Andy Burnham Eyes Expanding Support for Fan and Community-Owned Grassroots Clubs

A proposal to help local communities take over grassroots sports clubs at risk of closure is gaining traction within government, with Prime Minister Andy Burnham said to be personally invested in reviving a model he helped pioneer under New Labour.

The Co-operative Party, Labour's sister party, has proposed creating a 'Supporters Direct 2.0', a new agency that would support communities looking to take ownership of struggling grassroots clubs before they're lost altogether. The report points to the recently passed Community Right to Buy, which gives community groups first refusal when eligible assets, including sports clubs, come up for sale, as a mechanism the new agency could build on. It also highlights financial instability spreading well beyond football, into rugby union, rugby league and cricket, where a number of traditionally member-owned clubs are exploring breaking from that model.

The original Supporters Direct, set up under Tony Blair's government and chaired by Burnham between 2001 and 2005, helped establish more than 200 supporters' trusts, giving fans a financial stake and a voice in how their clubs were run. Around 50 football clubs are now fully or partially fan-owned as a result, including EFL sides AFC Wimbledon and Exeter, both of which exist in their current form largely because of that intervention.

At his first meeting with Co-operative Labour MPs, Burnham reportedly pointed directly to that legacy and said the government should "look to work on it again," according to sources present at the meeting. One MP described fan-owned sport as "definitely a personal passion" of the prime minister's, while acknowledging the "list of pressing issues is a long one." Burnham, a lifelong Everton fan, wrote in a 2001 book on football's commercialisation that "the heart and soul of every club is the property of its fans," a view he has returned to repeatedly since.

Caitlin Prowle, assistant general secretary of the Co-operative Party, said the moment calls for exactly this kind of renewed focus. "We need to think seriously about who owns our sporting assets and who gets a say in their future," she said. "Andy Burnham was a driving force in shifting sports ownership during the last Labour government and now he has the opportunity to do it again, with a renewed focus on co-operative ownership that puts fans and communities in control."

While the proposal's most immediate ambitions are grassroots-focused, the wider conversation it's reopened extends further up the game. The original Supporters Direct became the Football Supporters' Association in 2018, and the Co-op report argues that while fan representation has strengthened in some respects, including through the Independent Football Regulator, an explicit focus on ownership itself has faded.

No Premier League club currently operates under fan ownership, and sceptics argue the model struggles to compete financially at that level. It's understood there is no active work currently underway from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DMCS) to expand fan or community ownership, though a DCMS spokesperson said the government remains "firmly on the side of fans" following the introduction of the football regulator.

For grassroots clubs specifically, though, the appeal of the proposal is more straightforward: a dedicated agency, funded through a partnership between government and professional sport, that could give local communities both the mechanism and the support needed to save a club from closure, rather than losing it to financial pressure with no clear route to keep it running.