Gary Neville blasts Premier League after Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham ban threat

Sky Sports pundit Gary Neville has hit out at the Premier League, accusing them of acting like bullies in the face of the potential introduction of an independent football regulator.

The Football Governance Bill, which includes provisions for the establishment of an independent regulator, was tabled by the Conservatives in March and Labour are pushing forward with it. The call for an independent regulator in English football gained traction following the Super League fiasco with caused controversy with Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham fans.

The government have stated that it will ‘protect football clubs’ by ‘ensuring their financial sustainability’, and if the bill passes through parliament, it will grant a regulator backstop powers to intervene in football when necessary. Neville is a staunch advocate of an independent regulator and it’s believed its implementation would safeguard the interests of English football fans across the pyramid, reports the Manchester Evening News.

The Premier League has been hesitant about the introduction of an independent regulator, but the organisation’s CEO Richard Masters has cautioned that its formation would be a ‘risk’. Neville has fiercely criticised the Premier League for their hesitancy to embrace an independent regulator, expressing his views at a Labour conference on Monday.

He told the PA news agency: “We have a Premier League that’s entitled, they feel entitled. I’m not going to use the word greedy, but I just have. They are selfish and I can’t understand that way of thinking. It’s almost like they’re the big brother that sit there and distribute scraps of food to the little brothers round the table.

“It’s not what you do when you’re in a family. Their mindset is such of a bully. Their mindset is such that they think they can influence the regulator once the regulator’s introduced and they can get a better deal potentially the other side of the regulator. And what they’re applying is their soft power and their influence to try and create scare stories and scaremongering, like we had a couple of weeks ago.”

Meanwhile, Lisa Nandy, the Culture, Media and Sport Secretary, dismissed the notion that English teams could be barred from European competitions as ‘ridiculous’ and ‘really disrespectful to fans because it caused a lot of alarm which was really unnecessary’, while speaking at the same event. It comes after UEFA warned that English sides and the national team could be banned from its competitions due to the new regulator, given the UEFA’s policy against state interference in football governance.

Nandy has highlighted that the government won’t adopt a ‘heavy-handed’ approach, mentioning that the goal is to ‘deal with the lack of sustainability in other parts of the football pyramid’. In turn, the Premier League have dismissed Neville’s accusation about their behaviour as a ‘bully’, reinforcing their ongoing discussions around the football regulator with the new administration.

Further detailing their stance, the Premier League suggests that ‘light-touch, targeted and proportionate legislation can work’, alluding to previous sentiments from CEO Masters at the end of the last season. Masters said: “My overriding concern is that the bill will reduce our competitiveness and weaken the incredible appeal of the English game.

“Our competition is the most watched and commercially successful football league in the world. Thanks to that success, Premier League clubs are able to give away £1.6 billion every three years 16 per cent of our total revenues – to the wider game, helping to make it the envy of the world.

“It is a risk that regulation will undermine the Premier League’s global success, thereby wounding the goose that provides English football’s golden egg. It is a risk to regulate an industry that has worked so hard to lead the world, especially when none of its competitors are subject to the same regulation.

“Those competitors are relishing the prospect of the Premier League being uniquely constrained. Empires rise and fall and while I am confident about the League’s immediate future, it would be a mistake to be complacent about our place as the world’s most popular league.

“It is a risk to introduce uncertainty and red tape into an industry that relies heavily on a relatively small pool of investors, who often see club ownership as a passion project as well as a business.

“While the sport is buoyant today, it would be so easy to misstep and drive our world-leading investment elsewhere. Already, before it has even arrived, the promise of regulatory intervention in football finances has changed incentives for a new voluntary arrangement to be struck.

“We have spent the last year in discussions with the EFL about an even more generous financial settlement. But these talks have only served to highlight how destabilising intervention could be.

“The government claims its regulator will not interfere on the pitch, but by intervening in the carefully calibrated distribution of revenues and upsetting competitive balance, it is already doing exactly that.”