Graham Kelly: Doubts raised by £500m mortgage on fans' loyalty

Next Sunday sees the first-ever 'Football Fans' Parliament', which is open to all supporters in England and Wales. The event, to be held at Birmingham's National Exhibition Centre, has been organised by the Football Supporters' Federation, the representative association formed from the recent merger of the National Federation of Football Supporters' Clubs and the Football Supporters' Association.

The TUC general secretary John Monks will need to bring all his considerable skills to bear from the chair, for there is no lack of pressing issues to debate. Already on the agenda for the conference are such topics as television, away fans, the atmosphere at grounds, money and football and franchise football. No doubt the issue of racism, highlighted by The Independent last month, will also feature.

If I may say so, I am something of a veteran of supporters' get-togethers. When Tony Blair sent his Football Task Force on the road several years ago, I was there. Manchester, Norwich, Leicester, Southampton; I never missed a date, irrespective of whether chairman David Mellor was otherwise engaged.

The constant theme, and it was not a new one – it had been around since supporters started meeting football chiefs regularly after the Heysel stadium disaster in 1985 – was this: the real fans, the game's lifeblood, were those who paid their admission money, by contrast with the sponsors and the television companies, who would disappear like snow in spring once fashions changed.

The latest vogue in football, securitisation, amply makes this point better than any motions that may be discussed next weekend, for a number of bigger clubs have arranged 20 or 30-year loans at favourable fixed terms. Before long our football industry will be newly mortgaged to insurance companies and pension funds, post-Andersen and Enron, to the tune of more than £500m.

The key factor in enabling the merchant bankers who put these deals together to earn their not inconsiderable bundles of corn is a club's traditional levels of attendance, as future season-ticket sales are pledged as security against the loan. So the point made in all those meetings about fan loyalty is graphically written in red ink half a billion times over before anyone takes breath next Sunday.

The supporters might like to ask some questions about whether anyone in football has considered the collective wisdom of constructing such a monument to Mammon. What happens if a club is relegated to the Nationwide League, where the financial state of play is dire? Can it re-schedule its loan?

I do not want to cast any aspersions, but do you remember players' agents and the conflicts of interest they brought into football? Who is forming an overview of the likely magnitude of securitisation and the regulatory matters to be considered?

We have seen already this season that it is futile to look to the Independent Football Commission for strong action. It accepted in the case of Wimbledon's move to Milton Keynes that it had been established without any statutory powers and can only, hopelessly, make recommendations after the fact.

The fact is that an independent commission, appointed by the FA, unaccountably gave Wimbledon's move the go-ahead, despite the wishes of the vast majority of their supporters on the basis, among other reasons, that the club could not make a go of it in south London. This decision has already been shot through with more holes than Wyatt Earp's favourite tin can, starting with the fundamental question of why the members of the FA commission saw it as their role to protect the club's shareholders from the consequences of their original investment?

The FA is supposed to be creating a compliance unit just now, and if it is to perform a credible function in this role it must do the job properly, which its appointed commission in the Wimbledon case miserably failed at. They reported glowingly how the shareholders had injected funds to keep the club going in 2000-2001, but appeared to overlook the significant fact that the amount owed by the club to other companies in their group fell by £800,000.

More supporters still attend Nationwide League matches than Premiership in a season. Here is a proposition for them to reflect on at the conference next Sunday, because the businessmen are rushing helter-skelter into never-never land and no one seems prepared to stop and take stock on behalf of the game.

It is a few years down the line and a merchant banker unaccustomed to our quaint customs is facing a financial hit of considerable proportions as a number of his clients contemplate the sorry fate of relegation. "Say", he asks, "do you guys really need this relegation deal?"

The motion is, ladies and gentleman, that we can look with confidence, given recent experience, to the FA to save the vital promotion/relegation link when the big clubs need to save their skins. Is it carried?

grahamkelly@btinternet.com