The Football Governance Act gives fans the best opportunity they have had in many years to genuinely influence what goes on at the clubs they support. But, even among the more organised sections, there is little understanding of what that opportunity is, what fans’ rights are, or what is needed to maximise it.
That’s no great surprise. People aren’t attracted to football by legislative measures or corporate governance codes. But bitter experience has shown time and again that if we don’t take an interest in how our clubs are run, the things we enjoy suffer. What’s encouraging is that, at most professional clubs and a fair number of semi- and non-professional, there is at least some level of supporter organisation. But what’s worrying is that much of it is unprepared for, or even unaware of, the opportunity that has been presented.
That is not intended as a criticism of hard-working volunteers who give up their time and energy to try to provide fans with a voice. But the hard reality is we need to up our game, just as we are asking our clubs and the people who run the game to.
Over the next few weeks I am going to try to set out, in plain language, what the opportunities presented by the Bill are, and what fan organisations need to do to make the most of them. I’m also going to try to look at the challenges facing the regulator in putting the Bill’s principles into practice, and in building awareness of and confidence in the regulatory regime.
I’m not claiming to have all the answers. So this is intended as a conversation as well as information, a space where some of the challenges facing all of us who want football to be better can be worked through. My focus is going to be largely on the fan engagement parts of the Bill, but I am happy to run contributions from readers who want to take a similar approach with other aspects.
The more we can mainstream the understanding of available opportunity and what is needed to make the most of it, the more likely it is that the regulatory regime will be a success.
And the chances of success are improved by the fact that we are currently operating in fertile ground. New Prime Minister Andy Burnham has long advocated the measures set out in the Football Governance Bill. He gets football and its wider meaning, and is a former chair of Supporters Direct, the body set up to promote wider supporter involvement in and ownership of clubs. He has, in recent days, spoken out about where ownership of the game really lies, from the global level down.
Writing in 2021, he also said: “We need to legislate to give supporters more than media power.” The legislation is in place, and it has backing from the highest levels of the UK government. It’s now up to supporters to make the most of it.
In the rest of this series, I will cover points including
• Licensing - what is happening, how it will work .
• What corporate governance means, and why it is important in football.
• Heritage issues - what rights do fans have and how the Act and other legislation protects them.
• What the Regulator’s powers are and how they might be used.
Throughout the series I will, where possible, include specific references to the parts of the legislation that can help you. Here’s an introductory taster explaining why this is not just another set of fine aspirations, but a genuine opportunity to change things for the better.
Underlying everything you need to remember is the following point:
The Act’s Core Purpose Includes Fans.
The Act’s definition of “sustainability” for English football requires that it “continues to serve the interests of fans”. This isn’t just a sentiment; it is a statutory purpose that the Independent Football Regulator (IFR) must advance, and it is set down in the Act’s Part 1, (3) section 1(3)(a) and 1(3)(b). The fact that these key stipulations appear so early in the Act is no accident.
The underlying aim here is to ensure that standards reached by clubs are high across the piece for everyone, regardless of who they support. Another key concept to always bear in mind is addressed via The Fan Engagement Threshold.
What is The Fan Engagement Threshold?
For a club to operate, it must demonstrate it has “adequate and effective means” to consult fans and, crucially, that it “takes the views of its fans into account” when making decisions. (Schedule 4, paragraph 4). This moves engagement from a “nice-to-have” to a mandatory condition of a club’s operating licence. (Part 3, section 18(2) sets out the detail.
Good fan engagement is not uniform and what is needed at different clubs will vary, even if there are some minimum expectations of all. The Act provides for this by allowing the Regulator to set what are called “mandatory” licence conditions for all clubs (section 20) and “discretionary” licence conditions (section 21).
All clubs will have a mandatory fan engagement condition, and meeting it will be an ongoing requirement of a club’s licence. More detail on what it will contain is set out in in Schedule 5 (paragraph 8).
So What Do Fans Get to Influence?
The Act specifies exactly what “relevant matters” clubs must consult fans on (Schedule 4, part 4).
· Strategic direction and objectives.
· Business priorities.
· Operational and match-day issues, specifically including ticket pricing.
· Club heritage, such as the home ground, crest, team colours, and name.
What Does Direct Protection of Heritage Mean?
The Act answers this question through the “heritage objective” (Part 2, section 6).
· Relocation: A club cannot move from its home ground without IFR approval, which is only granted if the club has taken reasonable steps to determine and regard the views of its fans. (Part 5, section 48).
· Crests and Colours: A club cannot make material changes to its emblem or predominant home shirt colours unless it can show the changes are supported by a majority of the club’s fans. (Part 5, section 49).
I will examine what is meant by “strategic direction and objectives” and “business priorities” in later articles.
Studying the legislative provisions described above is undoubtedly fairly dry work for the lay reader.
In drawing your attention to them however, I am seeking to make a crucial point. You will, even if you concentrate only on the fan engagement provisions described above, notice that they make regular reference to other parts of the Act, including finance and corporate governance in particular.
Again, this is no accident. The Act has been carefully designed to be holistic in nature, ensuring that different parts of it reinforce one another. Any club that seeks to view its provisions as a menu it can choose from is likely to quickly find compliance with the Regulator’s expectations is hard to achieve. As fans, remembering this key principle will help you in properly holding your own club to account.
This series of articles could not have been written without the assistance of Robbie Whittaker of the Blackpool Supporters Trust. His knowledge of how legislation is drafted and interpreted has proved invaluable. Some of the basic research has been conducted with the assistance of AI in the form of Gemini Notebook, which cites original sourcing. Those sources have been checked by Robbie and I, but the analysis and conclusions are written by us.
• Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash
Here's a few questions that every club should be required to answer, upon pain of losing their licence to operate:
1. Does the club, any of its podcasters or any third parties inextricably linked to the club place any member of its supporter group/supporters of other clubs under unconsented surveillance (which includes telling fans to subscribe to their podcast channels without explicitly stating that they will be put under surveillance as a result, as opposed to slipping that through in allegorical language on page 145 of the Ts & Cs.), be that using satellites, mobile phones, keystroke hacking of computers/tablets/mobile phones in ways designed to achieve any of the following?
i. Commercial advantage (tantamount to theft/slave labour);
ii. Emotional harassment (lessons learned from- or used in conjunction with the criminal services (which provide almost no security to honest UK citizens but engage globally in worldwide murder, human trafficking, sex trafficking, organ harvesting and other actions of inhuman depravity);
iii. Intrusion into private financial affairs, which are absolutely none of the club's business absent official police enquiries, evidence of potential defrauding of the club etc.
2 Do any of the club's major shareholders, Directors and senior officials provide direct financial support to organisations that promote genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing or any other form of behaviour comparable in depravity to the worst actions of the Nazi party in WWII?
i. Do any American owners/shareholders make major donations to the Republican/Democrat parties, AIPAC, the ADL and any other lobbying organisations for the criminal state of Israel, whose leader currently has an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for many of the crimes listed above? If they do, by any humane definition, they are not fit and proper people to be in any position of responsibility, even if they are fiscally solvent billionaires. Being fit and proper is as much a test of humanity as it is of wealth....
ii. Do any Arab owners make direct funding available to Middle Eastern terrorist groups, be they Shia or Sunni Muslim in nature? Have those Arab owners supported illegal warmongering by Israel and the USA in Iran and if so, why?
iii. Do US owners turn a blind eye to the illegal coup d'etat carried out by US criminals in Venezuela, for the sole purpose of stealing one of the largest proven oil reserves on earth?? If so, why are they fit and proper people to own anything when natural justice says that everything they own should be stolen from them too??
iv. Do any owners run any other businesses which involve human trafficking, slave labour, confiscation of identity documents, use of violent enforcers demanding tribute, engagement in illegal match fixing of sporting events, taking advantage of known fixes to gamble on certainties, engaging in ticket touting anywhere on planet earth, engaging in practices defrauding legitimate creditors using webs of companies designed to create bankruptcies due not to insolvency but due to fraud and failure to honour contracts by the Directors?
v. Do any owners personally promote the concept of eugenics, a concept limited to narcissistic yobboes too thick to realise that genetic traits selected for in one century may not be the ones selected for 1000 years hence, resulting in the enduring value to a species of a widely diverse gene pool, many of whose members will live humble but genuine lives as parents, grandparents and great-grandparents? Those promoting eugenics are not fit and proper people to hold any positions of responsibility. William Gates III take note.....ditto Elon Musk.
vi. Do any owners own businesses designed intrinsically to wipe out the sorts of employment enjoyed by the majority of fans of the club they own? Owners seeking to use AI to create mass unemployment, mass dependency on feudal masters are no friends of fans, indeed they are their mortal enemies. Do any AI-owning owners accept that Peter Thiel's useless AI caused 160 Iranian schoolgirls to be brutally murdered, due to the lack of oversight of useless codes created by techies too thick to understand human life???
vii. Do any owners intend making investments into Trump/Kushner's tyrannical 'Board of Peace', which intends to rule over Gaza like a colony with nothing but feudal ownership and control? If so, why are they are a fit and proper person to own any UK business?
viii. Do the owners of Tottenham Hotspur FC understand that the relationship between the club and London Jews derives from a statement of non-Jewish solidarity with locally disadvantaged/oppressed Jews in the early 20th century? Do they further understand that an analogous statement of solidarity in the 2020s would be to support the endangered population of Palestinians currently undergoing ethnic cleansing by the most foul and disgusting Jews on the planet, almost none of whom possess Semitic DNA and who are without question behaving in an antisemitic way since the Palestinians are all Semites? You could ask the same question of the owners of Arsenal FC, whose cultural heritage includes their fans singing 'One man went to gas, went to gas a Yiddo', which I suspect would lead to mass prison sentences if ever sung at the Emirates Stadium in 2026/27.
Given the absolute intolerance for even bad language by fans these days, it is completely intolerable that billionaire owners can behave with contempt for human life, not in the dozens but in the hundreds of thousands.
It is also absolutely imperative that a no-tolerance culture of any behaviour of owners far, far worse than calling a black person a nigger is imposed. Causing hurt feelings is reprehensible, but no black person has been bombed to death through a nigger-hating white racist in recent years, have they?? There cannot be any situation where owners can support genocides, sex trafficking and organ harvesting yet fans are banned for life for verbal profanity.
I trust that Prime Minister Burnham is not too much of a bought Israeli puppet that he is prepared to confront the genocidal Nazis purporting to be Jews in Israel and to make a leading stand in eliminating all support of ethnic cleansing by any football club's owners, directors and senior officers in all four countries of the UK.....
I also hope he is prepared to confront the US Cabal, of whom the Friedkin Group are a part, to ensure that English Football does not become the victim of US cartels simply shutting down English football ad moving it to the USA unless the UK submits to all the sorts of disgusting gouging that is a trait of all US monopoly sports franchises.
We all saw what happened at World Cup 2026. No-one should be under any illusions that the US owners will try it on over here unless the fanbase stands up in unity to tell them to forget it or f*** off....