Detail of new rulebook for English football begins to emerge

David Thorneloe and Mark Ferguson of Pinsent Masons were commenting after the Independent Football Regulator (IFR) opened consultations on a raft of new regulatory rules and guidance relevant to clubs across the top five tiers of English men’s professional football.

“While the recent record-breaking transfer window ended a summer of transition for clubs in respect of their playing squads, the regulatory landscape off the field for clubs in England is continuing to evolve this season,” said Thorneloe, a specialist in public law and the IFR.

The IFR was established under the Football Governance Act 2025, which came into force during the summer.

The IFR’s main objective is to ensure the financial stability and sustainability of English football, ensuring that clubs have sound corporate and financial governance in place. In total, 116 clubs across the Premier League, the Championship, and divisions one and two of the English Football League (EFL), as well as the National League, are subject to its oversight. Safeguarding ‘the heritage of English football’ is also a statutory objective of the IFR.

The two principal tools the IFR will deploy in pursuit of its objectives will be a new licensing regime for clubs, and a new process to approve the appointment of a club’s owners and senior officers.

On Thursday, the IFR opened a new consultation on rules and guidance pertaining to the latter, detailing how it proposed to establish and oversee the new approval regime for club owners, directors, and senior executives (the ODSE regime). It has stated it aims to “shut out rogue owners and promote sound investment in football”.

Further draft guidance relating to the IFR’s information gathering and enforcement powers, as well as on how the IFR proposes to determine the appropriate type and level of sanction, where it exercises its discretion to impose a sanction on a football club, have also been opened to consultation.

All three consultations are open for responses until 6 October 2025.

Ferguson, an expert in public policy at Pinsent Masons, said: “It is important for clubs to engage in the detail – this is their opportunity to influence the IFR and help it develop a framework that is sensible and proportionate for English football.”

Thorneloe added: “The accelerated timescales for these consultations suggest the IFR is planning to introduce the new ODSE regime as soon as possible this season, ahead of its other rules.”

Further consultations, including on guidance relating to the IFR’s new licensing regime, where clubs can expect to learn how much detail they will be expected to include in a corporate governance report in order to meet their licensing obligations, are expected to follow in the coming months.

“The Football Governance Act lays out a high-level framework for clubs to adhere to, as well as regulatory principles, but the real detail of how the new regulatory regime will work will be laid out by the IFR in regulatory rules and guidance,” Thorneloe said. “These new consultations kick-off the regulator’s work in this regard. Though not yet formally confirmed, the expectation is that the IFR will seek to finalise the rest of the new regulatory regime in time for the 2026-27 season.”

Despite publishing its new consultation on the ODSE regime, Thorneloe said clubs have still to obtain clarification on all the circumstances when a person will be said to become an owner of a football club in England under the new regulatory system.

There are five forms of ownership set out in the Act, one of which is that the person has “the right to exercise, or actually exercises, significant influence or control over the activities of the club (in whole or in part)”.

Thorneloe said: “Clubs face duties to notify changes in ownership, while the owners themselves are subject to suitability assessment and, in certain circumstances, potential removal or disqualification by the regulator, so understanding the full extent of who is in scope of the ODSE regime is an important task for clubs and investors alike. As the IFR points out, however, the detailed guidance on what the concept of ‘significant influence or control’ looks like in practice will be provided by the government, not the regulator. This is something clubs will want to monitor for news on over the coming weeks and months.”