Will a regulator help or hinder the beautiful game?

Straight-talking, common sense from the front line of management

QI understand that the Government is about to establish a football regulator. With regulators of all kinds adding layers of bureaucracy to the business world, in your experience do you think this will help or hinder the beautiful game?

AStunned by this news, I searched the internet to discover how many government regulators already exist. I was staggered to find there are so many – the list seemed to fill my computer. Initialisms and acronyms such as Ofsted, H&SE, Ofcom, Ofgem, FCA and PRA are running our lives. Football already has the help of a minister of sport, four UK sports councils and government guidelines on risk management, equality and, of course, health and safety.

Cricket, rugby union, tennis, cycling and many other sports must be thanking their lucky stars that they are being spared this new wave of government interference, but once Westminster has a foot in the door who knows where this will end. Governance is a growing disease that, once established, seems to spread everywhere. So watch out followers of darts, marbles and tiddlywinks, your days of freedom may be numbered.

The proposal followed a controversial bid by 12 clubs, including six from England, to establish a European Super League in 2021, but even so I’m not sure why football needs this extra tier to keep its life in order.

More than any other sport, from archery to weightlifting, there are already enough bodies that tell football clubs what to do, including Fifa, Uefa, the FA, the Premiership, Championship and non-league organisations. In addition, every club from Arsenal down to AFC Telford United is run by a main board and its own commercial management team.

There is little evidence that more bureaucracy brings better results, but everyone is on the road to greater regulation. I shouldn’t be surprised that, over the last 10 years, my golf club has created such a wide web of committees that just about every member there seems to serve on at least one of them.

The Government intends to improve football finances, avoid insolvencies and produce a better deal for the fans. The new regulator hopes to improve the game by introducing guidelines, producing processes and insisting on a bit of box ticking – with football managers filling in forms when they should be working on the training ground.

I hope this new government body will do less damage than the Pensions Regulator, set up after Robert Maxwell raided the Mirror Group pension scheme. Maxwell brought the pensions industry to its knees; the regulator has all but finished it off.

Regulators are able to tell people what they can and cannot do. As a result, pension fund trustees are judged by how well they stick to the regulations, rather than whether they provide a great result for members, who rely on their scheme’s good financial performance to fund retirement.

Ever since the Pensions Regulator started in 2005 we at Timpson have consistently ignored its advice, sticking, instead, to instinct and common sense. During the 2008 financial crisis, the regulator wanted schemes like ours to de-risk by swapping equities for gilts – consequently locking in our losses.

My grandfather developed a healthy company pension scheme by investing in equities and I saw no reason to do any different.

Indeed, on a couple of occasions during the last few years, when the FTSE Index dived, we put extra company contributions in the scheme to invest in more equities near the bottom of the market. Despite ignoring the rules, this faith in long-term equity growth paid off, especially when Kwasi Kwarteng delivered his mini-budget. At the start of his speech our fund had a significant surplus, when he sat down it was 10pc bigger – bonds were not the place to be.

But at long last we are following the regulator’s guidance by exchanging equities for bonds to lock in our surplus, in readiness to be sold off to an insurance company.

Back to football. Despite a regular view from prime seats in the directors’ box, I bet the Government’s football regulator will find it tough to tackle some of the main issues raised by fans. Policymaking bureaucrats won’t come up with an easy answer to unpopular referees, boring 0-0 draws and the advantage gained by clubs that can afford to pay more than £500,000 a week for a star striker.

I have some solutions. To control rogue referees, give club managers a black card (only to be used once a season), to substitute the referee. Make games more competitive by varying the width of the goals, according to the value of the players on the pitch. And, a great suggestion given to me by Jeremy Clarkson: if the score is 0-0 at half time, have two balls in play for the rest of the game.