Meeting of the Parliament 25 February 2026 [Draft]
I thank Gillian Mackay for lodging her motion and bringing the debate to the chamber, allowing some of us, once again, to talk about football.
Two or three weeks ago, I chaired an event at the festival of politics on the soft power of sport, which members who are in the chamber for this debate would have enjoyed. I opened that event by saying that sport does not care about colour, creed, religion or sexuality—sport cares only about performance, and it has an inextricable ability to draw communities together around a passion. I have talked about that in the chamber many times before: how sport can break down barriers and have an influence and an impact on people’s lives.
We are talking about football today, and I will mention—as I always do—the last football match that I saw. It was on Sunday, when my grandson was playing for Ayr United—these are only 12-year-olds, I should say—against St Johnstone. There is a community around that football club, which is drawn from all over the place. We in that community all gathered there to watch those kids joyfully knock lumps out of each other, as it turned out. With my eldest grandson, it is rugby, which involves a different community of people who come together around a passion for that particular sport.
Gillian Mackay rightly talked about the influence of football in communities, and there are many instances that I could talk about in that regard. I am at Motherwell Football Club every Monday night, when I join my good friend Tommy McKean, who coaches there, and we get our squads together. When Tommy was looking for somewhere to house his squad, Motherwell Football Club allowed him to use its indoor facility for free. Clubs are the centre of our communities.
I have previously talked about things such as the changing room initiative at Hearts and Hibs and the ability of football clubs to reach into communities and go where statutory services cannot. That is incredibly powerful. I will not go into St Mirren in great detail, because I am pretty sure that it will be mentioned later. However, we have talked about the way in which community clubs bring people together—they coalesce around that passion. Frankly, we undervalue that. We undervalue the soft power of sport and the impact that it can have. We are trying to stop conflict and create a community ethos and spirit. We undervalue the power of sport, and we also underfund it.
We must be careful when we talk about ticket prices. The last time we debated the issue, I was approached by somebody from St Johnstone who said, “Did you know that we offer a free ticket to a child who goes along with an adult?” Those are the kind of initiatives that we need to be aware of.
I am running out of time.