Transparency rules on ownership and related parties are closing loopholes that football's ownership structures were built around. UEFA requires clubs entering its competitions to disclose ultimate beneficial owners, and since 2007 European football has operated a club ownership register maintained by UEFA covering top-division clubs across its member associations. In England, the Football Governance Act 2025 — which received Royal Assent in July 2025 after years of debate prompted by fan-led reviews of football governance — creates an independent football regulator with statutory power to license professional clubs, test owners and directors, and demand ownership information that previously sat offshore (gov.uk, 2025). Together these regimes attack the same weakness: deals and owners that no single authority could see.
Which loopholes are being closed?
Four patterns dominated the opaque era. First, hidden ownership: stakes held through chains of holding companies in low-disclosure jurisdictions, making the identity of the real decision-maker unverifiable. Second, related-party transactions: sponsorship, player sales and service contracts with companies linked to a club's own owners, priced above market to inflate revenue for regulatory purposes. Third, multi-club ownership: one investor controlling stakes in several clubs, creating fixture and transfer conflicts — a club's Champions League rival effectively owned by the same party. Fourth, subsidy disguises: owner funding recorded as commercial income. Transparency rules target each pattern with disclosure plus valuation tests rather than blanket prohibition.
How do related-party rules work in practice?
UEFA's club licensing framework requires clubs to identify entities with relationships to their owners and to submit related-party agreements for assessment against fair market value, with adjustments made to revenue when deals are found inflated. The same framework includes integrity rules for multi-club ownership: clubs with common ownership face restrictions on entering the same UEFA competition, and the organisation has required structural changes — sales of stakes or control of player registration — before admitting clubs under shared ownership. Premier League rules moved the same direction following the 2021-22 amendment cycle that tightened the definition of related parties after scrutiny of sponsorship deals, requiring owners to declare interests extending well beyond direct control.
What does the English regulator add?
The Football Governance Act 2025 gives the new regulator powers the leagues lacked: a statutory licensing system for men's professional football in England, an enhanced owners' and directors' test applied at acquisition, ongoing financial monitoring with power to require information, and enforcement tools including fines. Its test operates in addition to league tests rather than replacing them, and its remit was deliberately written around financial sustainability and systemic resilience — protecting clubs from failure through unsustainable ownership rather than policing competitiveness. The regulatory design draws on the fan-led review conducted under government auspices earlier in the 2020s, which documented club insolvencies and governance failures across the pyramid.
How do these regimes interact across borders?
Ownership opacity was always cross-border, so the response is layered:
- UEFA level — beneficial-owner disclosure, related-party valuation and multi-club integrity rules for European competition.
- National level — regulators and federations applying owners' tests domestically, now including England's statutory regulator.
- Corporate law level — anti-money-laundering beneficial-ownership registers in the UK and EU, which make hiding behind nominee structures harder for anyone seeking visibility in regulated football.
The layering matters because each regime sees a different slice. UEFA sees what clubs declare for licensing; national tests see acquisition financing; corporate registers see the entities themselves. A structure invisible to one is often visible to another, and information-sharing provisions in the newer frameworks encourage regulators to compare notes.
What loopholes remain?
Transparency regimes still strain against three habits. Valuation of related-party sponsorships remains an art: fair-market-value benchmarks for niche commercial categories are contested, and clubs can shop for the most favourable comparables. Multi-club structures adapt faster than rules, using minority stakes, investor syndicates and loan arrangements that fall outside strict control tests. And enforcement capacity is finite — a national regulator with dozens of licensed clubs must triance risk, and sophisticated owners can spend more on advisers than regulators can on scrutiny. None of this returns the game to the old opacity; it shifts evasion from being undetectable to being expensive.
Why fans should welcome the paperwork
Every major club failure of the last two decades — administrations, points deductions, extinguished community institutions — traced back to information that supporters, creditors and even leagues discovered too late. Transparency rules do not make clubs well-run; they make bad ownership visible earlier, to regulators, counterparties and fans. Closing the loopholes of hidden control and inflated related-party income is, in that sense, the least glamorous and most consequential reform in modern football governance.
For more context, read How the Premier League's new spending cap actually works.
For more context, read uefa sustainability.
For more context, read Why finance rules have rewritten clubs' transfer strategies.