Hansard

I rise with a feeling of déjà vu, having once again listened to George Adam talk about football and St Mirren. For the second day running, I am obliged to mention to Mr Adam that I used to coach his beloved St Mirren. I know that that puts him in a bit of a dilemma.

It is a real pleasure to speak in a debate that has such a positive message for Scotland and Scottish sport. We are quite expert at delivering international sporting events and the required legislation and policy, having previously hosted the Euro 2020 championships and the 2014 Commonwealth games, as many members in the chamber have mentioned. We will also be hosting the upcoming 2026 Commonwealth games; the Tour de France is coming; and we have hosted many world and European championships across many sports. It feels to me as though we are going round again.

I have to mention the very welcome tartan army, which travels across Europe and the world and which has a fantastic reputation. I do not know whether the world is ready to come to Scotland and be hosted by the tartan army; they ain’t seen nothing yet.

I add my thanks to the minister and his team for the positive way that he has collaborated and communicated with MSPs and their teams about the bill. If that were always the case in the Parliament, perhaps we would get much more done. In essence, the main discussions have been about dealing with and defining ticket touting; charitable exemptions and selling tickets at auction, which my colleague and friend Stephen Kerr wanted to speak a fair amount about; street trading in the vicinity of the venue; and advertising bans. In general, we are in broad agreement across the chamber on those things, despite some of the amendments not being included in the final bill.

The main issues on which we require more discussion and clarity are the potential laws on the designation and powers of an enforcement officer and concerns about what would be acceptable in defining the use of reasonable force. The additional powers that are being granted to enforcement officers through amendments have been the subject of discussion. The commercial rights of UEFA have been discussed significantly. I know that we have to consider them, but there is a level of unease around that, as has been highlighted by many members in the chamber.

The main thing that I want to talk about is the need to grasp the legacy from major championships, which we have not been good at. I was at the 2014 Commonwealth games every day, and Glasgow was ablaze with sunshine. The world must think that Glasgow is quite close to the Caribbean, because the temperature was in the 20s every day, except for the day that Usain Bolt ran, when there was a deluge. There was an amazing atmosphere. However, we did not do particularly well post the games. I do not think that sport has moved on in the way that it should have done and we have not grasped the huge commercial and other opportunities in the way that we should have.

In 2014, I was doing a little bit of work for one of the companies that was doing the information technology integration, and I helped it to develop its legacy programme. Legacy does not mean buying tickets for kids to watch events. We ran what was called the club together programme, which focused on athletics. A club, a local authority and sportscotland clubbed together to buy 15 hours of professional help for the club, at a cost of £3,000. We were able to measure the outcome of that programme. We know that 3,000 more athletes and 300 more coaches and administrators were brought into the sport because of it.

That is the kind of legacy that we need to focus on. We need to look at how we work with commercial partners to pull money and opportunities together. Sport has become very expensive, and that is especially the case with football. If we think about the cost of hiring football pitches, we are pricing our kids out of the sport.

My ask of the Government is that we should consider what we mean by the legacy of the major championships that we are hosting, both commercially and socially. Let us maximise the opportunity that hosting major events brings to Scotland.