The Letters of the Law

We have a new acronym – or is it an initialism? - in football. Or we will have soon.

IFR.

The appointment of the Independent Football Regulator is definitely happening after the Football Governance Act finally made it through parliament and became law. The IFR will be granted powers to act independently from the government and the footballing authorities.

Everyone has a stance on this. EFL chief, Rick Parry, has fought tirelessly for it; the Premier League bigwigs, not quite so tirelessly. Some owners and directors welcome it, others – that’s you, Karen Brady – think it might do more harm than good with ‘dangers lurking within the bill’.

I just hope it works out better than VAR.

In practice, the FSA (Football Supporters Association) will work with the IFR to keep the voices of fans at the forefront, while we should see much more protection for clubs from unscrupulous owners in future, and hopefully a solution to the cavernous gap that sits between the Premier League clubs and the rest. The published list goes like this:

·       Tough new financial regulation to ensure clubs have a long-term sustainable future

·       Stronger tests to stop rogue owners 

·       New standards for fan engagement in club decision-making

·       Ban on clubs joining closed-shop competitions and breakaway leagues

·       'Backstop powers' to ensure a fair financial distribution between leagues

·       Protections for key club heritage aspects like home shirt colours and club badges and stadium moves

OMG, what’s not to like?

It’s been described as a watershed moment. Too many people have seen, and used, football clubs as playthings or get-rich-quick (yeah, right) schemes. Neither ever work out well once the owner gets bored of playing or begins losing money (the two are often closely related).

The ‘dangers’ we’re warned of will probably be the things that stop the bigger clubs making more money and that narrow the disparity. But for the sake of the pyramid, I think we should take our chances with them.

But what else could the regulator do? And are things we are promised enough? Here’s four things that I think would make a tangible difference.

Broker a distribution deal

The ‘backstop powers’ mentioned are fine in principle, but already feel like they’ll only come into effect after the horse has not only bolted but is two or three fields away. The EFL, EPL and FA have all tried to find a way over the years to spread the money more evenly but there has not been enough goodwill – or much will at all – to flatten this top-heavy distribution and get more money flowing, not trickling, further down the pyramid. If the IFR is a backstop, it suggests they’ll only get involved if the kids can’t play nicely on their own. Why not just save time? They aren’t going to play nicely and if they wanted to, they’d have done so long before now, so instead of another X years of waiting, why doesn’t the IFR sit everyone down and broker an agreement for the next ten years?

Help fans be more involved 

No one can make new – or existing - owners bring fans more onboard at their clubs. We know fans aren’t the #1 priority for many of them, and that they are really just looking for ways to make more money out of them (not always a bad thing). One EPL club recently said via an employee post on LinkedIn that the ‘most important fans are the ones that never visit your stadium’ – WTF? So there’s clearly work to do. And while a lot of clubs are drafting up fan engagement plans, I wonder how many are paying it lip service.

But there must be something to be gleaned from Germany’s 50+1 model in that the more fan involvement there is, the less likely that things will happen that fans won’t like (colour changes, badge changes, stadium moves etc). And it not only keeps owners honest; it means that fans feel much more valued, and owners know exactly what the fans are thinking. If the IFR could be the catalyst for a move in this direction, in ten years I think the landscape could look very different.

Make fair play fairer

I keep losing track of FFP and PSR as it is, and my math isn’t great either, but isn’t it horrible that football now leads on stories like ‘Liverpool can still spend £150M and be OK with PSR’? It all but kills the final bit of romance left in the game.

At the top, the whole thing has begun to resemble one big ATM; a world where it feels like money is the onlything that matters. While FIFA and UEFA fight to win control of the calendar and competitions (one winner: allbank balances), we now have to thread fiscal responsibility into an already confusing set of complications. Whatever happened to what happens on the pitch?

Experts are invited onto Sky Sports News just to tell us how a club is faring within the rules, and the negative or questionable practices (clubs selling academy players to rivals, or selling the women’s club to themselves) seem to outweigh any benefits. If the IFR could get involved here, I’d like to see them help introduce a much cleaner and transparent set of rules and make clubs stick by them if that’s the way it has to be. Currently, clubs are more concerned with gaming the system and fighting the charges in courts - or at CAS - than they are with actually playing by the rules to begin with.

Create Owner Exits

This is already on the list, but it’s a tough one. The elite clubs aren’t really an issue, as any owners have to have very deep pockets and tend to be easier to scrutinise, plus if they go bad ways, there will always be someone else ready to take the club off their hands.

Smaller clubs are scraping along as it is, and if a new owner comes along promising the earth, it’s hard for the league to stand in their way, especially if the other option is oblivion and also if the awful things they’ll do to the club aren’t yet apparent. Most new owners who become bad ones, do so at a later date, when things don’t work out. So rogues will always end up at the helm and this is where the IFR can be effective, as its often the drawn-out saga to get rid of them – see what’s going on at Morecambe atm - that drags the club and the fans down. By then it’s too late as would-be buyers are put off by them or the club is already FUBAR. So if the IFR has the powers to remove them – ASAP – and put the club in the hands of people who really care, then maybe they’ll still have a chance.

It’s going to be a WIP to begin with, of course, but now we’ve got a regulator, it would be a shame to waste them.

But do I think any of the above will happen BTW?

LOL.