Mr Toby Perkins

As I said in my brief intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Earley and Woodley (Yuan Yang), I have been contacted by Chesterfield football club, which is very keen that its support for the Football Governance Bill be known. I would like to start by expressing the sadness that everyone in Chesterfield feels at the news that the club’s owner, Phil Kirk, has inoperable cancer and is receiving end-of-life care. He is the absolute epitome of a great owner and has absolutely transformed Chesterfield’s fortunes. Chesterfield has also had the opposite: Darren Brown almost took the club into insolvency at the same time that he was going to jail, so we know that there have been many owners who have let clubs down. There have also been lots of owners who did everything they could, but were simply not wealthy enough to operate within a business model according to which the better a club does, and the further along the way it gets towards the premier league, the greater its losses are on every step of the way. It loses money by being promoted from league one to the championship. There is a perverse incentive where the financial success of the company gets worse the better it does, until it reaches the promised land of the premier league. That all needs changing. It is madness. We have a very wealthy game. A slightly better distribution would still allow the premier league to be the golden goose, but it would also support the pyramid.