“No other country in the world has a state-sanctioned regulatory body of this kind – and the international football authorities are rightly suspicious of government interference in football. The promoters of the bill have already had to back down on one proposal, to make the regulator pay obeisance to the foreign policy of the government of the day.

The new regulator will only have jurisdiction over the English league system. Football in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland can carry on as before even though, albeit on a lesser scale, they suffer from exactly the same overspending habit which afflicts English clubs. Scotland in particular has seen a far worse case of financial collapse than Bury: in 2012, one of the Scottish ‘big two’, Rangers, went into administration and the reformed club had to be placed in the fourth tier of Scottish football.“