It’s time, Boris Johnson assured us in the days leading up to the general election, for football to come home. The prime minister’s pledge to put the government machine at the heart of a UK and Ireland bid to host the 2030 Fifa World Cup was further embellished by a promise to spend £550m on creating 2,000 new synthetic pitches and renovating 20,000 existing grass ones.
The instinctive response was to file this along with all the other campaign promises – 50,000 more nurses, 20,000 more police officers – received with such scepticism by his opponents. After almost a decade of savage cuts to public services, why should anyone believe in the generosity of a Conservative politician? After all it was Johnson’s current henchman, Michael Gove, who did so much damage by killing off 450 school sports partnerships to save £162m, while attempting to provide compensation in the form of a risible “Schools Olympics” with a budget of £10m.
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