The Football Association is to make 82 employees redundant and sacrifice 124 jobs in total due to the financial fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, with England’s governing body expecting losses of around £300m.
Chief executive Mark Bullingham announced on Monday that the loss of numerous revenue-generating events at Wembley, combined with the compensation that the FA will have to pay out to broadcasters for cancelled events, means that it will take “years” to recover from the economic impact of the Covid-19 outbreak.
As a result – and to bring greater certainty to employees now rather than leaving them in limbo – a new scaled-down budget has been drawn up that will result in 124 jobs being cut from the body.
Forty-two of those roles are already vacant, with the FA’s recruitment freeze in March meaning that they can be deducted from the total number of redundancies. However, such is the financial crisis that the governing body is predicting, they will make 82 employees redundant in order to ‘future-proof’ against any further worst-case scenarios.
“It might seem that football has weathered the storm by getting the top flight men’s game playing again. However, unfortunately the past few months have impacted The FA severely and we have lost a significant amount of money that we can never recoup,” Bullingham said.
“We also anticipate that many of our future revenue streams will be affected for a considerable time.
“The high level of uncertainty in our landscape means that we have had to plan for a whole range of potential scenarios. As previously communicated, we are currently planning for potential losses of approximately £300m. As a not-for-profit organisation, this will hit us hard.”
Bullingham added: “Today we are proposing to make 124 positions redundant. Because we halted recruitment the day we left the offices in March, we are able to take 42 vacant positions out of the structure, which means that we are proposing to remove 82 roles from the organisation.
“We recognise that this is an incredibly difficult time for those employees who have been affected by these proposals and we will do everything we can to support them during a consultation period, which will start soon.”
While professional football in England has been able to resume in the last fortnight – with Wembley set to stage its first match on Monday night since the Carabao Cup final in February as Exeter and Northampton meet in the League Two play-off final – it will be the lack of non-football events that will really hit the FA hard.
Bullingham noted the absence of concerts that were due to take place inside the stadium this summer, while October’s NFL International Series has also been cancelled, and the stadium’s hospitality service has “completely fallen away” during the crisis, leaving a £35m black hole in their annual revenues that Bullingham says “will probably take years to recover”.
The new budget will put an emphasis on serving English football and the two senior national teams across both men and women, meaning that other areas may well feel the effects of the large financial cuts.
“We have a responsibility to preserve our core functions that regulate and serve English football,” Bullingham added. “We also have a duty to support our men’s and women’s senior teams in their efforts to win major tournaments. That means we have set out in our proposals some difficult choices because we do not think we can afford to do all the things that we did before. We believe the impact of this crisis is to force us to focus more than ever on our key priorities.”
