Next Gen News

Britain's true attitude to grass-roots sport is made shockingly clear by the FA's accounts for the year to 31 December 2009

When the rebuilding of the old, two-towered Wembley was conceived in the late 1990s the venerable venue was going to be replaced by a national stadium custom-built for a World Cup and the Olympic Games, a soaring statement of the love and vaulting ambition we British have for our sport. Wembley is now owned by the Football Association, which said today that the stadium has needed a £200m subsidy since 2002, with £342m still to be paid off. The new Wembley, reliant on corporate packages and rock concerts, represents the true British attitude to sport.

The FA's accounts for the year to 31 December 2009, released today, show that, were it not for servicing Wembley's debts, which cost another £30m, the finances of football's governing body would be in reasonable shape. Even in a year in which the broadcaster Setanta collapsed â€" costing the FA £60m over four years â€" and the move from Soho Square to the glass and steel island of Wembley cost £17m, the FA would have made a sizeable profit â€" had it not needed to keep Wembley above water.

The body which exists to serve and improve all of football was able to invest only £41m in facilities, coaching, clubs, development and its county associations. In the accounts, which cover 43 pages of financial figures and earnest explanations, no amount is presented for how much the FA spends on developing football itself, on coaches or on nurturing coaches. FA sources have, though, said that the budget for Sir Trevor Brooking's "football department" accounts for two per cent of the FA's £233m income. Spain, Holland and Germany, who delivered a football lesson to England in the summer's World Cup, are understood to spend 15% to 20% of their national associations' income on coaching and development.

Here the project to build a national stadium, including a running track that would be needed to host the Olympics or the World Athletics Championships, foundered because different sports could not agree on how the track should be incorporated. The British Olympic Association and the athletics establishment did not believe that the proposal to build a track on concrete platforms and remove it after an Olympics was a serious one, presented as it was by football authorities who had appointed Ken Bates, then Chelsea's chairman, as the project chairman. Bates retorted that as the track would be needed only once or possibly twice in the stadium's lifetime, the view from the venue's upper tiers should not be compromised by having retractable seats over a permanent track. Such seats exist, without complaint, at the widely admired Stade de France in Paris.

The government and the National Lottery were providing £120m in grants but they could not bang heads together. If anything, they tended to mistrust Bates and sympathise with the BOA. But as football matches â€" internationals, FA Cup finals and semi-finals â€" were going to be the main stadium-fillers, the FA offered to take ownership of the stadium and do away with the track. So football's governing body went into the property development and concert promotion business, believing it would make a fortune.

The prospect of a national stadium ended there but the government did not have the nerve to claw back its grants. Only £20m was returned and the FA commissioned the £757m stadium with its arch, 90,000 seats and corporate feasting opportunities that were necessary to pay for it. The accounts released today show that a £309m bank loan is outstanding, that interest charges were £26m last year and that the FA had to provide a £31.5m bridging loan the previous year and another £30m loan last year. The FA is budgeting to pay £20m of its income to Wembley this year and next, then £12m for the two years after, a total of £64m until 2014. David Bernstein, Wembley's chairman, and Roger Maslin, its managing director, both making the best fist of a difficult hand, promise Wembley will then break even. After that it will begin to repay a little money each year to the FA.

The cost of the 80,000-seat Olympic Stadium in Stratford is around £500m and it faces the same dilemma as Wembley over its legacy. A large, permanent athletics stadium cannot pay for itself. With bids in for those seeking to keep the stadium alive after 2012, the most likely to succeed is said to be that from the Davids, Gold and Sullivan, who will take West Ham United, of which they now own the majority, to inhabit another huge London stadium built entirely with government and lottery money.

Add the Emirates Stadium, built for £350m in inner north London and with sumptuous turf that is, according to Arsenal's community department, the only grass football pitch in Islington, and the British approach to sport begins to be seen.

The FA last year maintained its contribution of £15m â€" 6.4% of its income â€" to the Football Foundation, which funds grass-roots projects and facilities in the blighted landscape on which all but the professionals play the game. However, this year, as the effects of the Setanta collapse began to bite, the FA could not maintain that commitment to its own grass roots. Predictably it states in its accounts: "Certain payments to the Football Foundation have been deferred for 12 months."

FA Cup prize money â€" which is paid to clubs in increasing amounts as they win through each round â€" was also reduced but the FA is at pains to make clear that it gives as much money to the professional game, £45m overall, as to the grass-roots "national" game. So last season insolvent Portsmouth were paid £2.5m by the FA for reaching the FA Cup final and Roman Abramovich's Chelsea took £3.4m for winning it.

Meanwhile the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government is considering how to cut spending on sports centres, playing fields and local authority and schools sports development staff, which are all vital to reversing the nation's lamentable decline in participation in sport and physical activity. Soon after taking office Hugh Robertson, the sports minister, scrapped the £40m subsidy which enabled under-16s and over-60s to swim for nothing, calling it "a luxury we can no longer afford".

That is a fraction of the cost of subsidising Wembley, that statement of our commitment to sport where, in a desperate campaign to break even, the pitch has been ripped up every few weeks in order to host concerts.