Gary Neville has criticised as “ridiculous” the Football Association’s plan to sell Wembley stadium for the funding of grassroots facilities, saying the money should come from the wealthy Premier League clubs or via a 25% levy on agents’ fees. The former Manchester United and England defender said that £70m more grassroots funding annually could be found from the 20 Premier League clubs paying £3.5m each, and that the government should also invest more in sports facilities.

Appearing at a House of Commons digital, culture, media and sport committee hearing into the proposed Wembley sale, Neville described £70m a year as “a pittance in football … a pittance in government”. He said: “I despair at the thought that the FA board and management are sitting there and thinking that they have to sell Wembley to fund grassroots football … Place a levy on agents’ fees; that money is disappearing out of the game, there’s your extra £70m. Don’t sell Wembley. Whatever you do, don’t sell Wembley when you can just place a levy on agents’ fees.”

Wembley stadium sale is backed if £600m investment goes to grassroots Read more

Premier League clubs paid £211m to agents on transfers over the past year, comprising the summer 2017 and January 2018 windows. Fifa is considering reforms including a potential cap on fees. But no proposal is being considered by any football body for a levy on agents’ fees to fund grassroots facilities, in which the Premier League, FA and government invest £70m a year via the Football Foundation.

The FA confirmed in April that it was in discussions to sell Wembley for £600m to the Fulham owner, Shahid Khan, who could use the stadium as a European base for his Jacksonville Jaguars team during the September to December or January NFL season.

The sports minister, Tracey Crouch, also giving evidence to the committee, indicated her provisional support for the sale of Wembley – which is legally required – saying of the need for better facilities: “If you build it, people will come and at the moment we haven’t been building it, so actually with this injection we can start to provide the facilities for people to come.”

Crouch declined to agree with MPs, including Labour’s Jo Stevens, that the Premier League should contribute more. Crouch said she negotiated a doubling of the league’s annual funding for grassroots facilities and programmes to £100m during the 2016-19 TV deals , which she described as a “major win”. That is 4% of the £2.4bn the Premier League clubs made from TV rights and sponsorships last season.

Sport England’s consent is also legally required because it contributed £120m of national lottery funds towards the £757m cost of rebuilding Wembley. Its chairman, Nick Bitel, told the committee that “very detailed conversations” were taking place and there was “very good broad agreement” on how the proceeds of a sale would be invested via the Football Foundation.

Consent, and the FA’s agreement, depends on Wembley being preserved as a national stadium for England games, FA Cup finals and a list of other “flagship events” which take place there, and restrictions, including on naming rights.

Sign up for The Fiver, the Guardian’s daily football email.

The FA’s chief executive, Martin Glenn, said he agreed with most of what Neville had said but argued that the Premier League does invest considerable money in the Football Foundation and that he was being practical about securing £600m to improve grassroots facilities which are currently “lamentable”.

The FA does not want to wait for “jam tomorrow”, he said, but make a “tangible difference” to facilities lacking changing rooms, toilets and maintenance by local authorities. Bitel said local authorities’ annual sport budgets have had cuts from £1.5bn to £1bn over the past five years.

“I don’t have the Premier League money, I have FA money,” Glenn said. “I think the FA has waited for years on some of these issues, hoping that something around the corner might turn up, whether it be a levy on gambling or a windfall tax on the Premier League, and we just needed to get going.

“The sale of Wembley, if we can release … money which is locked in a stadium, redeploy it into hundreds or thousands of playing fields up and down the country, why wouldn’t we consider doing that, especially if we could retain control and use of the stadium, and it stays the national stadium.”

The FA is undertaking a national consultation on the proposal. The parliamentary committee is not planning to produce a report on the Wembley sale.