The FA should not be selling Wembley at all, let alone for £600m

It takes some doing to sell a piece of London property for less than it cost you 10 years ago, a decade in which house prices in the capital have risen, according to the Office of National Statistics, by an average of 100%. Yet this magic trick is what the Football Association seems to be on the brink of doing, in selling a home that cost more than £800m to the Pakistani-American billionaire Shahid Khan for around three-quarters of that sum.

No wonder Ken Bates was apoplectic. “You never sell your freehold – it’s your home,” the former Chelsea chairman exclaimed on being told of the deal to sell Wembley. To find oneself on the same side as Bates is a remarkable side-effect of the FA’s sudden announcement. And on that of Sir Dave Richards, the former chairman of the Premier League and, like Bates, once a prominent member of the FA board. But their point is a powerful one, as those millennials waiting for their parents to die in order to be able to own a house will confirm.

Khan arrived in the USA 50 years ago with only pennies in his pocket, built an auto-parts business and is said to be worth more than $8bn. As a commercially astute man, he must think the FA are a bunch of mugs. Either that, or he must be wondering if there’s a catch. But, this being English football’s governing body, a cunning plan would be too much for them to devise, unless it came from Baldrick’s playbook.

If they let the freehold of the stadium go to the owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars and Fulham FC for the reported £600m, the ultimate size of the cheque deposited in the FA’s bank account is likely to be significantly smaller. It should be reduced, in the first instance, by the total of £112.7m of public money provided in order to subsidise the final work of replacing the old Twin Towers with Norman Foster’s tilted arch.

When Sport England gave £78m, the department for culture, media and sport contributed £18.5m and the London Development Agency coughed up £16.2m, the donations were for a specific purpose. They were not made for the benefit of grassroots football. The money was given in order to complete the creation of a stadium that would be the showplace of the English game, built in a location of great historical importance and emotional significance.

This was to be the shining city on a hill, a football cathedral, visible from all points of the compass, a place of inspiration, aspiration and pilgrimage. And, for the first time, it would belong to English football, once Messrs Bates, Richards and their various committees had negotiated their way to ensuring that the old building, and the freehold of the land on which it stood, had been purchased for £106m from Wembley PLC, the heirs to the owners of the original Empire Stadium.

Sign up to The Recap, our weekly email of editors’ picks. That plan has now been abandoned, at a point where the debt of more than £400m incurred during the course of construction had been brought down to £140m – or a little more than half the total sum Ellis Short has just written off in order to persuade a bunch of investors to take Sunderland off his hands. That debt will still have to be repaid over a planned six-year term, but the £112.7m of public money should be reimbursed without delay.

No doubt the FA will hope to avoid that obligation by pointing to its ambition to use its supposed windfall to benefit grassroots football by providing thousands of all-weather pitches around the country. The desire to repair the damage done by cuts to public amenities during the long years of Tory-driven austerity is an admirable one but the fear must be that, given its erratic record over the decades, the FA will not use the money with the necessary discipline. And once you start taking large chunks out of £600m, it can disappear pretty quickly.

The key issue, however, is this: do we need the Wembley we have known since Giampaolo Pazzini of Italy Under-21s became the first player to score a goal at the new stadium 11 years ago? Is it worth having a home which acts as a symbol of the country where the game was invented, where the statue of Bobby Moore provides a permanent record of a shining hour, and whose facade can be used to note the passing of a Cyrille Regis, a Jimmy Armfield or a Ray Wilkins, as it has done with dignity this year?

Supporters of the plan will say that it makes no difference whether the FA owns the place or simply rents it when required, while continuing take the income from broadcasting rights, sponsorship deals and Club Wembley. But owning and renting carry very different emotional weights. And although, after a rocky start, Khan is proving himself to be a good steward of Craven Cottage, his priority as the owner of Wembley would undoubtedly be to establish it as the home of his NFL team, the Jaguars, providing the league with its long desired permanent bridgehead into Europe. And no doubt the sale of naming rights would be an early consequence. Most NFL teams, after all, play in places bearing names such as MetLife, Heinz, AT&T and FedEx.

It is absolutely right to want to improve facilities for amateurs and young players around the country. But with the amount of money sloshing into and sluicing out of the game each year, there must be cleverer ways of paying for it than by selling your birthright for a mess of pottage. Esau regretted his bargain, and so will the FA. - The Guardain