About once a decade, English football, driven by a financial or governance crisis, is subjected to an official report that calls for massive structural change... and then nothing happens.
In the late 1990s, the Labour government commissioned the Football Task Force report, whose recommendations were so watered down it was nearly transparent. In 2011, after blistering criticism from a parliamentary select committee into football governance, Hugh Robertson, then the minister of sport, promised to legislate for change – and singly failed to do so.
Fast forward a decade and here we are again. In May 2021, 12 leading European clubs, six of them English, proposed for a microsecond to break away from their national leagues and create their own transnational competition. Almost instantly doomed, the ‘European Super League’ barely had time to breathe before a huge wave of fan protest and widespread public opprobrium brought about its swift and brutal end.
