English Football: Financial Sustainability

8. What steps she is taking to support the financial sustainability of English football.

I thank my hon. Friend for raising this incredibly important issue. Football is one of our greatest exports and is a source of joy to people across the country. For too long, however, robust protections have not been in place to ensure that every town, village and city can share in that success.

May I take the opportunity to pay tribute to the former Sports Minister Dame Tracey Crouch for her work leading the fan-led review of football governance? The Government committed in the King’s Speech to the football governance Bill and we expect to introduce it shortly.

I associate myself with that tribute and thank the Secretary of State for her reply. My constituency is the proud home of Reading football club, which managed to stay up last season against the odds but which has been the victim of financial mismanagement by absent owners. We desperately need the Government’s football governance Bill, which will set up a regulator to safeguard clubs like Reading and prevent future abuses. Will the Minister meet local fans and me to discuss what we can do to protect the club?

The Sports Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley South (Stephanie Peacock), will be absolutely delighted to do so. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Earley and Woodley (Yuan Yang) and to the three Reading MPs for their work to protect something that is so incredibly important to their town. I know from my experience of the work we had to do to save Wigan Athletic that when a football club is under threat from mismanagement or poor ownership, it is absolutely devastating for the generations of fans for whom the club is part of their civic inheritance. We look forward to introducing the football governance Bill without any further delay and to working with my hon. Friend and colleagues to ensure that we introduce the strongest possible protections to put fans back at the heart of the game, where they belong.