The impact of safeguarding and due diligence under the Independent Football Regulator

Putting aside political or sporting views, the establishment of the Independent Football Regulator (IFR) under the Football Governance Act 2025 marks a significant shift in how English professional football is governed. While the IFR’s core statutory objectives focus on financial sustainability, systemic resilience and heritage protection the regulatory framework ensures extensive safeguarding and due diligence requirements for clubs, owners, directors, and senior executives.

It was Richard Nixon who said "Life is one crisis after another." He may well have been speaking of the often-existential series of crises of governance in English football over the past four decades; that has often been characterised by repeated instances of financial collapse, unsuitable ownership, a laissez faire attitude to internal controls, and inadequate oversight by the professional sport’s stakeholders. 

The 2021 'Fan Led Review of Football Governance' report concluded that self regulation had failed to adequately safeguard clubs, fans, and local communities It recommended the creation of an independent statutory regulator, which ultimately came into being last year. Although the IFR is not a safeguarding body in the traditional child welfare sense, safeguarding and due diligence are embedded across its regulatory functions. These concepts are operationalised through ownership scrutiny, licensing conditions, governance oversight, and investigatory powers that collectively aim to prevent financial harm, misconduct, and systemic failure.

The Football Governance Act 2025 defines the IFR’s three primary objectives as:

1. To protect and promote the financial soundness of regulated clubs (“the club financial soundness objective”)
2. To protect and promote the financial resilience of English football (“the systemic financial resilience objective”)
3. To safeguard the heritage of English football (“the heritage objective”)

While “safeguarding” is not confined to a single statutory provision, it operates as a cross cutting principle. The Act further requires the IFR to adhere to regulatory principles emphasising a proportionate, constructive, transparent approach to due diligence processes and risk based regulation.

The IFR’s Owners, Directors and Senior Executives (ODSE) regime replaces and substantially strengthens the historic “Fit and Proper Persons Test” operated by football authorities. The ODSE regime applies to all clubs across the top five tiers of English men’s football and extends scrutiny beyond owners and directors to senior executives and “other key decision makers” exercising material influence at the club.

Under the ODSE regime, the IFR has stated it will conduct due diligence across several dimensions:

1. Integrity and honesty, including consideration of criminal convictions, regulatory breaches, and adverse findings domestically and internationally
2. Financial soundness, assessing the source of funds, financial capacity to acquire and sustain a club, and exposure to illicit finance
3. Competence and suitability, including experience and decision making capability in managing football or comparable organisations
4. Intent and strategic approach, particularly where ownership structures or financing models present ‘elevated risk’

The IFR is empowered to engage directly with banks, law enforcement agencies, and international regulators to support these checks. This significantly deepens the level of due diligence available compared to prior league based tests.

All professional clubs will have to hold either a provisional or full operating licence granted by the IFR. Licensing is conditional on compliance with mandatory requirements, including submission of robust financial plans, evidence of appropriate corporate governance structures, and effective ‘supporter’ engagement.  

The concept of the IFR is that this approach to licensing functions as a preventative safeguarding mechanism, enabling the IFR to identify risks before they crystallise into financial distress or cataclysmic failures of governance.

The IFR will also review governance arrangements to ensure clubs have:

1. Clear accountability structures
2. Adequate internal controls
3. Separation of ownership and management functions where appropriate
4. Transparent decision making processes

The risk-based approach taken by the IFR means that poor or non-existent governance is treated as a safeguarding risk, particularly where it increases the likelihood of reckless financial behaviour or conflicts of interest that could harm supporters and creditors. 

Safeguarding within the IFR’s remit includes protecting clubs and the wider pyramid from insolvency and its contagion effects. The regulator can assess financial distributions, monitor compliance with cost controls, and has powers to set discretionary licence conditions where financial risk levels are deemed unacceptable.

The idea being that by requiring forward looking financial planning rather than backward looking compliance alone, the IFR can assist in safeguarding professional clubs from unsustainable spending and debt accumulation.

The IFR’s safeguarding capacity is reinforced by its investigatory tools. It has powers to compel information from clubs and individuals, conduct investigations into suspected breaches, and has emphasised that it will co-operate with domestic and international enforcement bodies. IFR sanctions range from financial penalties and public censure to the forced sale of clubs (via a discreet process involving the appointment of Trustees) and licence revocation in extreme cases.

Again, the reasoning behind the powers is that they will allow the IFR to act decisively where safeguarding failures (in the financial, governance related, or ethical sense) pose a threat to a club’s sustainability.

Finally, safeguarding extends to supporters and local communities. The IFR is tasked with protecting club heritage assets, ensuring fan consultation on key matters, and preventing ownership actions that could irreversibly detach clubs from their communities. In this sense, safeguarding is both predicated on economic and cultural bases. 

The Independent Football Regulator does not operate as a traditional safeguarding authority, yet safeguarding and due diligence are the touchstones to its risk based regulatory model. Through rigorous ownership scrutiny, enhanced licensing, governance oversight, financial regulation, and robust enforcement powers, the IFR will seek to ensure that safeguarding as an institutional protection for clubs, supporters, and the wider football world from mismanagement, misconduct, and systemic risk.

Whether this approach brings a decisive shift towards preventative regulation in English football, embedding safeguarding within the fabric of governance or, as many fear, represents government interference in sport, which is explicitly restricted by UEFA and FIFA rules, blurring the line between state oversight and sporting autonomy remains a matter yet to be fully understood.

For clubs, the new regime brings familiar principles into sharper focus. Sound governance, clear accountability and sustainable financial planning are no longer simply matters of good practice, but integral to operating confidently in a more structured regulatory environment. Used well, the IFR framework offers clubs an opportunity to take stock, strengthen internal arrangements and approach long term decision making with greater clarity. The reality of the new system will reveal itself in due course and, it can be assured, will be forensically reviewed be all those with an interest in the multi-billion-pound business that is English football in the 21st century.