By the time the transfer window ends on 1 September, Premier League clubs will have spent hundreds of millions of pounds on boosting their squads. Liverpool alone has already spent more than £200m – and we’re only at the start of July.
Player contracts are being negotiated, with £125,000-a-week now commonplace – even at teams outside the top six, such as Brighton. That’s the basic figure. Chuck in bonuses, appearance money, possibly the use of free luxury cars and other perks, and their earnings will be much higher.
Meanwhile, in the ticket offices, the staff are frantically selling seats for the coming season. Fans will be charged higher prices – none more so than at Fulham, where the most expensive packages in the new £100m-plus Riverside Stand, complete with rooftop swimming pool and Michelin dining, cost £20,000.
The pre-season warm-ups begin shortly. For the major clubs, that will see them attending luxury resorts for training and earning yet more millions from promotional overseas tours.
Then the competitive fixtures begin. At many games, there will be a heavy police presence outside the grounds. Those matches deemed “high risk” will require up to 400 officers, comprising individual units, each led by an inspector, three sergeants and 21 constables.
If there was no match, there would not be any need for the officers, horses and, in some cases, helicopters overhead. Yet, the clubs that pay their players colossal sums and rake in vast amounts from ticketing – not to mention advertising, endorsements and TV rights – are not paying. You are. And not just for one game – but for all of them.
Despite the Premiership’s unbounded prosperity and success (something it loves to regale us with) and despite the clubs’ stupendously rich owners and their never-ending gravy train, the taxpayer is left to foot the policing bill. The clubs only pay for the police inside the stadium – it’s utter madness and outrageous.
The cost of the big contingent, those guarding the routes to and from the ground and watching over the supporters entering and leaving, is covered by the public purse. Currently, more than £70m a year goes on safeguarding football matches – with most of that figure swallowed by the Premiership matches in England. This, when the police are desperately short of funding.
In her recent spending review, chancellor Rachel Reeves announced a 2.3 per cent annual funding increase for the police service in England and Wales, a figure that was heavily criticised as woefully inadequate.
It is an extraordinary, unfair arrangement that the Metropolitan Police commissioner, Mark Rowley, rightly wishes to scrap. Echoing a call from the head of the UK’s Football Policing Unit (UKPFU), Mark Roberts, chief constable of Cheshire, Rowley is demanding the clubs foot the bill. He wants “more of a ‘polluter pays’ approach”.
Football is stopping our streets from being made safer. Roberts said if the clubs paid, it would free up funds for another 1,200 officers. No wonder Rowley asks: “Why isn’t the organiser paying for that, rather than local communities who lose their resources to go to football matches?”
The Home Office, which deals with policing, gets it. But elsewhere, the response is less positive.
Keir Starmer is a regular attendee at the Emirates to watch his beloved Arsenal play. On his way to his seat, possibly nodding in the direction of the high rollers in the directors’ box and corporate boxes as he does so, he must pass the serried ranks of police officers. Perhaps he marvels, too, at just how many are on duty at the expense of the operation.
Equally, Starmer basks in the popularity of football, applauding its working-class roots. He also knows to tamper with the “people’s game” at his peril. Witness the furore over another proposed football self-enrichment scheme, the European Super League.
In 2016, Suffolk police claimed in the High Court that Ipswich should pay for the policing around its Portman Road venue. Ipswich won, with Michael Beloff KC, their counsel, maintaining that victory for the police would be “expensive for a large number of clubs in the Football League and, one may infer, in the Premier League too.”
Subsequently, the Court of Appeal ducked the issue, finding for Ipswich and saying it was a matter for parliament to change the law if it wished the police to pay. That is where it has remained.
The UKPFU contradicts Beloff and says 48 per cent of games across all leagues incur no charge for policing, with 95 per cent of games in the National League being police-free. The greatest financial burden would fall on those most able to pay it, with “little impact on smaller clubs”.
Not to be outdone, the football lobby cleverly moved the goalposts and widened the argument, pressing the Major Event Organisers Association, which also includes the England and Wales Cricket Board, Boat Race, Silverstone and Jockey Club, to send a joint letter to Starmer, insisting a change in the law will impact on famous sporting events in this country – not just football matches – and, in some cases, could threaten their future. “This is simply not just a Premier League football issue,” it reads.
Keep the focus on filthy-rich Premier League football and the clubs’ billionaire owners and multimillionaire players. In that context, the £70m bill to help them earn even more lucre is an aberration. It’s a boil that only Starmer can lance.
Should he free up more police or pander to the Premier League and the powerful proprietors? Compared to other wealth taxes under consideration, this one is a dead-cert gimme. It’s a no-brainer.
As the football chant goes: “Can we play you every week?” They do – and appallingly, we’re paying for it.
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