The chair of the Independent Football Regulator, David Kogan, has said he will resign if he comes under any political pressure over how the regulator responds to Manchester City being found guilty of breaching Premier League financial rules over a nine-year period, insisting that his independence is absolute.
Kogan could remove City’s owner, Abu Dhabi United Group, should the verdict of an independent commission be upheld at the end of an ongoing appeal process. Concern had been raised that the proximity of City’s ownership to Abu Dhabi’s rulers could trigger a political intervention by the UK government, and with it an immediate test of the new regulator’s powers.
Those concerns were rebuffed by Kogan. “Our independence is absolute and my independence personally is absolute,” he said. “I [have] made it very clear … any form of political interference on the way we operate is going to result in my resigning from this role, and I stand by that completely. And, just to be crystal clear, we’ve come under absolutely no political pressure whatsoever on this or any other topic.”
Kogan was speaking at the launch of the long-awaited State of the Game report, a document setting out the financial challenges facing the English football pyramid. The City case has cast a huge shadow over proceedings as the regulator prepares to introduce a new licensing regime for clubs later this season. “We have powers within the legislation that allow us to review not only owners and directors and senior executives, but also whether those owners are fit and proper people to run clubs going forward,” Kogan said, describing how the regulator might intervene.
“That process is reliant on us having very detailed knowledge and information, which requires a certain amount of investigation. Then we would take judgments based on the legal advice that we then receive.” Should a club owner ultimately be found to have failed a “fitness” test related to “integrity, honesty and financial soundness”, the regulator could force the club to be sold. “We deal with issues of this type much more frequently than you might realise because we are constantly looking at clubs,” Kogan said. He added that if any decision by the regulator became the subject of legal action, clubs would be asked to foot the bill through a funding levy.
The report found that the highest earning top-flight club currently earns 605 times the revenue of the lowest earning National League club. Spending has increased at all levels of the game, with 94% of the 116 clubs under the regulator’s regime posting a financial loss in 2025-26. In one particularly eye-catching statistic, the report established that 11 Football League clubs recorded costs that exceeded their income even once player wages had been stripped out.
Kogan argued that a number of external factors outside the regulator’s purview are affecting the game, including the expansion of the club calendar, the regulation of players’ agents and the recent rise in interest rates. He argued, however, that one key measure – the agreement of a redistribution deal between the Premier League and EFL – could unlock change immediately. He said parachute payments to clubs relegated from the Premier League have had a “distortive effect that’s grown over the years”, and made clear that if a deal was done that reduced parachute payments but increased the amount going to all clubs then “that will go some way towards looking at the distorted effect”. Once that money was distributed, he said, “you’re going to see a softening effect going through down the 116 clubs”, meaning the top five men’s divisions.
The Premier League welcomed the publication of the report, arguing: “It recognises what English football has built – the world’s most popular league, the leading second tier, and a pyramid of unmatched depth.” The league said a recent offer of financial redistribution to the EFL – understood to amount to £320m per season – “meets the objectives the IFR has set out in its report”, and that it “remains committed to concluding a long-term partnership with the EFL that is fair, generous and balances the interests of all clubs”.
The EFL said the report’s findings “reinforce the EFL’s longstanding position that English football generates sufficient revenue to sustain both a successful Premier League and a thriving pyramid”, adding that it remained “committed to working constructively with the Premier League and the regulator to secure a financial settlement in the interests of the whole game”. Meanwhile, the secretary of state for culture, media and sport, Lisa Nandy, said the stark figures covered in the report had “blown the doors off the game”, and urged football authorities to “consider these findings for the good of the game, for the fans, and for the communities of which they are so often the bedrock”.