The new owner test guards the front door. The owners already inside are a different question.

On 5 May 2026, the Independent Football Regulator's prospective Owners, Directors and Senior Executives test went live. From that day, no one can become an owner or senior officer of a club in the top five English men's leagues without a statutory suitability determination from the IFR. The regime is real, the powers are real, and on the question it actually answers, who gets in from now on, it is a serious upgrade on what came before. On the question most fans would ask first, which is who is already inside, it does almost nothing yet.

That is the piece, and it is worth saying plainly before anything else: a fan-protection mechanism that applies prospectively, while the existing ownership map of English football sits untouched, is a partial answer to a structural problem. It is better than the answer fans had a month ago. It is not the answer the Football Governance Act 2025 was sold as.

What actually changed on 5 May. The IFR now has 90 days, extendable to 150 in complex cases, to determine whether a prospective owner or senior executive is suitable. The methodology is consciously drawn from the FCA's fit-and-proper regime for financial-sector licence-holders: source of funds, source of wealth, conflicts of interest, governance track record, and, the part that matters most, ultimate beneficial ownership through whatever layers of holding companies, SPVs (special purpose vehicles, used to ringfence an acquisition), and nominee arrangements the buyer has stacked above the English club.^{1 2}

That last point is where the regime has actual teeth. The Premier League's existing Owners' and Directors' Test has been criticised for years for stopping at the UK-registered holding company and not reaching the controller sitting several jurisdictions back. The IFR's stated approach does not stop there. Failure to disclose ultimate beneficial owners is grounds for refusal.²

What did not change. The 5 May commencement activated only the prospective test. Every current owner of every regulated club, Premier League through National League, sits outside this regime until a separate commencement order brings the existing-ODSE review into force. There is no published timetable for that order.¹

The clubs whose ownership history is the reason this Act exists — Bury, Wigan, Derby, the long list of administrations and forced relegations and pension-debt scandals that built the political case for an independent regulator — are not the clubs the prospective test reaches. Their owners, where still in post, are grandfathered in unless and until the existing-ODSE machinery is switched on and the IFR chooses to use it on a specific case.

The deal-chilling argument deserves the steelman. Club lobby groups and the firms that advise on football M&A have argued, reasonably, that a statutory 90-to-150-day gating item introduces real cost into transactions. In a competitive sale process, regulatory uncertainty shifts price and structure. Sellers will price the risk in. Some bidders will walk. English clubs become, on this argument, structurally harder to buy than European equivalents not subject to similar gating.²

That is a real concern, and it is not simply lobby noise. There will be deals that take longer, deals that fall apart in diligence, and deals where the price moves to reflect IFR risk. Anyone who pretends otherwise is not arguing in good faith.

The argument fails, though, on the counterfactual. The case against statutory regulation only works if you believe the prior owner-test regime was functionally adequate. The evidence does not support that belief. Bury collapsed in 2019. Wigan went into administration weeks after a takeover the league had approved. Derby's accounts were a slow-motion disaster the EFL's test did not surface. The friction the new regime introduces is borne by acquirers, advisers, and sellers. The friction the old regime failed to introduce was borne by fans, players, lower-league creditors, and host communities of clubs that should never have been sold to the people who broke them. Both are costs. They are not the same kind of cost, and they do not fall on the same people.

Where the test cannot see. The IFR's powers run to English regulated clubs. They do not, by themselves, reach into multi-club ownership structures where the controlling fund or sovereign vehicle sits outside the English entity. An MCO (multi-club ownership) network with one English node and parent layers in Abu Dhabi, Delaware, or Luxembourg presents the regulator with a visibility problem the Act does not fully solve. The IFR can demand documentation. Whether a sovereign wealth vehicle complies, in full, with a source-of-wealth interrogation from a UK statutory body, on a 90-day clock — that is an enforcement question the regime has not yet had to answer. The Skadden briefing is candid that information-gathering powers exist; how they bite when the entity holding the information sits offshore is, at 24 days in, untested.²

The women's game is outside the regime. The five regulated leagues are men's. The Women's Super League and Championship clubs fall outside the Act. A prospective owner of a men's Championship club faces a statutory IFR determination. A prospective owner of a WSL club does not. This is not a small gap. New ownership capital is flowing into the women's game at a faster rate, relative to existing valuations, than into most men's-game tiers. The fan-protection mechanism English football has just built does not extend to the supporters of those clubs. The Cutback has been making this point about the women's game's governance asymmetries for some time, and the ODSE regime as enacted reproduces the asymmetry rather than closing it.

What to watch. Three things, in order of how soon they will tell us something real. First, the existing-ODSE commencement order: until it lands, the regime is half a regime. Second, the first IFR refusal, or the first conditional approval that materially changes a deal structure — the case law of how this regulator actually exercises discretion will only exist once it has made decisions. Third, the licensing rules due by 1 July 2026, which will add ongoing conditions to club operation and are the mechanism through which the IFR can reach into existing clubs without waiting for the next sale.¹

I have been thinking about how to weigh this fairly, and I keep landing in the same place. The ODSE prospective test is a real piece of statutory infrastructure, built on a methodology that, if applied with conviction, can surface ownership facts that league-level tests have left buried for two decades. That is a meaningful change. It is also, on 29 May 2026, a change that protects fans of clubs that have not yet been sold, from owners who have not yet bought them. The fans of clubs already owned by people the regime would refuse, if it ever got the chance, are still waiting.

Footnotes

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