When labour took office in 1997 we heard a great deal about the interest in football of the "regular guys" now in power. Four years on, Labour politicians don't talk so much about football any more. However, in office they have been the game's devoted servants.
Governments have always gone out of their way for football, but this one is friendlier than most. At the EU's Nice summit Tony Blair and Gerhard Schr?der broke off from discussing qualified majority voting to persuade the European Commission not to abolish football transfer fees, because of their importance to smaller clubs.
The antiquated football transfer system had seemed doomed. It allowed a club to charge an unlimited fee to any other club wanting to sign one of its players, as long as that player had an ongoing contract. It would be hard to think of a system more opposed to free movement of labour, a basic principle of the EU. In any case the role of transfer fees in small clubs should be about as economically important to Labour as the importance of prompt deliveries of newspapers to Leeds newsagents.
Yet when the EU announces its verdict on transfers sometime in the next few weeks, it is expected to keep the system virtually intact. Once again, Blair has been football's unpaid lobbyist. One hopes that in the second term he will not be so servile.
When football wants something from government, it always claims to have a vital social role. Never mind that it is only followed by a third of the population, and is hardly big business: the only British club with a turnover much larger than an average out-of-town superstore is Manchester United. The point, says football, is that it is more than a business. It binds communities: Bobby Moore with the World Cup, cloth caps on terraces, kids dreaming in playgrounds, that sort of thing.
This is a plausible argument. Watching football does give happiness to millions. Playing football is even more important. A local club with dozens of adult and junior teams, of the kind to be found in every German town but hardly anywhere in Britain, creates a sense of community. "Football has got an absolutely key social role," says James Purnell, of Downing Street's policy unit. "It's a very good anti-crime policy, it's a very good health policy."
One would be inclined to agree that football is different, were it not that at other times football makes the opposite case. "As a PLC, we have a duty to our shareholders to ensure that we manage our resources with maximum efficiency," said Leeds United chairman Peter Ridsdale last December. When it suits it, football claims to be a business. It doesn't need an independent regulator, can't have caps on ticket prices, and shouldn't have to help local schools that can't afford footballs, because its duty is to shareholders.
The game hops nimbly between these two positions: football as a sort of Westminster Abbey, and football as Vodafone. For the last four years, the government has gone along with this. Now it is time to cut a deal.
The government should say, "Football is more than just a business, and so it should behave that way." If the government is going to do things for football, football has to do things in return.
Labour claims it has recently made exactly that deal. "We have agreed a new social compact with football," says Purnell. Last summer, he points out, the government set up the Football Foundation, a body that will take five per cent of the money from the Premier League's new television deal, match it with government funds, and give it to "grassroots" football. This should soon amount to about ?70m a year. The game's authorities are also creating their own in-house regulator, the Independent Football Commission.
But Labour's intervention has been so gentle that the game has hardly noticed. The Premier League's new television deal, starting this year, will be worth ?1.6 billion over three years. That is three times more than the previous deal, signed in 1997. Of this gigantic new deal, the government is taking five per cent before the pot is divided up between the clubs.
"I don't think we'll notice it," says Patrick Harverson, spokesman for Manchester United. "It's the old thing about taking money you didn't know you had." In any case, the Football Foundation is merely assuming the role of the old Football Trust, which took a levy on football pools money.
Compare Labour's softness with the stance of the Dutch government, which in 1997 stopped football clubs from signing a lucrative cable television deal, because it felt that every citizen should have the right to watch domestic football on terrestrial television.
Nor will the Independent Football Commission make much difference, as it will have almost no power. For years the government has been urged to create an external regulator for football, an equivalent of Oftel or Ofwat. This is not it. The IFC's strictures will be like the voluntary pollution codes that George W Bush gave to Texas.
Yet there is so much to be done. This is a country where children are ceasing to play football (the Thatcher and Major governments sold 5,000 school playing fields), where ticket prices at big clubs have risen several hundred per cent in a decade, where even England games are now shown only on subscription television. Many football supporters feel that both football and Labour have left them behind. Cajoling the big clubs into putting something back could be popular with them.
One small idea. Few children at state schools-let alone the disaffected youths from low-income homes about whom the government frets-ever play soccer on a grass pitch. At little cost something could be done about this. The big clubs, many based in run-down inner cities, should help do it.
