Football regulator's reputation rests on its handling of Manchester City

Thursday 15 October 2026 7:00 am:Wednesday 14 October 2026 5:22 pm The Manchester City case has given the IFR a baptism of fire The Independent Football Regulator has improving English clubs' failing finances in its sights but its treatment of Manchester City is what will likely define it, writes Ed Warner. What word or phrase to you best describes the state of English football?

Would broken, bust or (morally and/or financially) bankrupt fit your bill? Or you could be a free marketeer to the core, happy to luxuriate in the quality of the players and matches available to a global audience every weekend, regardless of the competing teams' finances.

Perhaps then brilliant or beautiful might describe the game as you personally experience it. The now-not-quite-so-new Independent Football Regulator has just published the draft of its inaugural State of the Game report.

Unsurprisingly short on hyperbole - positioned neither at the broken nor beautiful end of the perception spectrum, it being the work of a regulator, after all - the financial facts the report lays out nevertheless speak for themselves. The IFR does, though, allow itself one punchy statement in a suitably hefty font: "English football is underpinned by contradictions.

It is simultaneously the richest, best and most deeply competitive in the world, but it's also standing on the edge of a financial disaster." Dress these facts up however you wish, any reader of the IFR's analysis must surely recognise that football in England relies almost entirely on the assumed willingness of new investors being prepared to bolster or bail out current owners of loss-making clubs. The greater fool theory is writ large across 116 men's professional teams.

Forget their P&Ls; marvel at the intangible asset values instead. It would be easy to dismiss the economics of this industry as nuts, but you could have been saying the same thing for many years.

Yet club valuationscontinue to inflate, fresh buyers emerging - whether tech bros, private equity titans, luvvies, sport stars or local fans made good in business - to validate the rising values. On a club by club basis, the music does occasionally stop, and the last buyers of failing enterprises are then exposed as the greatest fools.

But there is no sign yet of a bursting of the collective bubble. Think any of the many potential investors circling clubs today will be put off by the IFR's report?

Nor, remember, do clubs often disappear, in spite of their precarious finances.