Asbos should impose weekly sport on young offenders, says Caborn

The sports minister Richard Caborn will today propose that anti-social behaviour orders (Asbos) be adapted to include up to six hours of physical activity or competitive sport each week. Caborn will use a lecture in London to argue that sport can play an effective part in delivering government policy, particularly in the area of health and social exclusion, and sees the controversial youth justice arena as one in which it can make a tangible difference.

"Sport can be an agent for change," he said. "Take coaching. If we could get another 6-10,000 coaches qualified we could have them working with the probation service. We could make every Asbo order include a compulsory four-to-six hours a week of sport or physical activity to help with the social inclusion issue." Caborn's proposal, which will be news to the Home Office, comes at the start of a week in which he will become the longest-serving sports minister in a single stint. Appointed in June 2001, the Sheffield MP will pass the record set by a Labour predecessor, Denis Howell, on Friday. The landmark sees the minister in bullish mood, pushing ahead with the European Sports Review he initiated.

On Thursday Caborn will become the first sports minister to address the Premier League clubs' meeting, where he will tell them that a limit on overseas players is crucial if the interests of the national side are to be protected. Caborn will argue for the adoption of measures recommended in the review, including quotas for home-grown players and wage controls.

"In my view the most famous team in the country is the England team, it is not Manchester United or Chelsea or Liverpool, and if we take actions that undermine the national team that is wrong," he said. "It's very interesting what Arsène Wenger has said recently, that if you don't have a clear percentage of home-grown players here then it could have a detrimental effect on the England side."

Despite almost total opposition from the clubs, which see the review in general and the home-grown player proposal specifically as a threat to their independence and commercial freedom, he will argue that the Premiership's success, emphasised by the £2.7bn television deal that starts next season, requires a new code of governance at a European level.

"The chairmen are highly intelligent people running successful businesses, but in the interests of that business we ought to be looking at how the game is governed more effectively, particularly as commercialisation has had quite an effect," he said. "There are excesses emerging in the game that cannot in the long term be good for the game. It's time to start addressing those and the time is now."

Among the excesses Caborn has highlighted is the glut of foreign players in the Premier League and the dominance of those clubs with the greatest income. He declines to name Chelsea, but the Premiership champions' disproportionate spending power - their most recent accounts showed a £140m loss - is of concern to many in European football.

"The Premier League's success has enabled the clubs to bargain with TV for levels of income that they did not think were attainable, but you have to look at that and say, how can it be used in the best interests of the game?"

Paul Kelso
5 February 2007

http://sport.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2006097,00.html

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