SIMON JORDAN: Football pours billions into the general public purse – this agenda-driven marketing campaign calling on golf equipment to cough up and pay for all features of policing is utter nonsense

Chief Constable Mark Roberts has been doing the media rounds with what I can only describe as disingenuous agenda-motivated nonsense about football and policing.

He is arguing clubs should pay the full recovery cost of policing matches, suggesting it would allow the Force to put an extra 1,200 officers on the streets. What he proposes as a simple solution to cover for the police’s inability to combat crime is actually nothing of the kind. I feel irritation, disdain and concern at his position.

The fact that in all good conscience he feels able to treat the national sport as a political tool, when it contributes more than £5billion-a-year to the Exchequer for departments like his, should be troubling.

By charging full recovery, the police can bill whatever it deems necessary both inside and outside the stadium, including ‘services’ in the surrounding areas like putting out road cones.

The £56million he says the police are paying is only 1 per cent of the amount already going from the sport into Government coffers but that seems to evade his simplistic outlook.

So we are clear, total policing costs in England are circa £17billion. Taxes collected from football fills up 30 per cent of that – a huge contribution.

Chief Constable Mark Roberts argues clubs should pay full recovery costs of policing games 

Police would be able to bill whatever they deem necessary both inside and outside the stadium

Against that backdrop, it’s a barefaced cheek for our national sport to be used as a pawn by the police to manipulate Government regarding their funding.

It steers into the narrative that football is awash with money and can well afford it. A bit like the uninformed politicians who judge the overall wealth of football in this country by the activities of a few top clubs.

Besides the billions raised through PAYE and VAT on club expenditure, a senior official at a leading Premier League club told me the local economy benefited by several hundred million from fans attending matches.

By simple economics, the kind that Roberts likes to work to, that means 20 clubs are responsible for at least £6bn in revenue, which would put another billion or two into the Government coffers.

That should already pay for more than a few Bobbies on the beat should the police decide to allocate resources that way instead of painting rainbow colours on their cars, rehearsing the Macarena, policing tweets and telling us which crimes they won’t attend.

You don’t have to cast your mind back too far to remember how football played a part in rescuing the national psyche during the horrors of Covid. During that time, our national sport was celebrated as a beacon. The football fraternity were considered key workers in terms of doing their jobs to raise morale.

Though stadiums were empty and therefore not policed to anything like the same degree, figures like Mr Roberts were happy for their budgets to continue, partly thanks to the revenue football provided from broadcast revenues and salaries being paid to its protagonists.

Roberts represents an organisation called the UK Football Policing Unit (UKFPU) and I could laugh off his arguments if it weren’t for people like him possibly having the ear of a Government regulator in the future.

Policing costs in England are circa £17bn, with taxes from football accounting for 30 per cent

Unlike other major events, football appears fair game when asked to meet policing costs

By its very introduction, alongside the kind of people that will run it, the regulator is likely to restrict one of our country’s biggest success stories, the Premier League.

For the police to isolate football as a weapon to improve their own efficiency is, to be frank, ludicrous, opportunistic and Machiavellian.

Do they tell organisers of the Notting Hill Carnival to foot the £11m bill for a three-day event? Do they raid the funds of Just Stop Oil to meet the £5m price tag of causing massive disruption in London and across the country? I’ve not heard of Tim Martin as chairman being asked to contribute if the coppers are called to a punch-up at Wetherspoons.

Yet football appears fair game, even though it already meets £14m of the total £70m police bill.

I do value our police and the job they do, but as we know in this country they police by consent and I certainly do not consent to this kind of ridiculous mis-representation.

It’s safe to say that having previously debated with Chief Constable Roberts, my views and preparedness to contest his views are not ones he appreciates.

He prefers now to appear on shows when I am not present. His style is centred on a mentality of ‘I am the Policeman and do not expect to be challenged’.

It reminded me of sitting in control meetings with the Police back in the day, preparing for games with a paid resource that I considered a supplier.

A campaign suggests football is costing the police officers on the beat – the opposite is true

The real threat is if an ‘independent’, but Government-appointed, regulator sits across the table from the Old Bill and is somehow persuaded that the £5bn football already pays is not enough.

Football shouldn’t get a free pass on helping the wider economy – and nor does it.

There is a politically-motivated campaign to suggest football is costing the police officers on the beat. The opposite is true. The income from football has helped to pay for more police. For a regulator to not see that would be so damaging.

The rest of Europe is probably laughing at how we built the most successful league in the world and are now seeking to destroy it from within.