The Green Party candidate for Mayor of Greater Manchester has slammed the announcement that six Premier League clubs are taking part in a breakaway European Super League.
The move, announced by 12 European clubs including Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur, would see the creation of an exclusive league with no risk of relegation for the founding clubs.
Melanie Horrocks, Green Party candidate for Greater Manchester, has said the move is an act of pure greed designed to guarantee ever-increasing profits for distant owners, over the benefit of the game itself and the millions of people who follow it.
Horrocks said:
“This move is not about football or any of the things that so many of us love about it. This is about sheer, bare-faced greed from a small number of incredibly rich men who own these clubs and couldn’t care less about the wider footballing system in which they have grown.
“Ultimately, this is the logical end-point of a focus on cash rather than community. It is what happens when fans are not involved in the owning and running of the clubs which are so often at the heart of their local communities.
“That is why, we would favour a German-style ownership model which means the fans, rather than foreign owners, are always in control.
“Better still we would provide incentives for clubs to adopt a mutual ownership model so that fans not only decide what happens with the club but are also enabled to ensure that the proceeds of their success are shared with the wider community.
“We strongly urge the football governance bodies to follow through on their warnings that any club that joins the new league will be banned from competing in current domestic and international competitions.”
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Green Party policy reads:
CMS862 The Green Party would prefer professional sporting clubs to be mutually owned by the members rather than by shareholders. For those clubs which are currently Public Limited Companies, whose shares are traded internationally, the risk is always that distant shareholders, with no regard for the community the club is supposed to represent, will take over the club and sever all meaningful links with the local community. In some instances, clubs have even been moved to other towns and cities - making a mockery of any supposed local connection implied in the club's name. We will introduce legal mechanisms to allow transformation of such PLCs into Mutual Organisations with agreement of stakeholders.