Why was the Independent Football Regulator Established?

SUMMARY

• Three events within a two-year period —the liquidation of Bury FC, the Covid-19 pandemic and the European Superleague proposal— exposed the systemic fragility of English football.
• These events underpinned Government support for the Fan-led Review (FLR) that concluded the existing regulatory structures were not sufficient to address the challenges faced.
• The FLR led to the Football Governance Act 2025 and the creation of the Independent Football Regulator (IFR), introducing independent regulation into the previously private realm of football governance.
• Four factors drove the creation of the IFR: political opportunity; lack of coordinated resistance from the football authorities; growing contests over revenue distribution; and the increasing difficulty of reaching consensus.

In October 2025, the Football Governance Act legislated for the creation of the Independent Football Regulator (IFR), representing a seminal moment in the game's 162-year history. The IFD for professional men's football in England is the first statutory regulator of professional football (or indeed any sport) in the world. It was the conclusion of a process beginning in 2021 with the Fan-Led Review (FLR) into the finance and governance of the football industry.

Why did the government initiate the Fan-Led Review?

There were three focusing events that convinced the Government to launch the FLR. First was the liquidation of Bury Football Club, a small but historic Football League One club, in August 2019. This exposed the fragility of English football’s economic model in the lower divisions, and the limits of the current self-regulatory structures. Extensive media coverage also demonstrated the critical social and cultural role of football clubs in their local communities. This was noted by an increasingly populist Conservative government, who included in their 2019 manifesto the commitment to ‘set up a FLR of football governance’.

The second focusing event was the Covid-19 pandemic. The ability of football clubs to generate revenue through match day attendance, the predominant source of revenue for teams in the Football League Divisions 1 and 2 and the National League, was decimated, underlining their vulnerability to external economic shocks.

The third catalyst was the European Superleague proposal that envisaged a breakaway by twelve elite European football clubs, including six from the English Premier League (EPL), to be played in parallel to national leagues and driven by a conviction to maximise financial returns exclusively for member clubs. The proposal highlighted the inability of the English football authorities to control their most powerful member clubs even where the institutional integrity of the English football league pyramid itself was threatened.

The political response in the UK was unusually decisive with all political parties opposing the proposal. The then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson threatened to drop a ‘legislative bomb’ on the proposals. In the face of intense fan and political opposition, the six English clubs quickly withdrew from the ESL project. Nevertheless, the government accelerated the FLR published in November 2021, concluding that the existing regulatory structures in football were not sufficient to address the industry’s challenges. A key recommendation was the creation of a new independent regulator for English football.

Why did the government implement the IFR?

Four factors underpinned the establishment of the IFR. The first was political opportunity. The Conservative government was supportive because it believed there was political capital to be gained. After the quagmire of the Brexit negotiations and Covid lockdown controversies, the notion of the ESL offered low-hanging fruit: a neatly packaged opportunity to stand up for English interests and ‘give the ludicrous European Super League a straight red’. At the same time, the traditional Labour post-industrial heartlands of ‘Red Wall’ constituencies in the North and Midlands won by the Conservatives in the 2019 general election were areas with a high density of often financially vulnerable football clubs. The Conservatives, alongside Labour and the Liberal Democrats, pledged its creation as a manifesto commitment. This cross-party consensus for the IFR—something that had not been the case previously—encouraged the Conservative government, conventionally antithetical to state intervention in sport, to enact legislation.

Secondly, the lack of coordinated resistance from the football authorities helped bring statutory regulation of football to fruition. Since the late 1990s the three main English football stakeholders, the EPL, the English Football League (EFL) and the Football Association (the FA) had, successfully, collectively opposed the ‘threat’ of statutory intervention. Post-covid, this consensus evaporated. The EFL supported the establishment of an independent regulator, the FA stayed broadly neutral, and the EPL opposed its establishment.

The third factor was the growing contentions over the English football system’s revenue distribution model. Whilst the EPL redistributes significant revenue down the football pyramid in absolute terms, the FLR recommended that the EPL make additional contributions. A more equitable distribution model became a core objective for the EFL, key to why it supported the IFR. The Act recognised that more redistribution of income is fundamental to the pyramid’s financial resilience; included within the Act is a ‘backstop mechanism’ giving the IFR the power to intervene if there is interminable stalemate between the two leagues.

The ongoing and seemingly intractable negotiations over the future revenue distribution model is symptomatic of a deeper problem and underpins the fourth factor: the increasing lack of consensus amongst key football industry stakeholders on a range of key policy issues. A self-regulatory framework is impossible to maintain where the key stakeholders are increasingly in conflict.