Sport Briefing Podcast Series | A New Frontier: The Changing Face of Regulation in English Football

Great, so first let's set the scene before we start.

Financial rules and regulations impacting English clubs have made a lot of news in recent years.

We've become increasingly familiar with terms like profitability and sustainability across the Premier League and also the English Football League or EFL.

Clubs that suffer points deductions, they've also faced fines for breaking the rules.

Governing bodies and competition organisers that have got jurisdiction over English football include the Premier League, EFL and even for clubs lower down the pyramid, the National League.

When you look at clubs that are participating in European football, they fall under the remit of UEFA rules.

And into that mix now is striding the independent football regulator, which was formed actually after some government intervention.

I wanted to just kind of briefly touch on the background to the IFR first of all, to set some scene and some context.

So it was first sort of mooted, I guess, seriously after a number of insolvencies in English football, and in particular, the demise of Bury and Macclesfield in the EFL.

There were also regular repeat issues in the press and elsewhere with club owners that had reputational concerns or even a habit of not paying player wages.

But the final straw, if we can describe it as that, I think was the plan of six of the Premier League clubs five or six years ago now to join a breakaway European Super League.

And if you remember, those plans fell apart pretty quickly following anger, I guess, and protests from fans.

And this really exposed the disconnect between the owners of the clubs and the fans of the clubs.

And I think the perception of fans and media and even politicians was that Some of the owners can be relatively transient in the ownership of the clubs, and they just didn't understand the culture and heritage of the clubs that in many cases could be over 100 years old.

So on the back of that came the government intervention.

So the UK government, they initiated what was called a fan led review into the state of the English game.

And that review took a while.

But it included a recommendation for an independent football regulator that was aimed at stabilising clubs that I think are very often lost making in English football.

And also to reconnect ownership with fans and potentially increasing the rigour that's applied to the process to decide whether owners can be considered to be fit and proper to run football clubs.

And many of these clubs, as I said before, I think that effectively community assets, they've been around for a really long period of time.

So the IFR is now up and running.

The impact is gonna be felt by clubs really from this season onwards, but we've just had the transfer window that's closed for English clubs and it has not stopped the spending.

So Premier League clubs have just spent a record 3.5 billion pound on players.

So now to you, Adam, before we get into the detail, you've had a really unusually close view of the creation of the independent football regulator.

So I think your insight for people listening to the pod is pretty unique.