Rishi Sunak and small talk are uneasy bedfellows at the best of times. So it was no surprise that he came a cropper this week when he asked Welsh brewery workers if they were “looking forward to the football” – only to be told Wales hadn’t actually qualified for Euro 2024.
The Prime Minister’s try-hard desire for credibility among football fans may even have been part of the reason he allowed himself to get drenched in Downing Street as he called the general election on Wednesday.
In 2007, England manager Steve McClaren lost his job hours after the newspapers dubbed him “the Wally with a Brolly”, for using an umbrella on the touchline during a disastrous defeat to Croatia. Sadly for Sunak he looked like a wally without a brolly as he scored the first own goal of the campaign.
The PM claims he is “a massive football fan” and that watching his team Southampton was his “number one love” as a boy. To be fair to him, he does get animated when talking about the club’s glory days, and has done so to reporters on the back of the No 10 plane on trips abroad.
And as someone who has spent years running our Westminster journalists-special-advisers-MPs football predictor league for Euros and World Cups, I personally know that both Keir Starmer and Sunak diligently complete their entries like true fans.
But from Tony Blair’s head-tennis with Kevin Keegan to David Cameron’s brain-fade about whether he supported West Ham or Aston Villa, football’s status as our national game means its interaction with politics is both inevitable and fraught with risk.
I remember Ed Miliband once looking terrified when a Leeds United-supporting political journalist privately asked him a detailed question about the club (which he claimed to support). Ed somehow turned the conversation towards the Boston Red Sox baseball team.
Boris Johnson at least never pretended to be a football fan. That much was obvious when, during a 2006 charity match, he played the game like it was rugby and took out former German international Maurizio Gaudino. Yet the former PM did at least grasp just how important it was to the country, even if not to himself personally.
Johnson’s advisers knew that he owed his 2019 election triumph to winning over small towns that were home to lower-league teams like Port Vale, Ipswich, Crewe, Lincoln, Bury, Blackpool and Accrington.
When the European Super League idea – which would have seen Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Arsenal, Tottenham and Chelsea compete with other European superclubs in a 20-team league with no promotion or relegation – suddenly looked like a real threat in early 2021, Johnson was quick to stamp on it. He recognised fans’ outrage at the idea of the richest clubs breaking forever the link between the elites and the rest of the game.
Having killed off the proposal, he shrewdly accelerated Tory MP Tracey Crouch’s fan-led review of all aspects of the game’s governance, including an independent football regulator to oversee the ownership rules and financial viability of clubs outside the mega-riches of the Premier League.
Unfortunately, as with many things Johnson promised, the new dawn never came. It took until February 2023 to get a Government white paper on the fan-led review. Clearly not a priority for Sunak, the Football Governance Bill was only introduced to the Commons this March and has now been dumped as he cleared the decks for the dissolution of Parliament.
Crouch tells me she hopes that whoever wins the election will pick up the bill, but the PM’s abject failure to deliver on this long hoped-for reform of English football is pretty telling. The public don’t care if Rishi Sunak is a real or fake football fan, but they really do care if clubs in their town go bust.
As a lifelong fan of Rochdale AFC, I feel this as keenly as anyone. In February, the cash-strapped club faced the threat of liquidation within weeks unless a £2m injection of funds could be found.
Thankfully, a Rochdale-born entrepreneur and philanthropist, Sir Peter Ogden, rode to the rescue and has done something rather remarkable.
The Ogden family has agreed that any future profit made out of their shares will be held for the sole benefit of the club’s community trust. They have also pledged to give fans a “golden share”, an effective veto over changes to the club’s badge, ground and history. This idea was a key part of Crouch’s fan-led review but was not adopted by the Government.
As well as providing investment, his family plans to create a Community Sports Hub with an income stream to boost social mobility and expand opportunities for youngsters across the town. Rochdale co-chairman Cameron Ogden tells me: “If this could be the model that people could replicate at other clubs, we just think that would be wonderful.”
Still, some Premier League footballers earn more in one month than the total amount of money needed to keep small clubs in existence. And there is a priceless value in the sheer local pride and identity encapsulated in a football club badge.
That’s why there is a bigger job still to be done by any future independent regulator – to force the wealthy clubs to give their smaller counterparts a fairer share of the riches at the top of the football “pyramid”. Tory trickle-down economics has proved as much of a failure in football as it has in our national politics.
Most football fans are walking lie-detector machines, inherently distrustful of any attempt to co-opt their beloved game for party politics. That unerring ability to sniff out fakery will be shared by all the voters in coming weeks as polling day approaches.
It’s also worth saying that from Brian Clough to Alex Ferguson, from Jurgen Klopp to Marcus Rashford, footballing figures have shown more leadership and more passion for social justice than some politicians down the years.
But there may be an electoral payback for whichever party manages to make good on their promises to protect the grassroots of our national sport. The bigger prize is allowing local communities to thrive, not just survive, through the magic of football.
Paul Waugh resigned as i’s chief political commentator in January to stand as the Labour candidate for Rochdale, a contest won by Azhar Ali