at his club in his business career so I think he is a good choice of Chairman, not that it is for me to comment but I do happen to think he is.

The stadium does drag financially and the FA is short of money so it is a concern but we are where we are; it was built on a debt model-I forget the exact figure that is still in the books that’s overdue but it is something in the hundreds of millions that still has to be paid back-and every year that is a financial drag on the FA, which it would be great if it wasn’t but it is what it is.

Q358 Dr Coffey: Coming back to your idea of football first, do you think the FA still has that as a priority? Is it implementing those tasks effectively?

Ian Watmore: I can’t tell really from the outside. My sense is everybody agreed with it on the surface but, as you know, probably in Government it is quite easy to agree in principle but not in practice and we see a lot of that going on, so I couldn’t tell on the ground. But when we come back to why do people criticise the FA, they criticise it because they perceive it not to be making sensible decisions in the regulator in governance space and they criticise it for seemingly to always get it wrong, vis-à-vis the England senior team, those are the two things that dominate whenever you ask the public about the FA. Until we crack both of those and have a clear programme that builds to a long term success of the England team and get a sort of regulatory discipline environment that people trust then I think they will continue to be dubbed in that way.

Q359 Dr Coffey: What do you think was the worst decision that was made at the FA when you were Chief Executive and can you explain a bit about the governance process and why it went so wrong?

Ian Watmore: The worst decision, that’s interesting.

Dr Coffey: I will ask you in a moment what your best was but I would like to hear-

Ian Watmore: No, that is a good challenge. I think probably the one that frustrated me most was the pitch at Wembley just because it was something we could control in our own backyard and it wasn’t about intergalactic football and all the interrelations of everybody else and it was really frustrating. When Michael Owen ripped his hamstring or whatever in the Carling Cup Final with Manchester United and he, to this day, believes it was the pitch that did it. You could just foresee that happening to a whole bunch of England players just before the World Cup-and as it turned out it probably wouldn’t have mattered-but at the time we thought we had real high hopes at the World Cup. That one was definitely a frustration.

But I think the real strategic issues that we weren’t grappling with were the areas of what role does the FA have in regard to governance of the game. The answer was quite a weak role and weakening every year and yet people perceived it to have so much more power than it actually had, and I think that was the biggest source of concern to the Chairman and I. You could look at what I said about the financials of football clubs. I was frustrated that the women’s game was the first casualty when Setanta went bust, everybody just said, "We won’t do the Women’s Super League" then I had to fight very hard to bring that back in.

We had a lot of issues around the staff and I had to take some very tough action with the staff, the sort of thing that is going on in Government at the moment; pay freezes, we have ended the final salary pension scheme. These are people who don’t earn a lot of money, who have given their lives to the game and what was really annoying at the end of it all was that 50% of every pound we saved there went back to the professional football game and that didn’t seem right either, that was a hard sell to people. So there was a combination of things.

Q360 Dr Coffey: To give you the other side, what was your best decision? It might be the pitch.

Q361 Ian Watmore: No, because that came after I went, they made what I thought was the right decision later on. I hope the best decision will turn out to be two things: one was to reignite the National Football Centre project. We had bought the plot of land in 1999 I think and it was still 2009 at the time and nothing was there really, realistically. Working with David Sheepshanks and others I think we breathed a lot of life into that project and I think that is now off and running.

I think we made some pretty sensible decisions around the money side because when Setanta went bust the finances of the FA were in freefall; it was the equivalent to a Lehman’s Bank moment for us, we’d lost 15% to 20% of income overnight and then the market for what was left was deflated. So knowing next time round we put a lot of financial stability in, and I am sure there is still more to go, in that area.

We started the web-based TV channel, FATV, which I think in the long run will be very important as people move towards the internet for their football consumption. The final thing I did do was sign the press release that made the Women’s Super League a reality because I was very passionate about trying to do something for the women’s game and had some of my best actual moments I think on tour with the women’s team in Finland the previous summer when they got to the final of the European Championships. I really hoped to see that that combination of them playing well and the start of the Super League would get the women’s game off to a future.

Q362 Dr Coffey: What I am trying to tease out is that you were able to make good decisions and also decisions you were less proud of as the FA, what was different in the governance process, if you like, that allowed you to achieve some success? I suppose I am trying to come from the fact that sometimes as Chief Executive, you will get what you want all the time and other times you don’t take everybody with you, so what changes to the governance of an independent board would make that different?

Ian Watmore: I think the fundamental thing when you are a Chief Exec of any organisation is you want the board to challenge you but you want the board to think of themselves, first and foremost, as part of the organisation. People from various sectors of the game would sit in meetings of the FA and talk about the FA as though it was a third party. They were not driving the best decisions for the organisation, which is the FA; they were driving the best decisions for whichever area they came from. Sometimes they coincided and sometimes they didn’t. I believe you need a board that is single-purpose and focused on the organisation and I didn’t think it was.

I also found it very regrettable that the board leaked like a sieve, if that is not being unkind to sieves. It sort of started on the day I was interviewed for the job. The headhunter said to me, "We won’t send the papers out on the Friday night because it will all be all over the Sundays, we will do it Monday night and the interview is on Tuesday and you’ve got a chance of staying silent" but it was in the papers on Tuesday morning and it went on throughout the period and I felt that was a problem too. Again, that’s another thing that I think is sacrosanct about boards. Boards should be trusted by everybody on it that what is said and done in it, is confidential to that board and it clearly wasn’t.

Q363 Damian Collins: When you were the Chief Executive how much time would the FA board spend on certain things like internationals?

Ian Watmore: I would say in the board meetings I attended, quite limited amounts of time.

Damian Collins: Once or twice?

Ian Watmore: Yes, and of course in the era I was in everybody thought we were on a roll and Fabio was coach of the year on the BBC’s Sports Personality; we all thought we were going to do something special in South Africa. It wasn’t the crisis point that it can be periodically but in the FA board as a whole it wasn’t a major topic of discussion when I was there.

Q364 Damian Collins: There seems to be disconnect between what England fans, the football writers talk about and what the FA board talks about and the ongoing concerns about the fact that our players have probably never played in a league consistently at such a high level in domestic football and lots of them play abroad, there is never more money in the game and yet the national team grows weaker and weaker. It is the debate probably football fans have more than any other debate and it is one that doesn’t particularly seem to grip the FA board.

Ian Watmore: One of the things I think is, again, I’ve said that the board should be independent. I also think it should be half-executive, half-non-executive and the reason I say that is I would like to see people like Sir Trevor Brooking in his current role as football director and probably Hope Powell as the leader of the women’s game, on the board of the FA talking about football; people who have played it, people who are responsible for developing it in the men’s and women’s game, people who have a pipeline of knowledge about who is coming through the system and what is right and what is wrong. I would like to see the board have more people of that ilk on it from within the FA so that these topics would be discussed, they would be driven out and the consequences and conclusions of that would be arrived at sensibly.

Q365 Damian Collins: How would you characterise the failure of the FA board? Is it that there is no great desire for reform or change, there is plenty of discussion about it, reports written, views expressed? Does the board either not share those views or can it just not agree amongst itself what to do?

Ian Watmore: I think there is a very small conservative nature to it all so change is not a welcome word in that sense; people want to evolve slowly rather than radically. But you do have quite different interests around the table from the five that come from the professional side and the five that come from the counties. Half of the money goes to each of them, as I have said; one half works out how to spend this lot and the other half works out how to spend the other. So the actual board meetings, they could be tetchy on certain issues but they tended to be one group of people talking about a subject, everybody else staying quiet or vice versa and I think it was just a sort of unholy alliance between the two groups not to tread on each other’s patch and I don’t think that is the way the board of the FA should be.

Q366 Damian Collins: Just finally, do you think if the board was reformed in the way that you have discussed-an independent board of experienced football people-that the FA would be, if you like, more realistic in the way it uses its resources and you could question the way the FA has spent money in the past on Soho offices, salaries or how managers are paid, even the company contract Capello was given before the World Cup? Do you think a reformed board would be more practical about the way it uses its money?

Ian Watmore: I do. I think particularly if you had some good genuine independent non-execs of the type who are used to challenging company Chief Execs and executive teams on how they are investing shareholder money. I don’t particularly name names but people like Terry Leahy, he was a fantastic supporter of ours when he was at Tesco through the Tesco Skills Programme. You just know that people of that calibre would drive better spending decisions.

Q367 Alan Keen: Ian, you seem to be saying that-and I agree with you because I know virtually everybody involved in football administration-there are some excellent people doing excellent jobs. If we take Richard Scudamore, who I agree with you is one of the top people and a proper football supporter; he supports Bristol City-

Ian Watmore: He does.

Q368 Alan Keen: He understands how supporters feel as well as everything else but Richard’s boss is the 20 club owners. Their interest is not in the future of English football or the future of football at all. It is, in almost every case, the ability of the club that they own to make money. They may have come into it not being worried too much about making money but I think ego comes into it as well. But certainly the main thing is that their interest is not the same interest as the future of football involving youngsters’ development and everything else and supporters of all the clubs around the country, whatever level the club that they support is at.

It is the structure, isn’t it, that is wrong and Richard does a great job representing those people. But if he or you were the managing director of football as a whole then self-interest would work, with a right in there. Do you think it needs Government legislation to set out a structure for football? It is obviously a shambles, isn’t it? What do you think about legislation to set up a structure that is for the benefit for the whole of football, like there is in other European nations?

Ian Watmore: I think I agree with a lot of what you say, except the concept of Richard having a boss is an interesting one. Sorry, just joking. I agree heavily with the fact that, as you say, the running of the Premier League and making it the global success that it has been today, which Richard and others are primary movers of, has been a stunning success story and one that we all enjoy if we like watching that sort of football, which I do. They would argue that money trickles down through the leagues to the other clubs. I don’t know whether that is better or worse than in another situation.

But what it does do is it becomes a single objective, which is to make that league a huge success, whereas I think what you have said is there are more objectives than that. We want that but we also want a strong England team and we want a growing national game in communities around the country and we want more women’s football, and so on. So these are things that I think we need to line up and say, "Here’s a series of objectives for football as a whole". That is what I argue in my note to the Committee, which you may not have but you can read afterwards and see if it is more coherent than my verbal ramblings here. You should set out what the strategic objectives for football as a whole are and then what role the FA has within that and then how the FA might have a governance structure to determine that. I don’t think it will come about through natural causes. It will only come about through an external impetus that is either your Committee or the Government through a Bill or something, because I don’t think it will happen on its own merits. It took something like the Lord Justice Taylor report to change football once before and maybe this is the time to do something equally significant for the game in the long run.

Q369 Alan Keen: You mentioned Terry Leahy. An analogy with Tescos, if one part of Tescos is doing exceptionally well, whatever that part of Tescos makes, if it doesn’t fit in with the overall aim of Tescos internationally then Tescos will do something about it from the top downwards, whereas football is run completely separately. It is all run by good people with the best intentions and if you are being paid, as Richard is, by those 20 owners then he does a fantastic job and it is his duty to do that, even though he understands very well that the thing is out of balance.

Ian Watmore: I think it is possible to square the circle of competing objectives. In a world where the best global talent is playing in the Premier League, which is what people want to succeed, it ought to be possible to use the money that comes from that to develop the best local talent to be as good as that. It is cheaper to make, not buy, if you do it over a long period of time and there are various clubs around who do that very well. We can see some of those clubs beginning to churn out really top talented English players who aren’t just the best in England, they are actually making it with the best players in the world. Whether there are enough of them is highly debatable and whether the system that is producing them is producing them more by accident than design I think is definitely worth questioning. I would think one of the key objectives that we should set for the whole of football is to grow that pipeline of talent systemically, using the wealth that is here because of the Premier League.

Q370 Chair: Can I just clarify: is it your view that for the FA to have the powers you believe necessary to impose a greater governance on the game that would necessitate some kind of Sports Act being passed by Parliament?

Ian Watmore: I don’t think it needs to be because it is obviously something that people could agree to do, but I don’t think they will agree to do it so it is going to be an external intervention that causes them to change. You may not agree with what I am saying but if you did agree with it I don’t think it will come about through just the natural process. I think it will require something different. Whether that is an Act or a strongly worded demand from Government, I don’t know, but I think it won’t happen otherwise.

Q371 Chair: There is no particular reason to believe that a strongly worded demand from Government is going to produce a response either.

Ian Watmore: Sorry?

Chair: It doesn ’ t necessary follow that a strongly worded demand from Government is going to produce a response either.

Ian Watmore: No. I think in the end you have to look at the restructuring. If you need to do restructuring it needs to be forced, or at least to be threatened there so that people might change themselves if they know it is in the background.

Q372 Chair: Does all your experience suggest that is going to have to happen?

Ian Watmore: If you agree with the line of direction that I am recommending, yes.

Q373 Dr Coffey: Is the risk of legislation that it will open up the FA to judicial review on a regular basis? Would that be helpful?

Ian Watmore: There is a lot wrong with legislating. Parliament has some big things to worry about and using parliamentary time on this is one thing. FIFA statutes don’t like government interference. It is more aimed at different governments than ours but nevertheless I am sure it will be used. People will argue that it is threatening their livelihood and so on. So it is not without risk. It would be much better if people just said, "Look, in order to give this a fair crack of the whip let’s have an independent structure, run it for five years and let’s see where we go from there".

Q374 Chair: We have received evidence, not from FIFA but from UEFA, recommending that we adopt some kind of Sports Act.

Ian Watmore: okay, that is more a party role then.

Q375 Jim Sheridan: Can I clarify: external intervention; by that you mean Government, or is there another external intervention?

Ian Watmore: No. I think in this case it is Government. The analogy I had with the Lord Justice Taylor report, I don’t know whether that was a Royal Commission or something but it was something similar. Maybe a Royal Commission could recommend such things.

Q376 Jim Sheridan: But there is no other intervention?

Ian Watmore: Not that I can think of, not unless it was a commercial proposition that dwarfed everything that there is today and I can’t see that.

Q377 Mr Sanders: From what you are saying, do you think the FA should have a more leading role, actually take the leading role in regulating the financial activities of professional football clubs?

Ian Watmore: I think the answer to that is at the strategic level, yes. In other words, I think the FA should set the financial regulatory environment in which professional football operates but I think it should then be for the leagues and the clubs to implement that, usually through their competition rules, which is the most effective way of doing it. A lot is talked about UEFA’s Financial Fair Play scheme and I think there is a sort of assumption that UEFA is like a European governing body, somewhere between us and FIFA. In fact that is not true. UEFA is a confederation of associations, owned by the national associations. What UEFA is doing is using its Champions League competition, and to a lesser extent its Europa League competition, to say, "If you want to play in our Champions League competition then you have to comply with these rules". So it could be that the British clubs all said, "No, we’re not doing that", but of course they won’t because they are desperate to play in the top club football in the world, so they will eventually comply.

UEFA use a competition as a means of achieving a piece of regulation that they think will benefit the game. I think we should set the environment at an FA level and then let the individual competitions, in this case the leagues, determine precisely how to implement that, their own roles within the rules that they impose upon the clubs that play in the league.

Q378 Mr Sanders: But the FA could set some parameters by which your membership of the FA is determined. If you don’t meet them you can’t be a member.

Ian Watmore: That is the kind of thing, yes.

Q379 Mr Sanders: Do you think the FA is fit for that purpose, though, under its current constitution?

Ian Watmore: No, for the reasons I have said. Whether it has the staff in there to do some of that stuff-I think some of the people I had in that area were absolutely brilliant. One of them has gone off to run Portsmouth, which I think shows how good he is.

Q380 Mr Sanders: The football club or the city?

Ian Watmore: I think the city is easy by comparison to the football club. The football club was, of course, the disaster club of a couple of seasons ago. I think you would need to ensure that the capability was there in the organisation to really understand, but I think that is a soluble problem.

Q381 Damian Collins: You joined the FA just after Lord Triesman presented his response to the then Secretary of State for Culture’s questions on football, and that covered some of the ground you are talking about. He talked about whether there should be a financial governance system based on the UEFA fair play rules. When you joined, what was your view on those plans and what happened that led to the collapse and rejection of those ideas?

Ian Watmore: It was, as you said, just before my time but my understanding was that David and the staff from the FA produced a version of a response to I think it was Andy Burnham at the time, and the board members told him that was not the submission he was going to put in, that he was going to put in a different one, which in paraphrase said, "See the submission made by the Premier League and Football League and that is the FA’s position on these topics". I think that was right at the start of the problems between him and the professional game. I think he had also made a speech that they didn’t like about debt in football, and the combination of those two things meant it was very tense on that subject whenever it came up in any meeting.

Q382 Damian Collins: Were these ideas pursued? They were in Lord Triesman’s report but from your time as Chief Executive was this something you felt that, "This should be an agenda item, this is something we should be taking up on a regular basis"?

Ian Watmore: It was one we would have liked to have done but it was made clear that the situation was not changing, that these were matters for the leagues and not the FA. That was kind of the line and so that was what prevailed.

Q383 Damian Collins: Given what you said about the FA, you can probably see why the Premier League might not have very much confidence in the FA to take on that role?

Ian Watmore: You can argue every one of these things. My argument would be that if you regard the FA as essentially an assembly of the people from the counties who may or may not have the sort of experience and know how to deal with this sort of big business type of thing then, yes, you would have no confidence, I’m sure, if you were in the professional game. But if the body concerned was properly resourced, staffed with the right sort of calibre people and had the right sort of board structure then you should have confidence. You might not like what they decide but you should have confidence and that is why I think a different sort of FA is required for these purposes, one that is independent of both its heritages.

Q384 Damian Collins: When we took evidence a couple of weeks ago from David Gill, Niall Quinn and the Chairman and Chief Executive of Stoke City they all agreed that the UEFA Financial Fair Play rules will be a good model for enforcement through the Premier League. Do you agree with them?

Ian Watmore: Each one of these sort of regulations tends to tackle a different problem and the problem that Michel Platini and co were trying to solve was the combination of billionaires coming in and just buying any player they want and paying whatever wage they want out of the petty change of their wealth, or alleged places where the local cities were putting local money into the clubs. He felt it was unfair that clubs of the Chelsea-Manchester City type, or perhaps the Barcelona-Real Madrid models, were bound to be strategically much more successful because they had all this money being poured into them and he felt that by doing the Financial Fair Play rules that would cap that possibility and it would mean that clubs would then have to survive on the resources that they naturally developed. So that is what is now coming in.

I don’t think it inherently deals with the sort of leveraged debt takeover of a club, which you might feel is something else that isn’t an attractive thing to do. When Manchester United or Liverpool or any of these other clubs find themselves in the position they are in, or were in in Liverpool’s case, I would have thought you should at least consider whether there was a regulatory environment that said that sort of thing shouldn’t be allowed from the outset. You have some sort of capital ratio or something in the way that the club is owned. That won’t come up, I don’t think, with Financial Fair Play. You would have to do something else, but Financial Fair Play will probably eventually cap the billionaire, "I’ll have that one" approach to football.

Q385 Damian Collins: On the Manchester City and Chelsea stories, is their high profile something of a distraction? When we took evidence last week in Burnley, the Chairman of Burnley said that if you want to sustain a smaller club in the Premier League, on top of what you get from gate receipts, on top of what you get from TV money, you basically need someone who is going to put in £50 million a year in cash every year just to hold you in the Premier League. That has to be unsustainable.

Ian Watmore: I would argue that it is, although they do seem to keep finding people who are prepared to do it. People do argue that it is smaller sums but it has always been that way in English football a bit. But I do believe the sustainability of that should be questioned. I do believe that if you apply Financial Fair Play at the highest level it should force its way right through the system. Was it Burnley you said you took evidence from? One of the reasons that the Burnleys of this world get to that level is because the Chelseas and Manchester Cities of this world have stretched it so much up here that just to get ordinary players they now have to pay twice the wages that they used to have to pay and so on, and the television money hasn’t kept up with it. So, I think having a dampening effect at the top will eventually filter through to the rest of the system. I think what UEFA are doing is promising on that front, although we’ll see if people find ways round it.

Q386 Damian Collins: In your time at the FA did you ever look at licensing models that operate in other countries? The licensing model in Germany is one that is talked up a lot. It seems to be a fairly flexible system but nevertheless it does at least guarantee a level of oversight from the governing body of the financial performance of the clubs and whether they compete on a fair level, a fair level being that they can pay their bills without going into administration during the season. Is that something that you looked at?

Ian Watmore: The German model is a good one on a whole range of fronts. It is integrated to start with. The DFB looks at leagues and the national association is one integrated whole. It has all the strengths that you say and we have seen for more years than we care to remember how good they are at churning out international teams of all types: men’s and women’s, all ages and so on. The only counter to that argument would be that the Bundesliga is not the Premier League. It doesn’t have the global pulling power; it isn’t the exciting league that the Premier League is. It doesn’t reach consistently the last stages of the European Champions League with three or four clubs. I think if you were to look at the Premier League on its own you would say it has been more successful than the Bundesliga. On the other hand, if there was some global downturn in football finances the Bundesliga is more likely to come through as a sort of HSBC bank and the Premier League would be more difficult to pull through in that. But nevertheless I think, for the period that we are looking at, the Premier League has a long way to go before it runs out of opportunity. It is only really tapping into the early reaches of the global audience.

Q387 Damian Collins: I suppose, to stretch an analogy, the question would be whether English football clubs are becoming too big to fail and the relative price of failure here is small. Leeds United will be back in the Premier League, if not next season within a couple of years, as probably one day will Portsmouth. The Germans have the ultimate sanction, which they don’t use or haven’t used yet, but there is potentially a case where they might.

Ian Watmore: I would like to see a system that didn’t weaken the Premier League but did strengthen the FA. I love the Premier League as a spectator and so on. It has transformed football in this country from where it was in the late 1980s. I have nothing against the success of the Premier League as a league competition and it is well run. It has its issues, that I would like to talk about in a sort of technocratic way some time, but right now it is in a good place. The FA is not in a good place at the strategic level. I would hope that we can elevate it to have a much stronger role in football and then we can have a strong FA and a strong Premier League, not a strong FA or a strong Premier League, and that I think is the fundamental thing.

Q388 Damian Collins: Finally, with regard to financial oversight, we discussed last week with Leeds United the fact their Chief Executive doesn’t know who owns the club. Do you think that is wrong? Is that the sort of thing that the FA, even if not having actual power over, should take a sort of moral leadership on and say on some of these practices, "There might be nothing wrong with what is going on but it is questionable and not transparent and not the way we do things"?

Ian Watmore: I think one of the good principles of governance in any organisation is transparency, and I would apply that to football.

Q389 Paul Farrelly: Ian, I just wanted to return, as we wrap up this session, to a few specifics about the FA. First of all, I wanted to take a few of the points that Damian was exploring on finances and talk about something that did happen on your watch. We know what happened to Lord Triesman’s paper but I have been passed a paper-not by you or anyone associated with you-called Football Finances that you prepared, I understand, in February 2010 and which was for discussion among a joint management group, including yourself and the Chief Executives of the Football League and the Premier League. That was prepared just a month before you resigned. Could I ask you what was the reaction to that paper that you prepared?

Ian Watmore: I think it was more of the same as we have been talking about, which is this is not a matter for the FA really. I think there was an initial worry that we were trying some sort of takeover or some political stunt or something, which I wasn’t. I was just trying to write down the issues as I saw them and try and put them in a sort of consultative way that would get us talking. It was made reasonably clear that that wasn’t the direction that people wanted to go in. They gave us comments on it but I think it was just one of many things where I realised I was just butting up against the governance ceiling and it was time to stop wasting my time and go and do something else.

Q390 Paul Farrelly: Was that the straw that broke the camel’s back?

Ian Watmore: Not especially. It was one of them. There was a month of quite a lot of things happening. One of the ones I found hardest to deal with, although it is probably never spoken about, was I think David Gill rather sensibly recommended that the decision-making bit around who gets what suspensions and did they really punch somebody in the face or not, the sort of compliance unit thing, should be outside of the core FA and in some way with some unimpeachable figure running it. I have quite a lot of sympathy with that. The flip of that is that the Football Regulatory Authority, which is the bit that sets all the regulations and so on in the first place, would come back inside the FA. At the moment it is in an arm’s length status. I think it is analogous to a Government Department setting a regulation but running the operation within, which is 100% the wrong way round. The problem I had when I was reviewing that was if I brought the FRA back inside it would go immediately under this conflicted board and then it wouldn’t be able to make the decisions that it needed to make. So I got into a place where on almost everything that I was moving on I saw cul-de-sacs and I decided I would just go and do something else.

Q391 Paul Farrelly: You have just covered one question I was going to ask, probably the last question. Your paper, was it ever discussed at the FA board at all?

Ian Watmore: No.

Paul Farrelly: It just remained among this management group?

Ian Watmore: Yes. We tabled it over time but-

Q392 Paul Farrelly: When you said that they thought it wasn’t for the FA, who in particular thought it wasn’t for the FA?

Ian Watmore: I don’t want to go into particular individuals, conversations that are private, but I think the generality of the position that David had when he first tabled his approach remained, which is that for these matters the leagues were the people to do it and they should do it themselves and we should just butt out.

Q393 Paul Farrelly: The danger here is that there are so many papers lying around, so many recommendations, that someone will always find a reason to disagree with something because somebody else has said something different. That is something we have to wade through. You make some interesting comments that at present the game is applying the so-called fit and proper rule in a sort of not legally disqualifiable way, which is taking a different judgement. You have mentioned capital ratios previously but you argue that perhaps the game might adopt a fit and proper business case approach as well. You argue in particular about a ban on securitising future revenues and player securitisation so that we don’t get the West Ham-Sheffield situation. You even go on to the football family taking such a collective responsibility that, like the Government with schools, it puts clubs into special measures. All of these suggestions were batted away, were they?

Ian Watmore: In effect. The topics in there, the intention of that paper-as you say, it has never seen the light, I think it was leaked by somebody to somebody else and it has probably moved around-was to say there is no right answer, there is no silver bullet, but we do have some issues. We have our two most famous clubs in these debt problems, in Liverpool and Manchester United; we have the club that has produced more England players of high quality than ever, in West Ham, in the hands of creditors to an Icelandic bank that has failed; we have one of our oldest and most famous clubs, in Portsmouth, being the laughing stock of the Premier League, as it was at that point. We ought to be at least discussing the sorts of things I put in that note in deciding are any of these things really the answer or should we just let free market reign? As somebody once put it, debt is the slavery of the free and I think debt is the slavery of the free market if you take it to an extreme. There is obviously good debt, there are reasons to go into debt to build a stadium or something like the approach that Arsenal have taken to building Emirates and then selling off their old ground and gradually getting back into financial balance, but debt for the sake of it is troublesome over the long term. I think we should be looking at ideas for how to control that without stifling the inherent success of the underlying leagues, which I am proud of.

Q394 Paul Farrelly: I have a couple more questions about the FA. I think we are quite clear on what you would like to see. It is going way beyond Burns and having an independent FA. What would be the best model in professional sport or professional football, possibly from overseas, that you would compare your ideas with?

Ian Watmore: I don’t think there is a particular sports model where I would go, "Yes, that’s the one to follow". Each of them has their flaws. The German football one is a great one but it could be challenged on the strength of its primary league. The Spanish produce great clubs but one of the reasons they do that is they skew all their television money towards Barcelona and Real Madrid and not through the rest of the league, while the Premier League is very good at flattening its distribution of cash from top to bottom. We all know that most of the other sports, England cricket, English rugby and so on, have had some of the same problems. It has emerged from one place into another. I think the thing that makes football in this country different is the global success of the Premier League makes it such a disproportionately big event. To some football fans now club football is what they watch in preference to international football and in almost all the other sports it is the other way round. Even today club rugby hasn’t reached the point where it dominates national rugby.

So I don’t think there is an obvious one. I looked at the States models and talked to Ivan Gazidis who came out of major league soccer in the States. There are some things there but it is a closed system there and I don’t think we have that. So I think we have to fall back on the fact we have the model we have with strong leagues and a national association. If you put governance around the national association, like you would a top PLC company, which is half executive, half non-exec, where the non-execs are chosen for their independence and their skills, I think you have a real chance that the national association could thrive without killing off the other two things.

Q395 Paul Farrelly: Under the governance arrangements, would you like to place the FA Council in the position of a supporters’ trust with a club where it may be consulted but it doesn’t necessarily have any-

Ian Watmore: I think I argue that it needs to cede more powers to this independent board and not be the ultimate parliament of football, but I wouldn’t do that without the independence, because at the moment it’s a check and balance thing that is there to stop ridiculous things happening. But I do like the people on the FA Council, not just because I like them individually but they do have a real breadth and wealth of experience and I think we should tap into it.

Q396 Paul Farrelly: My final question is that the coalition agreement talks about supporting the co-operative ownership of football by supporters. My party’s manifesto, for whatever reason, talks about mutualism at the heart of football as well. What is so special about football that we, as a committee, should be making any recommendations about the future direction of the FA at all?

Ian Watmore: That is perhaps a question for you, but I think the difference between football and other sports in this country is it does occupy a greater importance to people up and down the land en masse, whether it is playing or refereeing or watching or talking about it in the pub or helping your kids through or finding a way if you’re disabled into participative sport. It is just massively impactful on British life, and it is British life not just English life. I think it is therefore appropriate that the Parliament of the day should have a view on whether something that important to the people is in a healthy state. If it is not it should certainly ask questions and then it should decide whether it goes further than that and make recommendations and even laws.

Q397 Dr Coffey: You were quite glowing about the German game earlier and the German FA. They do not have any independent directors on their board, so is it about structure or is it about personality and people?

Ian Watmore: I think the lack of independence in Germany is because they have bundled everything together. It is one integrated organisation where they look at the whole. We have separated. We might as well recognise that, and that the Premier League is a self-standing entity under its own right. It is technically called the FA Premier League, but to everybody in the world it is the EPL or the PL. The Football League has reinvented itself massively successfully after the ITV digital fiasco, and we have the national association, that is the oldest one in the game. It annoys people around the world that it’s not called the England FA, it is the FA, a bit like the Open Golf Challenge, it is not the British Open. It is the oldest; it is 150 years old in 2013. I don’t think we should be trying to push all of those organisations back together à la Germany. You might take a different view. I think we can achieve the success of the Premier League and the success of the FA by giving it strength and teeth, and I think that comes from independence, but you may form a different view.

Chair: Thank you, that has been very helpful.

Q398 Jim Sheridan: You spoke earlier about a vested interest in the FA. There is no one with more vested interest than the fans, is there, or should there be a structure that involves some sort of interaction with the fans and the FA?

Ian Watmore: I think that is a great question. I argue very strongly yes, that whatever the FA is, it should be consulting with the fans and the players, the mass participation of the game as well; it is not just fans, it is players, Sunday morning kids and parents and that sort of thing. I think the FA needs a much better way of consulting with and engaging with those people. There are groups, as you know, like the Football Supporters’ Federation and those sorts of things where I think that there is a councillor slot on the FA Council for at least one of those groups. They have a role to play, but they are campaigning on particular issues and I think they tend to attract people who are passionate and fanatical about the way sport is run, so they have an interesting view to tap into, but I think the FA needs to find ways of engaging with the broad mass of the public. I would say a bit like in Government these days, people are looking increasingly to the social media as a way of tapping into people. I think football needs to do that much more broadly.

Q399 Jim Sheridan: Secondly-hopefully a yes or no answer on this-after listening to what you have had to say today, would it be proper to assume or do you feel that at any time that you, and subsequently the FA, were bullied by the Premier League, or by individuals of the Premier League?

Ian Watmore: Do I think that the FA-

Jim Sheridan: Do you ever feel you were bullied?

Ian Watmore: No, I am not a person who is easily bullied, so-

Jim Sheridan: Were there attempts to bully you?

Ian Watmore: I don’t recognise bullying. People have argued passionately the opposite case and people have become frustrated when I have made my point, but I didn’t personally ever regard I was bullied.

Chair: Thank you very much.

Ian Watmore: Thank you.

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Richard Bevan, Chief Executive, League Managers Association, Steve Coppell, Former Manager of Reading, and Martin O’Neill OBE, Former Manager of Aston Villa, gave evidence.

Q400 Chair: For the second part of this morning’s session, can I welcome Richard Bevan, the Chief Executive of the League Managers Association, with Martin O’Neill and Steve Coppell? Your organisation represents managers from the Premier League and then goes all the way down to League 2. Can you just set out what you see as the main issues affecting them and to what extent they differ between the top and the bottom of the pyramid?

Richard Bevan: Yes, on the main issues affecting the managers, the LMA’s history goes back to 1919. It used to be the League Secretaries and League Managers Association. The LMA was formally launched in 1992. I think probably the biggest change since 1992 will simply be employment issues. That is the key one. The average tenure of the job back in 1992 was about three and a half years. It is now sitting at 14, 15 months-I think I am about to lose a manager in the next five minutes as well. But also in the Football League last season, the average tenure of a sacked manager was around about 10 months. I think a very worrying stat for the game, which is reflective of the game and worrying for all the stakeholders, is that there are about 46 clubs at the moment that have a manager that has been in place for less than 11 months. If you take the manager being the most important person at the club, as the one that gets the sack most regularly when things go wrong, then you have to presume that is very bad news for the game. Certainly in a business corporate environment, politics and any other environment, that would be something that you would have to address fairly quickly at the top.

Secondly, not particularly sexy issues but very important issues, many of our managers don’t get private healthcare, so in the LMA we recently set up a health trust. We now have 60 managers in that. If you can imagine getting the sack every 12 months and you are out of work for, on average, 16 months, you have to make sure that there is healthcare as well as other basic needs. So the LMA is very much a family from that perspective.

Thirdly, I think very importantly, what we are trying to change is our ability to collectively take the views of our members and to lobby both at home and internationally across Europe. We have 91 managers in 30-odd countries. I think it is somewhat ironic that today in UEFA they are voting on new members of the UEFA executive. There are 13 nominees for seven places, and out of those 13 nominees, there are five ex-players that have been nominated by different countries around Europe by different FAs. The FA has never nominated any ex-player, nor to my knowledge has it ever had an ex-player on the board. Even Trevor Brooking isn’t on the board of the FA. I think what you need, like Mr Platini did representing France, you need to make sure that you have young, energetic people, not people, with all respect, in their 70s joining the UEFA executive. So over a period of 10 years, or 15 years, we can try to ensure that we get to a much better position, that we can help influence the game in a better way. Perhaps taking our stock at the moment, the Under-21 Championships, we went in for that alongside Wales, Bulgaria and a couple of other countries and it was recently awarded to Israel, so that probably reflects where we are at.

Lastly, we are in regular communication now with coaches across Europe. We are setting up a number of meetings and think-tanks and we do intend to be proactive. In many ways, like it or not, with some stakeholders, the LMA, the players and perhaps the supporters as well are probably the best policemen in the game at the moment.

Q401 Chair: Can I come back to the first point you made about the ever-diminishing average tenure of a football manager? To what do you attribute that and is there anything you can do about it?

Richard Bevan: There are a number of things that I attribute it to, mainly the world we live in, the lack of managing expectations at a certain number of clubs, the 24/7, the pressure, the financial issues as well, the reward for getting into the Premier League are now reportedly in the region of £90 million. Equally, if you get relegation or even going out of the league, the pressures will be different, and they are exaggerated by the very nature that we are living in a 24/7 media world and the internet, Twitter and everything else.

In terms of can we do anything about it, yes, we can, short, medium and long term. Short term we are pushing for standard contracts. We are encouraging our managers to have the objectives of the club very much written in writing, "What are we looking to achieve in three months, six months, 12 months?" and helping to manage those expectations, and very importantly, the LMA is very much moving into the role of developing training, coaching and management education. We are moving into the National Football Centre in July next year, and along with three business schools, we intend to build upon the leadership management. We have recently been working with companies, major plcs in the country such as Castrol, Barclays, Jaguar and a number of other companies, because we are looking to bring that leadership model in, because there are probably three aspects of being a football manager in what I have learnt in the last three years since I’ve joined: leadership, management and coaching. The FA are very much delivering the coaching and education and we are going to be delivering the management and the leadership training.

The total spend in football is embarrassing for the game. Less than £750,000 is spent on the development of our technical staff-that includes referees-in terms of technical training. We did a recent report with the Warwick Business School on the film industry, the comparison between the film industry and football. Very similar, £3 billion turnover-the entertainers, if you like-and in the film industry, they spend around about 5%, 6% of their turnover on training of their technical staff, which is fantastic, because that is why our British technicians are wanted all around the world, and that is why we are winning Oscars. So hopefully if you were to look at the LMA in five years’ time, you will see it is very much focused on the delivery of coaching and management. I think if we achieve anything like the goals we have set ourselves, then we will improve longevity, because we will prepare our managers better.

Q402 Mr Sanders: Can I ask Steve and Martin your experience of management? Is it becoming harder for clubs to bridge the gap between the Championship and the Premier League?

Steve Coppell: I would say most definitely without the input of a benevolent millionaire who would invest, as we spoke before, the massive sums of money. In my experience at my club with Sir John Madejski, at Reading in particular we tried to bridge that gulf, and even though he is a wealthy man, his ideal all along was the club should sustain itself, which it can do very successfully at one level, but when you get to the Premiership now, the Premiership is without doubt a power league. You can more or less forecast who is going to finish in what position at the start of any one season, based on the power reference of each club within that league. There are always one or two exceptions, but that cannot be sustained without the finances involved. So to answer your question, I would say most definitely it is very, very difficult to go beyond the one or possibly two seasons’ success without the input of substantial funds.

Q403 Mr Sanders: Can I ask, Martin, is it possible to challenge for a Champions League place on a regular basis without a very significant financial outlay?

Martin O’Neill: On a regular basis, I would probably very much doubt that. I think statistically it has been proved that only Everton and Tottenham Hotspur obviously have broken into that top four in the last seven or eight years. I think it is the dream and I think the dreams are always worth pursuing. I suppose from the country where I was born that is what we lived on most of the time. So, yes, I think it would be very, very difficult, as you mentioned, on a regular basis. However, Tottenham Hotspur are making a terrific effort at the moment. First of all, they have done it, and I think it has been a magnificent achievement, not only in getting there, but what they have done in their first season in the Champions League, now contesting the quarter-final. So for teams of that ilk, and I am talking about perhaps maybe tradition, history, crowd support, yes, I still believe-Tottenham have shown the way recently, Everton did it before that-that it is possible. But on a regular basis without that input, that financial input, it is difficult.

Q404 Mr Sanders: Can we ask why you left Aston Villa?

Martin O’Neill: You can, and I would not answer that, primarily because there is a tribunal coming up in the next month or two and I am not at liberty today to speak about that, but I appreciate you asking me the question and asking about my wellbeing.

Q405 Mr Sanders: In general terms, is there a connection though to the difficulties and the competition for wanting to achieve a top four position and where you are today?

Martin O’Neill: You make a very, very good point. I think that Richard touched on it. The managing of the expectation is-well, let me start by saying that the world in which we live in now seems to be-I only say seems to be-instancy. We are looking for instant success and because we have instant access to things, I think the other seems to want to follow, or people feel, if it is there for you, you are capable of doing it. What I am saying is that you set out with a number of ambitions, a number of goals, you try to achieve those and if you have a little bit of a success early on, then people are looking for more, they are looking for more. I think that that has been the difficulty in the game. I am not saying that it didn’t exist some years ago, of course it did, but with the financial situation being so, so strong now, the possibility of failure in the Premiership, the possibility of relegation, then the thoughts of getting into the Champions League, it has reached a zenith.

In my 20 years of management, I have seen a lot of positive changes in the game. It is still a wonderful, wonderful game, and, for instance, if you look at the stadium improvements, if you look at the racism that we were trying eradicate, all great news. Then I often think to myself, "Well, has the game changed at all?" and I will bring you back to just a little story. About 31 years ago, I sat in a dressing room in the City Ground, Nottingham Forest, as a player, and we were part of a very, very successful team, the team was going very well indeed. In stomped a colourful megalomaniac, who had obviously had a bit of an issue that morning with something or someone. At that stage, he was the most successful manager in the country. He had just won the European Cup, and within a couple of months he was about to win another European Cup, and he stomped into the dressing room-now Brian Clough could stomp into any dressing room and he could be irked by anything, but obviously he was chuntering about his board. They had upset him that morning, I don’t know, perhaps because they hadn’t given him something that he had felt was his due, but he almost read the situation, because there was a number of us who were reaching that age where we were thinking about management, certainly thinking about coaching, and I think he had almost a telegnostic feel about it, because he said, "If any of you lads are thinking about management, don’t". He said, "The only inevitability about this job is you’ll get the sack."

I wonder whether anything has changed over that 31-year period. Certainly statistically, as Richard talks about, it wasn’t as severe, managers were getting longer in those days, although still getting sacked, but it has reached a level now where I think managing is still a terrific job but it has become exceptionally difficult.

Q406 Mr Sanders: Is it more difficult to manage expectation than it is to manage a football team? I wonder whether, Richard, I could ask you, what support you give to managers in order to help them manage expectation.

Richard Bevan: That is a very good question. Managing downwards and managing upwards are of equal importance, and I think probably the traditional Chairman in football is going. Issues have arisen in negotiating over 100-odd compromise agreements in the last 12 months or so, because we also represent a lot of coaches, we have lost about 36 managers and about 48 coaches so far this season. One of the problems is who in the football club am I ultimately responsible to? There seems to be in a lot of clubs, particularly in the Football League, two or three directors that have investment in the club, they are having a say in the club, that want to play in a different way and so I think that is very hard for managers. In terms of what we are doing about it, particularly when managers are out of work, we have the Warwick Business School football management course. We are working on 16 three-day modules of leadership and management, and media training is in that. Also, we monitor media interviews of our managers and we help them, and some have a greater need than others and some have a bigger drive, but what I find working for these guys, is that there is a massive appetite for learning. There are 100,000 matches of experience between the members. That is a lot of knowledge, a lot of passion and I want to try and harness that.

I think you talked earlier about Europe, and we looked at Europe, we looked at the way Holland works, we looked at the way Germany works and the one thing that is very clear-to me, anyway-about Europe is there are very few turf wars in those countries. They work together. Their strategy is more unified and I think proper governance, correct and successful governance, is all about participation of the stakeholders in making the right decisions, but getting them to embrace those decisions and that doesn’t happen, if at all.

Q407 Paul Farrelly: We have heard from Steve about John Madejski at Reading, but Martin, can I just come back to Aston Villa? I can understand the difficulty of managing conflicting objectives, such as, "We expect the team to do this, but we are only going to do this and we are only going to give you this" and some people might want to take a stand and say, "I cannot fulfil that objective for you". But if you are looking at the Premier League and below in the round, take the perspective of just up the M6 from Aston Villa, from my club, Stoke City, for the likes of Stokes City it is an absolutely good thing for people like Randy Lerner to pull the horns in and not join the splurge, just as it would be for John Madejski not to join the splurge. Because if it is unsustainable, the way all the decisions on transfers and paying people’s wages filter down, it affects the financial viability of all the clubs below, so isn’t it a good thing that the horns were pulled in in terms of not going on any more spending sprees?

Richard Bevan: Can I answer that question, because there is a Premier League managers arbitration and if Martin answers that question he could conflict himself out for what is going to be an important tribunal? So I don’t think you can ask questions that relate to Aston Villa because-

Q408 Paul Farrelly: Let me phrase it generally: is it generally a good thing that unsustainable spending sprees do not happen?

Martin O’Neill: I think that Mr Watmore touched on this, and he talked about the top clubs in the Premiership, where they have been on massive spending sprees, and therefore other teams, to attempt to catch up, proportionately they have to spend some money. Now, I accept your point entirely. I believe that football clubs-was it Deloitte that mentioned something about the 65% wages to turnover? I think that is something that clubs should aim for and attempt to go for, and I do agree in principle that you can only deal with what you are able to bring in, and if you cannot compete against Manchester United and you cannot compete against Chelsea, it doesn’t stop you attempting to do so, but then I think then that you have to get some sort of-for want of a better word-reality check. But that doesn’t exist in the Premiership, and you have just mentioned Stoke City. Tony has done a wonderful job there, absolutely wonderful job. The day that they made it into the Premiership was a fantastic day for Stoke, but Stoke believe that they belong there, even though they hadn’t been there for quite some time, and now, last year, when they finished I think about 10th in the league, it was terrific. This year, would 11th be good enough for Stoke City this year? I wonder. I will throw it back to you.

Paul Farrelly: We might come on to that in a moment.

Steve Coppell: Can I just add a little bit there? You cannot compete with the big clubs financially, so you try and compete at a different level, which is the nurturing and development of talent. Now, again, the big clubs can spend more money, but you can provide a more caring atmosphere with a route through to progress. I think that is the attraction of the clubs who are trying to compete against the mega-giants. It is the only way you can sustain it and perhaps, in the future, if we have more home-grown players demanding to be in the squads, which I think is a fine development for English football and would protect our national team to some extent in the future, I think that is the way forward.

Richard Bevan: Certainly in the Football League, I think there is only one club that has just posted a profit, which is Swansea. There are 653 clubs in 53 leagues across Europe and over 50% are losing money. So certainly, whether it is under a licence or whether it is a different type of UEFA financial play rule that is reflected down the leagues, we would very much like to see the ability of clubs managing cost controls to a greater extent.

Q409 Alan Keen: Just a small question about the LMA. I am mindful of what the FA are trying to achieve, and that is to professionalise, not just at the club managers’ level but coaching and further down so that we can bring people up through the game. But there is one problem, sometimes it is managers who sack coaches. A new manager goes into the club and they quickly get rid of three or four coaches and take it further down to bring in people that he works well with. I can understand that. Martin is known to have worked with a team of coaches, but how has the LMA approached it to sort of deal with that? Are you trying to aim at getting a level within a club where they would be looked upon as permanent coaches, say with the under-17s and others, so that a new manager coming in is free to bring his own coaches in at the level for the first team coaching and other assistant coaching, maybe for the reserve sides, so that that coherence of tactics and everything else is okay, but at least the other people in the club below that level are fairly safe to pursue their career for five or six years or indefinitely, as it were?

Richard Bevan: Certainly in 1992, when Graham Taylor, Howard Wilkinson, Lawrie McMenemy and a couple of others formed the LMA, it was very much because there were issues between coach and manager, whereas in recent years, it has gone the other way. We are representing and have represented-employment issues in particular-over 40-odd coaches so far this season, and those coaches have been represented because of the request of the manager. Certainly there are some cases where managers will take their coaches with them. In terms of managing the conflict, I think there is conflict in every walk of life and it is how you embrace it, so if we were dealing with a manager and a coach in the same club, where there was a breach-I have not had to do that in three years-we would use separate legal advisors, as with the PGA, if they were dealing with golfer on golfer.

Steve Coppell: I think you would find as well most clubs within their academy system have fairly stable environments. I think they were designed to not be affected by the incomings of a new manager, so the development of young players is very much insulated from who is managing the club. It is not a separate entity, but it does have a special consideration.

Q410 Alan Keen: At what level would you go to? Academy would be the obvious level that you want to perpetuate for years. In my own team, Middlesbrough, they set a-

Steve Coppell: Yes, development, you’d go to development level, I think. It is the prerogative of any owner or manager to employ his inner sanctum staff: people, like any relationship, you have to trust, and that trust is usually developed over time.

Q411 Alan Keen: Even with physio, would the new manager want to bring his own physio in, for instance?

Martin O’Neill: That is possible. I take your point, in principle as much as anything else. Any new manager who is stepping into a football team and will concern himself immediately with what the youth team is doing is deluding himself. He should take himself off to the nearest insanity place, because he is not. He is dealing with football. He is dealing with football first team issues. That is what his job consists of. It consists of that immediately. If he gets the time, if he gets, as they have often talked about, these five-year plans-I have never seen one myself-where someone steps in and has time to look and see what is happening at youth team level, he might get an opportunity to have a look at the youth team within six or seven weeks of coming into the football club and then it is up to him to take as much interest or as little interest as possible.

Steve has made the point that they are usually almost separate entities and chairmen like them to be separate entities, because the chances are if the manager is going, it would be because of first team results, obviously. Yes, a manager will take in some of his staff, but surely that is something that the club must be thinking about when they are about to sack the manager in the first place.

Q412 Dr Coffey: Mr Coppell and Mr O’Neill, you have both been exceptionally distinguished players and successful managers, are you concerned that the influx of foreign managers is restricting the opportunities for English or UK managers?

Steve Coppell: Personally, I am. As an English coach, I feel to a certain extent offended that we don’t have an English manager of the national team.

Dr Coffey: That was going to be my next question.

Steve Coppell: As you know, I think the LMA at the moment are working with initiatives to try and educate our coaches and managers to be better at their craft so that in the future that won’t be an attractive option. The same with our players; to have so few of our players playing every week, every Saturday in the Premier League I think is something that we should be concerned about as regards the overall picture of the success of the national team. I just think it is wrong. We should have more protection within our game for talented people. The responsibility is with the clubs to produce the best home-grown players they can. It is their responsibility, without doubt, not to cherry-pick around the world and invite those players to come and take advantage of the finance that has been generated within our game. Similarly, with the managers and coaches, there should be a more defined route of progress, educational process, which again the LMA are taking a lead on, so that when an owner of a club, whether he be English or foreign, looks at the contenders out there to run his club, he will say, "Well, the English system is the best system, they give the best education and time has shown they produce the best results".

Richard Bevan: Can I give two important facts before I pass it on to Martin? One, there’s only nine overseas managers in the 92 clubs. It is a misconception there is a lot, but obviously in the same way that the best players in the world want to come and play in the Premier League, so do the best coaches and the best managers. In terms of having an Englishman as our English manager, there are about 60 Englishmen managing in the 92 clubs, and I come back to the training point I made earlier: what are the FA doing in terms of vision and strategy for four, five, 10 years ahead, and are they saying, "Are we identifying the talent? What are we doing to help train those individuals to improve, so we end up with a dozen or so candidates to become the next England manager?"

Martin O’Neill: My view was concurring with Steve’s, but having listened now to Richard and those statistics, I think I will keep quiet.

Q413 Dr Coffey: I was going to ask, do you think the FA should restrict the manager to being a UK national, but I think there seems be consent that that is true.

Steve Coppell: I think the qualification rules for the national team now should apply to the manager as well, which doesn’t restrict foreign managers but it makes it more difficult.

Richard Bevan: We have about 10 managers, who are managers of other national teams as well, Finland, Panama, Uganda, India.

Dr Coffey: Tony Adams, Azerbaijan.

Richard Bevan: Yes, Thailand, and 90-odd guys working abroad, so as we train and develop our young coaches, they will go abroad to get experience.

Q414 Dr Coffey: From what I have taken from what you have suggested, the LMA is taking the leading role in educating managers, but should there be more mandatory levels of UEFA licensing, not just in the Premier League, but up and down our leagues?

Richard Bevan: If you look at the number of UEFA qualified coaches in this country, it is around about 2,700. If you compare that to Germany, it is 32,000, to Spain it is 29,000 and Italy is about 27,000. But I think what the National Football Centre will bring is a focus on quality, not quantity, and as well as the AB and the pro licences. We have about 140, 150 coaches with the pro licence; the figure in other countries in Europe is over 1,000. I think the key for a coach, a young coach, and a manager is that there needs to be a clear pathway. If you go to Holland and you want to become a coach or a manager, there is a very clear pathway of how you go up the ladder. If you have not played the game or if you come out of the game early and you want to become a coach, there hasn’t been that clear pathway. Although we are leading the way, we are not trying to take control of coach and education management, what we are trying to do is to work in partnership with FA learning in order to ensure that the people we represent get a broader cross-section of training. In League 2, for example, it is my opinion that you need to probably understand the commerciality of the club if you want to survive longer than 12 months. You need to understand what the ambitions of the Chairman are, you need to understand the budgets and the cash flows and maybe even read a balance sheet.

Q415 Ms Bagshawe: I just want to come in on a little supplementary to Mr Coppell’s answer there. You said that it is the responsibility of the clubs to develop players for the national team and that it is a great shame that we have so few English players playing in the Premier League. Would you support some kind of quota for English players per team in the league?

Steve Coppell: Yes, I would. I would, to protect our own talent and to put more emphasis on clubs to produce the talent that will play for England in the future. Again, it is a pathway, as Richard was saying there. If you sign for a big club now, you know that the big club, unless you are the top of the tree, are going to buy somebody from somewhere around the world, and that makes our league game more attractive. If you go anywhere in the world, they will be watching Premier League on the television in the afternoon, so it is that dilemma. But as somebody who played for his country and loves the England team, I want the England team to almost run parallel with the success of the leagues. Is it possible? I don’t know, but I think we can just move a little bit more the balance away from the league itself towards a national team.

Q416 Ms Bagshawe: What about you other two gentlemen, quickly?

Martin O’Neill: I think it would improve Mr Capello’s choice of a game on a Saturday afternoon anyway, if he is getting to see more English players playing in the Premiership.

Richard Bevan: Personally, I am less about quotas, less about restrictions. I am more about better governance, better people leading our game, a more unified approach, an agreed strategy, and if we had those, we wouldn’t have to worry about quotas.

Q417 Philip Davies: Just pursuing this theme, shouldn’t it be the free market and it all be done on merit, and presumably given that it is such a results-orientated business, if the best players are English, they will get in the team; if they are not, they will not get in the team? Do you not think that if you had this kind of-laudable though it is-aim to force clubs to develop more English talent, would that not in itself damage the Premier League in the sense that one of the reasons presumably why there is so much money in the Premier League is because of all these stars come from around the world to play in it? That is the thing that gives it the kudos, why it is so important. Would it not damage the league itself to do that?

Richard Bevan: I think on that particular point, you only have to go to the top of the tree in the FA, and what you need is you have to first of all identify players, identify the talent. Secondly, you have to make sure they have enough hours to be trained. Thirdly, you have to make sure that the coaches that are coaching them are the best in Europe, and the point where you do need assistance, which is why I am sure the Premier League have gone for their 25-man squad rule, and the use of a minimum of eight players locally, I think that has to do with making sure that the Premier League and the FA have the ability to-I have just forgotten the thread. The point I was making, the last point, is that you must create opportunities. I think the Premier League and the Football League, it is about opportunities for our domestic players, that is key.

Steve Coppell: If the purpose of the English game was to provide the best and most exciting league throughout the world, I think you could say that we have been fairly successful, but if the purpose of the English game was also in combination to make a very competitive England team, which every two years would make us very happy, rather than making us reasonably unhappy, then we have been unsuccessful. We need to try and combine the two, and I don’t even know whether it is possible, but I think we can make a better fist of it than we are at the moment. Again, it is all down to that responsibility of clubs and the Premier League to a certain extent to maybe shift a little bit of power towards the national game.

Q418 Philip Davies: Can I ask about the qualifications issue for football managers, because every so often it seems there is a controversy. The last one-Alan will know more about this than me-the one that springs to my mind, I think, was Gareth Southgate, who I think had been appointed as manager of Middlesbrough and he hadn’t gone through all of his coaching qualifications and all the rest of it. Where do you stand on that? Just because somebody does not have a particular qualification does not surely mean that they are not going to be any good at managing a football club, does it?

Richard Bevan: I think if you are going to become a surgeon, you wouldn’t expect a surgeon not to have the right qualifications.

Q419 Philip Davies: It is the same parallel?

Richard Bevan: I think it is a good example, yes. If you take Europe, we are the only country in Europe that doesn’t have mandatory qualifications, although the Premier League do now, and the Football League have been moving very closely towards that. In Gareth Southgate’s case, it was also because Steve McClaren was taken by the FA to become the manager of England, and they wanted to promote him through. There have been four or five occasions. What the Premier League are doing is saying that as long as the manager is going through his qualifications, they do on occasions and have made about five or six exceptions.

Q420 Philip Davies: My reading of the situation is that somebody like Martin O’Neill has been a tremendously successful football manager, not because of his coaching qualifications-if you do not mind me saying so-but because of your ability to inspire the people that play in the club, your man management skills. It always strikes me, as an observer, that the ability to manage people and to inspire them to play better and to fulfil their potential is a far more important asset in being a successful football manager than necessarily the coaching qualifications that you have. So surely somebody who is a great man manager, somebody who inspires people, who might not have all of the coaching qualifications, I put it to you would prove ultimately to be a more successful manager than somebody who cannot inspire the players in the same way but has all the coaching qualifications.

Richard Bevan: I think the point you are making is a good one. At the same time though, being a successful manager is about leadership, management and coaching: can you teach leaders to be better leaders, can you teach managers to be better managers? Of course you can, and in business, if you were going to be looking at any of the plcs, do they train their senior team, their managers? Yes, they do. So you want to provide the opportunity for a coach to have as many qualifications, to have as much learning as possible to survive and be as successful as he can as an individual.

Steve Coppell: You need to have qualifications. You can’t just say, "Open house, who do we want to be manager next week?" I think it is a requirement of the trade that you do have some basic knowledge of coaching techniques. As you say, it is all about man management. I am not sure whether Fergie has all his coaching badges, but you look at the success he has had down to man management. Gareth Southgate had spent 15 years in the industry as a player. It is a natural progression. He wasn’t a rookie by any means. He had been in many dressing rooms with many top managers and obviously learnt an awful lot from them. So I would say qualifications, yes, but it shouldn’t not allow people with man management abilities to be able to do the job.

Richard Bevan: There is also a big appetite among our members. We recently had the Royal Marines working on a particular course with our guys, there were about 40 members. We run coaching clinics and, in my time, there have never been fewer than 70 managers and coaches turning up on one particular day. There is a big appetite for learning as well.

Philip Davies: Martin, I prayed you in aid.

Martin O’Neill: No, I am so pleased you mentioned that. I am beginning to agree with you. I have always been a bit sceptical about-Richard won’t like me for saying this-the licence, the procedure you go through. I do accept it. I accept because, again, you have to do something about it. It might be the worst analogy in the world, but it might be a bit like getting a driving licence, you have to pass the test at some stage or another. Will that be how you drive in the next two or three years? Well, if it is anything to do with my driving, it certainly wouldn’t be, but I think that there are certain things that you can learn during these courses. I must admit, I don’t have my licence myself at this minute, and hopefully it won’t debar me from going back into the Premiership. I will certainly do it, but I will do it because I want to do it. I want to do it, because there are things that I can learn from it. Now, I don’t for one minute suggest that when I take a coaching course just for the purpose of passing an exam-it will give me that experience, of course, but will that be any good to me in the heat of the moment when I am having to make a decision as to whether a game can be won? I am not so sure. Maybe that is just experience, but I do accept the point. I didn’t always think this, but I am coming round more to thinking that the licence is there for a purpose. As you say, I am not even sure that Alex Ferguson has this particular badge. It hasn’t prevented him from being one of the greatest managers of all time, and I am still debating the point.

Richard Bevan: Well, 50% of first-time managers never get back into the game when they get the sack, and so-

Q421 Philip Davies: I was going to move on to the respect bit, because as we have mentioned Alex Ferguson, it seemed a good point to ask just briefly-the FA tried to introduce a respect campaign to help the amateur game as well, parents not having a go at the referee and all this kind of thing. As we touched on Alex Ferguson, what is the League Managers Association doing to make sure that managers set the best example of all to their players, which is not to challenge the referee’s decisions, that the players therefore do not challenge the referee’s decisions, because unless the managers and the players at the highest levels of football show some respect to the referee, there is no chance of anybody lower down the chain doing it.

Richard Bevan: The Respect programme is a very important programme, and when the FA and Lord Triesman launched it, we were, and still are, very supportive. I was in a meeting yesterday, and am pleased to see that the results of the Respect programme have been working, that there has been turnaround in terms of the amount of referees, there were about 7,000 amateur referees leaving the game a year, that has been turned round.

In terms of managing at the very top and the volcano-I think they call it, sitting on a volcano-at times there will always be moments of high emotion, but behind the scenes our guys are extremely hard-working. We have completed a document and we have meetings on a regular basis with the PGMOL, the body that works with the referees. We had 80 managers working over 500 hours, chaired by Greg Dyke, where we came up with a number of recommendations on how we could help referees, and that is on an ongoing basis.

Steve Coppell: The only thing I would say, after a game that has been very intense and the be-all and end-all of your week, your preparation, your thinking, everything you do, 20 minutes after the game finishes, you have somebody asking you questions, it is very difficult to be even-tempered and conclusive about what happened. So I think it is just the passion of the moment. It is what makes our game, it is what all the supporters want to see, they want to see the management team show passion. Sometimes words don’t come out the way you would mean, but I don’t think it is a bad thing. I think there is an awful lot of respect emanating-certainly I call Sir Alex the don of managers. He is the don of managers. He does so much for the game that is positive and I think so many of the top managers are of that ilk, but just for 20 minutes sometimes you just don’t think straight.

Richard Bevan: These guys do a fantastic amount of work, as I said earlier, behind the scenes, and something that people are not aware of is we have been debating for the last three, four weeks in terms of what happens in post-match interviews, in terms of not answering any questions regarding the referee. They tried that in Scotland recently and it didn’t hold together, but it is something that we are looking at. There was a case with one manager that said after the FA Cup match that he didn’t want to complete the interview, but he was told that he was legally contracted to do that, which wasn’t the case in the FA Cup, and, again, his emotions were very high. You look at the likes of Peter Jackson up at Bradford, he has three or four games to prove his worth up there and to hopefully get a full-time contract there running the club, not as a caretaker manager, and one decision could affect that. But it is an entertainment world. At the same time, our guys behind the scenes do very much care, they are very positive about it. As I said, we had a five, six-hour meeting on the subject yesterday.

Q422 Damian Collins: There has been a lot of discussion about debt and profits in the game. How much pressure is there on football managers to spend more money?

Steve Coppell: That is a good question. There is an awful lot of pressure on most managers not to spend money. There are very few occasions where a Chairman has said to me, "Well, why aren’t you spending the money that I’ve given you?" The reality is I think you know you have to compete. I think most managers, given the opportunity to spend money, would rather see that money running around on the pitch than sitting in a bank account gathering interest and looking after the financial security of their club in the future. You know you are managing in the instant and you have to get results. You are judged on results, so if you get the opportunity to spend money-but again, I have never known a Chairman who has allowed me to spend more than he has offered.

Q423 Damian Collins: But you must know in your conversations with the chairmen of football clubs that if they have an ambition to reach a certain level, it is going to cost them money, and if a manager wants to stay in a job beyond the end of the season, he knows he is going to need money to do that.

Steve Coppell: I very often say to people in football, "The success of football is easy. If you have the money, you buy the best players and then you have the best team. It’s easy". But most clubs don’t have the freedom of the finances to be able to do that, so every judgement call you make then is just trying to get the best value for the money you spend, and that is the art of management.

Q424 Damian Collins: Mr O’Neill, I think it was reported you spent £120 million in four years at Aston Villa, and that was not enough even to get into the Champions League, but to get within touching distance of it. I appreciate you cannot talk about Villa directly, but I would be interested in your views on this: are managers in a position where effectively they are driving debt within the game, because they have to be advocates for spending more money?

Martin O’Neill: Well, one thing I will say, the figure was much, much less. What generally happens in a football club is they talk about the amount of money that is spent on players coming in. What they forget to do is that you have to attempt to balance some capacity by letting other players go, and in actual fact the figure that we are talking about was closer to £70 million net over four years. Yes, there is seemingly an outside pressure, there is a pressure from supporters who feel that when a club is taken over, the owner, the Chairman, has just carte blanche to put this into a different stratosphere when, in actual fact, most people would want to run football clubs as a business. As Steve has just mentioned, I am not so sure that there have been that many chairmen who would say, "Well, here’s a spare £50 million. Go out and see what you can do with it". I think that prudence seems to be the key word these days. But, yes, it is a difficult one. You have to try and compete at some stage or another and if you feel that there is something out there, someone out there who can help, of course you will have these discussions. But the owner of the football club will have the ultimate sanction.

Q425 Damian Collins: Do football clubs have a strategy beyond spending as much money as they can to try and sustain a league position? Some clubs are striving to either get into the Premier League or compete at a higher level within it. You have talked about youth football and other things within the club, and clubs have limited resources. It would strike me that a club would need a strategy to say, "We have a certain amount we can spend. There is a certain amount that has to come from internal development within the club, a certain amount we have to raise through a better commercial strategy". Do clubs have serious strategies like that, and given the management might be there for a relatively short period of time, what role does the manager have in that?

Richard Bevan: That will vary dramatically from one club to another, and there are some very good chairmen and boards out there. We spoke earlier about a model, Stoke City, Peter Coates, the Chairman there, is very experienced-it is his second time, I think, at Stoke-and the chairmen at Crewe and Doncaster Rovers and numerous chairmen and boards are very talented and have very successful models in that they can break even at the club and operate in a positive cash flow. I think it will depend upon the boards. I find that particularly on the employment tribunals and the legal issues we have. About a third of the clubs are probably struggling with some of the quality of the leaders of their clubs and the way that they operate their model.

Q426 Damian Collins: Mr O’Neill, do you think we will ever again see a club like Nottingham Forest with a European Cup?

Martin O’Neill: Funnily enough, I was thinking about that last night. Again, it is a dream. I think it is highly unlikely, highly unlikely, the way that football has gone in the last 20 years, and I think that would be a shame. It doesn’t mean that there couldn’t be a manager who could bring all of these things to pass. You could inherit a very, very good youth team in a couple of years who might come through, if they stick together, and I am talking about the Manchester United side of about 1994, 1995 time, but I suppose that was at Manchester United. Nottingham Forest are a provincial football club, steeped in the history now with two European Cups. I don’t think it is impossible, but I think it is highly unlikely, certainly in the 20 years.

Richard Bevan: Perhaps the expectation has come away from winning the Champions League to getting into the Champions League, as Everton did in 2008, and getting to the last 16. That was obviously a major success.

Q427 Damian Collins: I record for the record that Steve Coppell was giving a no to that.

Steve Coppell: That was a massive no. Absolutely impossible without the massive support of a benefactor. If you are producing a team, if you have a great youth team then in the next transfer window you lose your three best players. It is the very nature of football now.

Damian Collins: One final question, if I may, I know we are getting tight on time.

Martin O’Neill: I wasn’t expecting him to be as strong as that.

Q428 Damian Collins: I could see him vigorously shaking his head, so I thought I would give him the chance to put it on the record. One topic that we have talked about quite a lot in previous hearings is the football creditors rule, and when we discussed it with the Premiership chairmen and Chief Executives they expressed a view they thought the rule should go, and that without the football creditors rule clubs would, out of necessity, need to be more transparent in the way they deal with each other. Clubs would be more cautious about selling a player to a club if they didn’t know that that club had the money to pay for that player and that it would be fairer, because it seems unfair that a football club with smaller creditors from the community that they serve lose out when a football club the other end of the country is protected by it. As managers, I would be interested in your views on that. If the football creditors rule went, do you think it would make a difference to the way you do your jobs and do you think it would be good for the game?

Richard Bevan: First of all, before I pass on to these guys the football creditors rule doesn’t apply to managers and coaches. It is obviously something that has had a lot of debate recently and probably still needs to have more debate, but I think that would come if the clubs could have a licence, in looking at how they would operate. But it does need a debate, and certainly the man in the street running the small printing business and not getting paid is an issue in today’s commercial society around football.

Martin O’Neill: Are you referring perhaps to transparency? For instance, I have never understood this idea about a player being sold to another club and it was a non-disclosed fee. I have never been into that idea.

Q429 Damian Collins: No, I think what I was referring to is if a player is sold to a club and that club might be in financial difficulties. The football club selling might not be as concerned that it might not get its money if the payment was being paid in instalments, because they are protected by the football creditors rule, but if that rule didn’t exist a club might want to know a lot more about how a club is going to pay for that player.

Martin O’Neill: Obviously.

In the temporary absence of the Chairman, Mr Adrian Sanders was called to the

Chair for the remainder of the meeting.

Q430 Mr Sanders: If the Chair were here, he would be calling on me to ask the next question, which is what impact has the increased level of overseas ownership had on standards of governance in the English game?

Richard Bevan: We have about 11 or 12 overseas owners in the Premier League. To be honest, whether the owner comes from America, Birmingham, Australia, Wales, wherever they come from, I think that they need to be operating within a much tighter environment. We would like to see a licence going from the FA to clubs, a framework where a new owner, wherever he came from, had to work within much closer guidelines, and that would protect the future of the club and also give more integrity. Certainly, there are the UEFA fair play rules, and there are still some issues around ownership and offshore ownership and transparency. But I think it is not so much about overseas owners, it is more about the quality and making sure the framework is correct. If you do have overseas owners coming on board, as we have recently, I think we have to-the leagues and the FA and the media-impart upon them the importance of the tradition, the philosophy, the supporters and the actual community, and I think if we do that-in many ways the Government are also a union for supporters. It is representing-

Q431 Mr Sanders: Would you see this in place of the fit and proper test or is it in addition to the fit and proper persons?

Richard Bevan: Do you mean the licence?

Mr Sanders: Yes.

Richard Bevan: The fit and proper persons test or the director test, I see that as part of a licence.

Steve Coppell: I think good governance is all about protection. You have to protect the people within the game and I think the people who need to be protected on this particular point are the supporters, because that is the only loyalty in football, the supporter for his own club. Almost every other loyalty can be bought, but the supporter for his own club, when he is at the whim of bad governance then he is vulnerable and I think everybody within the game is going to be very mindful of that.

Q432 Mr Sanders: Martin, can I ask you, because you are in a unique position. You will have experienced a club run as a committee at Nottingham Forest; you have experienced the traditional English club ownership model under, say, Doug Ellis; and you will have experienced foreign ownership at Aston Villa. How would you compare the differences between the three?

Martin O’Neill: Yes, I joined Nottingham Forest way back in 1971 as a 19 year old player and they were the only team in the Football League who were run by a committee. That of course, changed in-you may say it might have changed about 1990-odd or whatever it was. It changed in January of 1975 when Brian Clough arrived, because it was no longer a committee, it was his decision. It was interesting for those couple of years to see how that committee was run. Of course, I was a young professional footballer at the time, more interested in trying to break into the first team, but I did not know the basic difference between that and the board. I felt that the committee at Nottingham Forest seemed to run itself reasonably well at that stage. It did not find itself in serious debt until 1979, when they decided to build the East Stand. They needed £2 million, would you believe, and I think they found a little bit of difficulty, and even winning the European Cup at that time did not cover the cost. So that was the first time that I realised that the committee could find itself in a bit of difficulty, of course there were shareholders and such things like that.

I have been involved with football clubs where they have been run by boards. I have been in board meetings too; those are interesting in themselves. I get back to the point that Richard and Steve make. If you have good governance, I think that will transcend most things, and I think that is the best way for me to explain it. If the club is run exceptionally well, has transparency, obviously, and I suppose if the supporter believes in the way that club is being run and thinks that this club can have a future for a start and, secondly, can have some ambition, I believe then that that is the best way. If there is a comparison between the three, it would have to do with the governance of the club itself, not the way in which it was done.

Q433 Jim Sheridan: Can I ask a question about the role of football players’ agents? We have the extreme example of Wayne Rooney, who made it known that he was not happy at Man United and then regained his enthusiasm when another couple of zeros were added to his contract. You guys depend in your job on getting the best out of players, they have to remain focused on what they are supposed to be doing in terms of playing football, but if players are being distracted by being promised extra money, or moving clubs, or to stop being players, that will impact on your job, I would imagine. I was trying to get a feel for what managers think of agents, and should there be a code of conduct between managers and agents. But also should the manager and the player have the same agent?

Richard Bevan: That is a big question. I think the role of the agents is something again, a little bit like the governance issue, where there will be good and bad out there, and we probably experience both. There are 400 licensed agencies, I think, in the UK. Our biggest concern is that FIFA, I think in 2012, is going to be relinquishing their regulatory control over agents, and I think that is going to be a major problem. I think, probably because of legal issues, administration issues, if you have agents bringing young players from country to country, indeed from continent to continent, you are going to have a lot of issues. Certainly, from my experience, I have seen a lot of good agents working. Probably the biggest negative for me is the size of agency fees. I think that is something I have been extremely surprised at.

Steve Coppell: From my experience again, as Richard said, there are good and bad. A good agent is a huge ally in dealing with some players, particularly difficult players. A bad agent needs to be regulated, and again, that is where you need guidance from your governing body, to make sure it is not just a code of conduct but actual regulations whereby bad agents are eliminated.

Martin O’Neill: You would hope that when you sign a player that if he signs, for instance, a four year deal, that you would be hoping that you would have some control of this. I think that this might be a separate issue, but the control has left the football clubs and gone to the players and therefore the agents. I think that is one of the major changes I have seen in the game. When I started out, the player had no control whatsoever, he was at the behest of the football club. Now it has gone full circle and I think the players are now in charge, which is a bit of a shame.

Richard Bevan: Recently I heard it is a bit like the wild west out there, we can’t do anything about it, we are where we are, and I think that is an inappropriate approach to it.

Q434 Jim Sheridan: I think the fundamental problem as I see it is that there is an incentive for agents to move players on, simply because of the commission they get, so it is in their interest to keep moving players on. The other factor is the fact that the agent also is paid by the club. Would it be fairer if the player pays the agent rather than the club?

Richard Bevan: I think you probably need to look at other models around the world and pick up experiences. For instance, if you take America, in a number of sports the agents’ fees are paid centrally. I am not necessarily saying that is the right way to go, I am just saying there needs to be a focus on the framework and if there is not it will be chaos.

Q435 Jim Sheridan: Steve, you say you think that agents should be regulated?

Steve Coppell: I believe so, yes.

Q436 Jim Sheridan: Would you agree with that, Martin?

Martin O’Neill: Absolutely.

Q437 Damian Collins: Do you think the Bosman ruling has had an inflationary impact on players’ wages?

Martin O’Neill: Yes, I do. Interestingly, I think that you can trace an awful lot of these questions today back to Bosman. Bosman set out in the first place with right on his side, because he had been given a free transfer, his money for the following year was going to be less than the previous year. In English football he would have been given a free transfer and therefore he would have been free to negotiate another deal with someone else. But he was held back. He was held back by the club, who had freed him, and were not prepared to keep him but were looking for a fee. He took this to a higher authority and won his case, and I think quite rightly won his case. Had he been dealt with in England, it would have been perfectly all right. But suddenly, just from that, the fallout from that was extensive, so much so that we were possibly debating the idea that football itself could have its own rules, and I think there is certainly a case for that. Because the minute that there was a possibility of a player having a bit of a difficulty with his contract, suddenly he could go to European law, and find a loophole there, and sort things out. Clubs were finding out loopholes as they were going along. For instance, a player with two years left of his contract was in the position, by some sort of law-made way back, I think, during King John’s time-that he could actually get out of his contract, and certainly in his last year, could buy himself out and agents were using these to manipulate situations. Bosman himself set out on the side of right, but a lot of fallout from that has happened. It has triggered a number of situations which I believe could have been resolved early on.

Q438 Jim Sheridan: Can I just clarify the question I asked about, is it unhealthy or bad practice for the player and the manager to have the same agent?

Steve Coppell: I would say it is bad practice, with the potential of being unhealthy.

Martin O’Neill: Yes, absolutely. Conflict of interest would almost certainly take place there.

Steve Coppell: With the Bosman thing, I think we can realistically say now, for most good players, a contract is probably at least 12 months short of the reality, because you know you have to protect that asset.

Q439 Damian Collins : You have to renegotiate before you get to the last year?

Steve Coppell: Yes, very much so. At least 12 months. And that, with the combination of increased TV income, has made it very inflationary, yes.

Q440 Alan Keen: Because we are short on time, I am going to try and be brief. It is the main structure of the game in this country that needs changing. Do you agree that it should be the FA that is the body that is strengthened so it is superior in power to any other body in football? That would be with an LMA representative on there as well, of course. But it is the FA surely, that must be strengthened to be the regulating body above any other part of-

Richard Bevan: I think, if there is one thing that can come from the select committee and the encouragement to the game to do various proactive things, one of them will be to work together to unify the family and absolutely a pyramid system in which the FA are on top. The FA are the representative of FIFA and UEFA. At the moment the FA just manage the business. Like Ian said earlier, I think a lot of the criticism of the executive is unfair. In my three years I have come across a lot of fantastic executives in the FA and in the Premier League as well, and their speed and their communication and the discussions we have are very good. Unfortunately, the framework in which they operate does not encourage them to be innovative, proactive and, most importantly, it does not encourage leaders. It is the framework that needs to be changed and if you do not change the framework then they will not develop.

Q441 Alan Keen: Do you agree that the PFA also, along with the LMA, should have a representative on that?

Richard Bevan: I think, if you wanted effective governance in the world we live in, whatever sport it was, if you do not embrace the players, the coaches, and certainly, in our case, the managers, then you will fail in delivering that participation. It is only when you get participation in decision making, if you achieve that then you will find people are on the same wavelength and we will deliver far greater success. A little bit like, I was talking earlier about Germany and Holland, where you do not see the turf wars, for want of a better way of putting it.

Martin O’Neill: Richard had said earlier that we do have the determination, we have the passion, and I think we have the knowledge, although that might not be universally accepted. But I do believe that we have an important role to play, simply because we are, or are supposed to be, the most important person at the football club.

Richard Bevan: I think there has been a fair amount of talk as well, about whether there should be independent directors. If you had a very efficient structure in the way we have just been mentioning, then the need for independent directors would not come out. But you do need, as it stands at the moment, guys who will challenge, and the PFA and the LMA represent people across all of the leagues. I think that is very important.

Q442 Alan Keen: Do you agree that the independent directors, the sort of people who would be appointed, would listen to you? At the moment you do not have that voice at the top.

Richard Bevan: I think we have the voice, insomuch that the guys that are members of the LMA have got a powerful voice collectively. We try to use that very professionally, whether it is the professional way forward document; we have a current review with Southampton University going on in the technical area; we are looking at transfer windows; we are looking at a whole range of technical issues. But there is not a technical committee in the FA. The Technical Control Board they got rid of in 2006. Then you can look at the true governance, you have the Professional Game Board, which sits below the FA, and the Professional Game Board’s remit is the finances of the FA yet the Chief Executive and the Chairman of the FA do not have a vote on that, which is why I believe Adam Crozier resigned.

Q443 Paul Farrelly: We have run over our time, I am sorry to detain you. I only have two questions on which I wanted to seek your views. Firstly, with regard to the game and the FA, we went to Germany, and without being naive and taking everything at face value, we got an impression of a more collective ethos, particularly when we were told the story of how they reacted to their disappointing performance in Euro 2000, to try and change their game. My specific question is about youth development. Do you think that the current proposals for youth development in the country-with all the different interests involved, including the Premier League-are right, or is there something better that we could be doing?

Steve Coppell: To be honest, I do not know the answer to that. I know there is progress being made at the academy level at the moment, and changes are afoot. But in any walk of life you are judged on results and if we are not getting results, if we do not have the input of young, home-grown players coming through the way we would like, to give us a very competitive national team, then we must change, we must do something different. We must have a more innovative approach to how we are producing our players rather than just leaving the blinkers on and saying this is what we have done for so many years and we are all right. We have to be more open-minded and flexible, I think.

Richard Bevan: Youth development is massively important. Our Chairman, Howard Wilkinson, who sadly could not be with us today, has a lot of good thoughts and views which he is imparting upon key people in the game. I think the responsibility for youth development essentially should be with the FA, but the Premier League are taking some key movements into their new academy system. I think what is important is that they embrace the Football League, which they are in negotiations with, and I am sure they will come out together. But what is important is the likes of Watford and Crewe and Southampton and Middlesbrough. Those clubs are doing fantastic work with youth development. They are still incentivised, they are still encouraged, and they still see that as an important role. If you look to Germany, they are spending £500 million on their youth development and their structure. But they are more or less one organisation and so they do work much closer together. But I absolutely believe that the Premier League are a very efficient organisation. If they were to work closer with the Football League and indeed with the FA, giving clear guidelines, then we would be in a better position.

Q444 Paul Farrelly: I am just wondering, Martin, whether over this issue we can square the circle by persuading people to give away some of their own money and share it out a bit more, if not in their own interest, then in the national interest?

Martin O’Neill: Yes. I did not realise until I read it a few days ago that each member of the German World Cup side, the 23 players, had actually come through a Bundesliga academy system. If you tell me that is a fallout from 2000, then that is very, very commendable, and there are parts that we could pick up from that. Like Steve, I am not really sure-I will only go from my personal experience at club level, I am all on for the youth academies. When I went to Aston Villa, I did not ask them to go and produce four or five players within a year. But I hope over time that we will get some very, very good players coming through the football club, and I think that is happening at the moment, and that is exceptionally good news. Steve also mentioned we are in the results business. To try and see that through, to see the end of that five-year plan that a manager and owner or Chairman seem to set out in the very first place, you have to be winning games at that first team level. And you are hoping by the end of that five-year period that you might have at least three or four of those young academy players playing regularly, consistently well in your team to hold down a place in a side that is doing very well.

Richard Bevan: The investment in the National Football Centre is fantastic. 1999 was the year when the FA bought the land. They probably should have built the National Football Centre then, instead of building Wembley and wasting £92 million on legal fees around Wembley. That is probably a lack of strategy and vision. But the hardest thing I think for the Premier League and the Football League and the FA, and indeed any of the other countries that invest time and money in youth development, is creating the opportunities, that is the hardest thing of all. You can find great coaches, you can invest in those sort of structures, but creating the opportunities for these guys to play is the hard part.

Q445 Paul Farrelly: Burton, the brewing capital of Britain, in my county of Staffordshire, leads me neatly to my last question, which is about supporters, which is what this inquiry really picked up on in the first place, from what the Government and various political parties were saying in their manifestos. As you all know, a fortnight, particularly at this stage of the season, is a long time in football. With Stoke City, if you do not beat West Ham in the quarter-finals of the FA Cup to get to the semi, and then if you do not beat Newcastle United 4-0 to stave off the relegation battle, within a fortnight you can go like Tony Pulis and Peter Coates at Stoke, from walking on water to being dead men walking. You hear supposedly sane and rational supporters, who are not idiots, grumbling and you just want to tell them to get a life sometimes and get some perspective. So given that, my question is, you have been under these pressures, do you like supporters, and if the answer is yes, what role do you think they and their organisations have in the governance arrangements of clubs in the country?

Steve Coppell: We exist to make the supporters happy. They are the people that need to be entertained to continue our industry, so they do have a massive voice. How that should be channelled, I do not know, because, as you mentioned with your own club, it gets almost so centred to their own team that you can’t see the bigger picture. But without doubt, we have to keep our customers happy, they are our number one bosses and they have a massive voice to say in the way football in this country is going to be developed in the future, whether it be paying through the turnstiles or paying for TV. Someone with a better footballing brain than I will determine how that can be done, but they have to have a say in the way our game is developed.

Martin O’Neill: Are you concerned about the madness that Stoke City’s fans are showing at the moment?

Q446 Paul Farrelly: I would not want to single out one club. I am sure it is across a lot of clubs in the second half of the division. But the question really is, Martin and Richard, should there be specific structures imposed, specific models imposed or, within the realms of involving supporters, should the clubs be allowed to evolve their own models?

Richard Bevan: Supporters’ trusts operate successfully in a number of clubs, and absolutely they are key stakeholders. On the board behind you is the word "participation" all the way across. I think it is participation-they need to have their voice listened to, they are absolutely key to the game and the more that the Football Supporters Federation can get a seat at the right tables, then the better for the game.

Martin O’Neill: Steve mentioned earlier, I think it was a good point, that the only loyalty in football is the supporter with his football club. I think that they always want the best for their football club. They want the very, very best. If they have a good manager in charge, they want a better manager in charge. I just think it is the modern day approach to the game and I listen to the occasional phone-in, the website, this instancy. You want to be better, you want to be better than the previous week, you want to be better than the previous day. That fortnight you talked about where the manager and Chairman can go from walking on water to being dead men walking, that exists at every single football club. When you have won a few trophies, as Sir Alex Ferguson has done, just a few, then I believe that you can transcend that. But we are mere mortals in this game and we have to live with that. I believe there is a touch of insanity about it, but I do not know how it is going to be eradicated. Supporters are the most important people because they will still be supporting the football club. How you involve them, I do not know. Would you be thinking about a renegade group joining the board, or something like that? I just really do not know at this minute, and I have not thought it through.

Q447 Jim Sheridan: I think the sad reality is, everybody I have spoken to agrees that supporters should have some sort of tangible role in football, but there is always resistance. It is like the constituents who always want to play a part in community but they want it somewhere else. That is exactly what we find with football. Yes, there should be a role for supporters, but I am not going to give up my position to give it to a supporter.

Martin O’Neill: I must admit, honestly, I really have not thought it through.

Mr Sanders: I am sorry, gentlemen, I think we must wrap this up. You said earlier that you thought somebody was going to go imminently. It almost makes Martin’s point. I believe it is Ronnie Moore at Rotherham, who only a few weeks ago was in fifth position in League Two, and five poor results and it looks like he has been shown the door today. Can I say a very big thank you to Steve Coppell, Richard Bevan, Martin O’Neill, for giving evidence today. It has been a very good session, thank you.