In the article on Wednesday about the “dog dirt” condition of so many public football fields, the Premier League‘s contribution towards trying to improve the grassroots was set out: of its 2010-13 television deal, worth £3.1bn, around £1bn a year, the Premier League provides £43.4m in total. Of this, £12m goes to the Football Foundation, £20.3m to the league’s own clubs’ social inclusion schemes, £3m internationally and £8.1m to the Football League for community work and youth development.

That is 4.3% of the Premier League’s TV deal this year. It is short of the “minimum of 5% of income” which the Premier League committed to invest “primarily in grassroots facilities and projects” in the Football Task Force report of January 1999. A 5% contribution this year would amount to £50m – the contribution is £6.6m less than that.

The Premier League argues that although as a member of the Task Force it signed up to “a minimum of 5% of income”, the government did not ask it for 5% of the overseas element of the TV deal, only what it receives for selling its matches to UK broadcasters. It excludes the overseas rights – now £1.4bn from 2010-13, £467m a year – from the 5%. The £43.4m it distributes does meet, even exceeds, a 5% proportion of the UK TV deals, but the 20 top clubs all receive an equal portion of the whole £1.4bn from overseas rights over three years, without sharing it with the grassroots.

Anybody pondering this, the Premier League’s contribution to grassroots at 4.3% of its broadcasting deals, might scratch their heads raw wondering how the Premier League came to be included in the “voluntary code”, maintained by the Sport and Recreation Alliance, for sports bodies to distribute fully 30% of their “net broadcasting income” to the grassroots.

The sports minister, Hugh Robertson, called for that last year after he allowed the England and Wales Cricket Board to continue selling the Ashes exclusively to Sky, contrary to the recommendation of his listed events panel. Robertson argued that cricket should have the freedom to maximise its TV income but in return should distribute 30% of the resulting bonanza to the grassroots. He said then the Premier League was highly unlikely to distribute that figure.

Within weeks, the Premier League did appear in the list of bodies contributing 30% of “net” broadcasting income to the grassroots, and on investigation, it is not a howling surprise that it does so due to a flexible use of the word “net”.

The ECB makes its 30% with a quite straightforward calculation. Its TV deal is reported to be around £60m a year, and it distributes £20m of that to what it defines as grassroots. The ECB does not “net” off any costs from its £60m first, certainly not the wages of the England squad’s central contracts or the large payments to the counties which the ECB makes. “We do not net off any specific costs from our broadcasting income before calculating that 30% of it goes to the grassroots,” a spokesman said.

The Premier League, however, has been permitted by the Sport and Recreation Alliance to deduct from its £1bn TV deal the multimillions which its clubs pay to their players before calculating the 30% that goes to the grassroots. It is allowed to do so by treating players’ wages as a “reasonable cost of staging the events”, because without players there would be no matches – straightforward logic, according to the Sport and Recreation Alliance.

Sources at Robertson’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport say this is clearly not what the spirit of the 30% figure was. The Premier League clubs, after paying players, staff, upkeep of their stadiums, agents and other expenses, mostly make a loss overall, so they could conceivably qualify by distributing 30% of nothing – nothing – to the grassroots.

Robertson’s idea was for 30% of the huge money pouring into sport from pay TV – which excludes the majority of viewers who have only terrestrial television – to return that privilege by investing in grassroots facilities, before agents and players gobble it all up in stellar wage packets.

The Sport and Recreation Alliance, formed as the Central Council of Physical Recreation in 1935, has an important role as an independent campaigning voice, wanting as many people as possible to be able to participate in sport. Its forthcoming conference on 4 May will examine “good governance” and how sport can be part of Robertson’s government’s “big society”.

Yet with this unnecessarily flexible definition of the word “net”, it has for some reason included the Premier League as a body distributing 30% of broadcasting income to the grassroots, when the true figure is 4.3%, and in so doing has undermined its own credibility. It needs to lobby for the grassroots, especially in this climate of cuts by Robertson’s government, with rather more backbone than that.