Graham Kelly: New role for Richards will strengthen Premier League's power base

The Right Honourable Lord Pendry, chairman of the Football Foundation, was further elevated last week. It was announced that at the end of March, his lordship, formerly the Member of Parliament for Stalybridge and Hyde, will become the first president of the Foundation when his current period of office ends. His replacement as chairman is to be the Premier League chairman, Dave Richards.

So, the relentless surge to power of the leading clubs, already emboldened by their seizure of influence in setting up a professional game board at the Football Association's Soho Square headquarters, continues.

Nature may abhor a vacuum, but the opportunists in football clearly take their chances whenever they can. The Football Foundation's glitzy website, set up to promote its grassroots activities, features a five-man board comprising Richards and Richard Scudamore, from the FA Premier League, Geoff Thompson and Frank Pattison, the FA chairman and vice-chairman respectively, and Trevor Brooking, the former chairman of Sport England.

These constituent organisations are the funding partners who contribute the Foundation's £53m per year income, but Brooking's term of office expired last October without renewal and Pattison resigned from the FA board after the former chief executive Adam Crozier left, fearing the amateur sector would struggle to maintain its share of the game's resources. So the way was clear for the Premier League to reinforce its power base on the creation of the new honorary position for the honourable lord.

The Foundation was the 1999 successor to the Football Trust, which, primarily, grant-aided essential safety improvements in the wake of the Taylor Report and, before that, the Safety of Sports Grounds Act, 1975. The office of chairman of the trustees was always occupied by a nominee truly independent of the donors, ever since the then Minister for Sport, Denis Howell, invited the leading academic Norman Chester to handle donations from Littlewoods' spot-the-ball competition.

Now the Foundation concentrates on funding much-needed improvements to facilities at grassroots levels, as highlighted by its recent publication, the Register of English Football Pitches, a fascinating database of the results of a painstaking two-year survey. The Premier League and the Foundation obviously feel it will be helpful to put an additional mouth where the League's money is, even if it is seldom opened in public.

The circumstances surrounding the original arrangement, whereby the Premier League contributes five per cent of its television revenue to the Foundation and the Government match the sum, are intriguing. This deal was made at a Downing Street meeting in 1999 attended by Dave Richards and Mike Lee from the Premier League and the Government's advisers, James Purnell, Tony Blair's special adviser on sport, and Andy Burnham, formerly secretary to the Football Task Force and adviser to Chris Smith, Minister for Culture, Media and Sport.

The same year Tom Pendry decided to resign from Parliament at the next election. He recommended Purnell to the committee of his constituency, an eminently safe Labour seat. Pendry became the chairman of the Foundation and then entered the House of Lords on Blair's nomination.

Now that preparations are under way for negotiations for the next television contract, MPs James Purnell and Andy Burnham (Leigh) are ideally placed to start asking questions about the public interest in the Premier League's central "cartel". They are putting down motions that the five per-cent levy should be increased so as to help Nationwide League clubs in distress.

Pendry, as shadow minister for sport prior to the original election of New Labour in 1997, had put the flesh on the bones of Tony Blair's pre-election Charter for Football, then had to endure an agonising weekend of engagements awaiting the call which never came from Downing Street; the women's Cup final at The New Den must have lasted an eternity for him.

The thrust of the incoming Prime Minister's football strategy had been devised by his communications director, Alastair Campbell, to whom Pendry remained more shadow than substance, and Tony Banks, lacking any noticeable relish for the tough measures or confrontation with football's power brokers which might have been more compatible with Blair's modernising agenda, was appointed instead.

Labour came to power with a carrot-and-stick approach. They criticised the previous Conservative Government for allowing football to be held hostage to the fortunes of an unregulated market, then promised to work with the authorities and supporters in a task force to put everything – from ticket and replica shirt prices to corruption and racism – right.

However, such is the current inertia it is tempting to conclude that, had the allegations of sleaze not been so virulent in the mid-1990s, new Labour would not have taken any notice at all. Certainly, the Premier League has been able to resist all calls for independent regulation, a measure which David Mellor, the chairman of the Football Task Force, so strongly advocated.

grahamkelly@btinternet.com