October 9, 2026 Football’s New Governance Era? The Hardest Problems May Be Beyond the Regulator’s Reach
In response to the Chartered Governance Institute’s recent article, “Game changer: football’s new governance era”.
The Football Governance Act (FGA) and the creation of the Independent Football Regulator (IFR) will change how English football is governed. The question now is whether they will change how football behaves.
The Chartered Governance Institute’s recent blog rightly describes the reforms as a turning point for the game. The move from industry self-regulation to statutory oversight represents the most significant intervention in football governance for decades. Yet regulation alone does not fix the conditions that created the need for regulation in the first place.
For supporters, it offers hope that some of the game’s most damaging failures can finally be addressed. For clubs, it introduces a level of scrutiny that would have been difficult to imagine even ten years ago.
But reading the CGI’s analysis left me with the same question I’ve had since the legislation first emerged:
Will the FGA and the IFR truly reform football governance, or will regulation simply sit alongside the deeper structural issues that continue to drive poor decision-making?
What’s wrong with football governance now?
When football governance failures are discussed publicly, they’re often framed as failures of ownership, boards or accountability.
Reality is rarely that straightforward.
The collapse of Bury, the prolonged governance issues experienced by clubs such as Sheffield Wednesday, and the backlash against the proposed European Super League all exposed serious governance concerns. But they also highlighted something else: football operates within a system that consistently rewards risk-taking.
Promotion can transform a club’s finances, while relegation can devastate them.
Faced with that reality, many clubs make decisions that appear irrational from a governance perspective but entirely rational from a competitive one. They spend beyond sustainable levels. They rely heavily on owner funding. They pursue growth strategies that would attract significant scrutiny in most other industries.
The problem is not always that boards fail to understand the risks; often, they understand them perfectly but perceive the cost of caution to be even greater.
For many clubs, the choice is not between sustainable growth and reckless spending. It is between taking a calculated risk or accepting a competitive disadvantage. Viewed through that lens, some of the behaviours the IFR is seeking to address are not aberrations within the system. They are products of it.
The CGI’s central argument is that the FGA and the IFR will not be enough without a wider cultural shift. I agree with that to a point, but I think it oversimplifies the problem.
Poor governance in football isn’t always the result of poor owners or ineffective boards. More often, it stems from logical but short-term decisions driven by financial pressures and incentives that encourage clubs to prioritise survival and competitiveness over sustainability.
That’s why regulation alone may struggle to address the underlying causes.
The IFR’s challenge: changing behaviour, not just introducing rules
The Football Governance Act gives the IFR significant powers.
The proposed licensing system, enhanced owners’ and directors’ tests and wider oversight requirements are welcome and represent meaningful interventions in how clubs operate.
But governance professionals know that compliance and behaviour are not the same thing.
A club can satisfy every reporting requirement and still make poor strategic decisions.
A board can pass every regulatory test and still pursue a business model that is highly vulnerable when circumstances change.
Licensing regimes live or die on how standards are defined, monitored and enforced. Too light-touch, and they risk becoming a box-ticking exercise. Too rigid, and they could constrain clubs already operating on fine margins.
I genuinely hope the IFR is willing to challenge poor behaviours when it sees them.
What it cannot do overnight is resolve the financial gulf between footballing tiers or remove the pressure on clubs to compete at all costs.
That’s why the regulator’s success won’t simply be measured by the number of licences issued or enforcement actions taken. It will be judged on whether the regime can achieve the much harder task of changing behaviour before clubs reach crisis point.
Will fans finally be listened to?
As a football fan and governance professional, one of the most encouraging aspects of the Football Governance Act’s development was the extent to which supporter groups were consulted.
Fans aren’t generally known for keeping their opinions to themselves, but all too often it can feel as though those opinions carry little weight when major decisions are being made.
My postgraduate research focused on supporter advisory boards at Wrexham, Leeds United and Portsmouth. What emerged consistently was that structures alone do not deliver effective engagement. The determining factor was the attitude of ownership and leadership.
Where supporters were viewed as strategic stakeholders, engagement influenced decision-making. Where consultation existed primarily to satisfy expectations, it rarely altered outcomes.
The ownership approach at Wrexham offers a visible example of supporter engagement being treated as part of how the club operates rather than as a compliance exercise. That emphasis is also a recurring theme in Welcome to Wrexham.
I always come back to the same blunt but important point:
Football clubs belong to their fans.
Owners may own the businesses that operate the clubs, but it’s supporters who sustain them through generations of success, failure and everything in between.
The Football Governance Act seeks to strengthen the voice of supporters, but the challenge is ensuring that engagement becomes meaningful rather than procedural.
As governance professionals, we should be asking the following practical questions:
- How will stakeholder engagement be embedded into decision-making?
- How will boards evidence that supporters’ views have influenced outcomes?
- How will clubs ensure engagement is given the same seriousness as financial oversight or risk management?
The risk for the IFR is not that engagement doesn’t happen, but that it becomes process-driven rather than outcome-driven: compliant, but not transformative.
What does this mean for boards?
From our perspective as governance advisers, the most important consequence of the new regime is not necessarily regulatory, but operational.
Clubs are being asked to demonstrate financial resilience, governance capability and stakeholder engagement on an ongoing basis.
The boards that thrive will be those that look beyond minimum compliance requirements and focus on strengthening decision-making across the organisation. The challenge is unlikely to be understanding what the new rules require. The challenge will be embedding governance practices that continue to function when sporting and financial pressure intensifies.
Football boards are regularly asked to make decisions under circumstances that few corporate boards would recognise. Performance expectations change weekly, supporter scrutiny is constant and financial consequences can be immediate. Governance frameworks must be capable of supporting decision-making in that environment, not simply demonstrating compliance after the fact.
That means asking questions such as:
- Does the board genuinely understand its long-term sustainability risks?
- Is stakeholder engagement influencing decisions or simply documenting them?
- Are governance structures helping directors make better decisions under pressure?
- Would the club’s governance withstand scrutiny during a period of crisis, not just stability?
Those questions existed before the Football Governance Act, but the difference now is that the answers matter more than ever.
So, what next?
Structurally, English football governance has changed in a way that would have been difficult to imagine even a decade ago.
The challenge now is implementation.
The IFR can introduce rules, licensing requirements and oversight. What it cannot do on its own is remove the financial pressures that have shaped football decision-making for decades.
For boards, this uncertainty is where governance will matter most and where governance becomes more than a compliance exercise. Clear frameworks, robust reporting, meaningful stakeholder