Labour’s football regulator needs to be shown the red card
Diktats on diversity and sustainability will do nothing to help hard-up fans.

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Ever wondered what steps Millwall FC are taking to get to Net Zero? Are you worried sick about whether Shrewsbury Town are meeting their diversity targets? Do you have concerns about the ‘suitability’ of the 1,200 fans who own Darlington FC to look after their club?
I dare say that even the most obsessive follower of football probably has not. Yet these are the kinds of questions that every English football club may soon have to answer should Labour’s Football Governance Bill, currently working its way through the House of Lords, come into law.
If ever there was a case for a shiver looking for a spine to run up, the UK government’s plan to regulate football is surely it. The Premier League alone employs tens of thousands of people and contributes billions of pounds to the economy. It is attended by millions of fans every year and watched by millions more, at home and abroad. At a time when budgets are stretched, and economic growth is non-existent, why has Labour decided to put its energies into meddling in one of Britain’s few prospering industries?
If you listened to ministers trying to justify the bill, you’d think English football was on its knees. According to culture secretary Lisa Nandy, fans have for too long ‘risked losing their cherished clubs as a result of mismanagement and reckless spending’. But with the exception of League Two club Bury FC, which folded in November 2020, the nation’s football clubs seem like beacons of resilience at a time when every other business is struggling. In fact, if the vast numbers of compulsory liquidations now clogging up UK courts are anything to go by, football clubs should be the very least of Labour’s concerns.
The new national regulator isn’t just interested in clubs’ finances, however. It will have the final say on everything from a club’s team crest to where its home ground is and the colour of its home shirts.
Predictably, with this being a Labour bill, a major focus of the new regulator will be equality, diversity and inclusion. According to Baroness Twycross, who is pushing the bill through the Lords for the government, compliance with these measures is necessary to ‘make clubs more sustainable’ and ensure ‘good corporate decision-making’. Really? Does anyone outside of the Labour Party believe that the long-term future of Doncaster Rovers FC is dependent on mandatory reporting of data on race, gender and sexuality? This seems like yet another excuse to drag woke politics into football, to lecture the supposedly bigoted masses about the pet causes of the elites – as if the relentless ‘rainbow laces’ or Black Lives Matter campaigns were not already enough.
Of course, there is much to lament about the greed of some club owners. With the cost of everything from ticket prices to replica kits soaring, working-class fans are being excluded from the clubs they’ve supported their whole lives. But the bill’s focus on diversity and sustainability shows that this is not who any of this is for. Regulation for regulation’s sake will be a boon for bureaucrats and lawyers, sure, but it won’t bring any benefits for long-suffering supporters.
Labour’s football regulator needs to be booted into the third tier.
Hugo Timms is an intern at spiked.
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