EFL chair hopeful regulator tests could help avoid protests like Sheffield Wednesday and Reading

Ahead of the forthcoming publication of the Football Governance Bill in Parliament this week Parry fielded questions from journalists on what the Bill would mean for English football clubs going forward, and what sort of role a regulator could have in helping the sustainability of them in the future.

Fans at teams such as Wednesday and Reading have taken it upon themselves to protest against their current owners, Dejphon Chansiri and Dai Yongge, amid concerns about their respective clubs, and Parry thinks that the chain of events leading to those sorts of events can be evaded if all goes to plan.

“Yes, and I think that’s in two respects,” he told The Star when asked about avoiding protests. “The first is that the regulator clearly is going to have an input in the owners and directors tests. We think our current tests are pretty robust, they’ve definitely improved over the years, but the regulator will have greater statutory powers, such as criminal prosecutions for people who make false declarations etc. So the tests will be sharper.

“But I think the more important thing is that, if we get a fairer redistribution of revenues, that is the absolute key. The government has talked about Bury and Macclesfield – we tend to talk just as much about Derby, Reading, Bolton, Wigan. The biggest challenges, the biggest inequities, tend to come in the Championship, and they flow from the need for clubs to try and compete with the parachute clubs.

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“So you have parachute clubs receiving £50-odd million with wage bills of £60, £70, £80 million, and all the other clubs are receiving £10 million in central funding, losing £15 million a year and trying to compete with wage bills of £30 million or less – it’s no surprise that in each of the last six years two of the promoted clubs out of three have been parachute clubs. That’s where the major tension arises, and if you look at what happened with Wigan and Derby, and with Reading, it’s not that owners came in with bad intentions or were bad owners – lots of money has gone into the clubs chasing the dream – but it gets to the point where owners either can’t continue funding or they don’t want to. And that’s what leaves the clubs high and dry.”

Parry also went on to explain how the regulator would be able to intervene should somebody previously deemed ‘fit and proper’ no longer fit that description, explaining his point of view that better redistribution of funds would also help the cause.

He went on to say, “I think what the regulator will do, which we’ve never been able to do, is require guarantees, some bonds and assurances that that funding will be in place going forwards, and that they won’t be able to turn the tap off overnight. So the big issue for me from a fan point of view is not just better consultation, or the badges and colours – important though they are – it’s that every fan wants to know that their club is financially stable and will exist in the long term. That’s where the big benefit comes…

“The other thing that the regulator is going to do is not just do one-off tests, but to actually do the tests periodically to make sure that people are still fit and proper, and to make sure that they’re honouring their commitments and putting in the funding they promised to put in. And if they don’t then they’ll have the ability to tell them to divest and put in trustees to run the club in the meantime. So they will definitely have powers throughout the process that we don’t currently have.

“If we get fairer distribution and reduce the dependence on owner funding and people overspending, then it will be a really holistic approach to making clubs more sustainable longer term.”