The chair of the Independent Football Regulator says he will quit if there is political interference in any future investigation launched into Manchester City.
The club have been found guilty by an independent commission of clearly intending to circumvent Premier League financial rules over a nine-season period.
City have appealed against the verdict, but if it is upheld the IFR could also act, and has the power to force owners to divest from clubs in extreme cases.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham raised eyebrows when he said he would be “really concerned” if City’s Abu Dhabi owners left following the commission verdict, emphasising the potential for this case to have implications for diplomatic and trade relations between the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates.
IFR chair David Kogan was adamant however that he and his body would not stand for any meddling in their work, should they seek to take action against City’s owners in the future.
“We are absolutely bound by one thing, and that one thing is regulating football and regulating football clubs,” he said at the launch of the IFR’s ‘State of the Game’ report in Manchester on Tuesday.
“Our independence is absolute, and my independence personally is absolute. I made it very clear in an interview last year that if we (experience) any form of political interference on the way we operate it is going to result in my resigning from this role, and I stand by that completely.
“Just to be crystal clear, we’ve come under absolutely no political pressure whatsoever on this or any other topic, and I don’t expect to in the future.”
An earlier draft of the Football Governance Bill contained a clause which said the IFR needed to “have regard to the foreign and trade policy objectives” of the UK Government in making suitability assessments, but this was scrapped.
Kogan’s hiring as IFR chair was the subject of an inquiry by the Commissioner for Public Appointments over his historic links to the Labour Party.
While it found rules had been broken by Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy for failing to declare donations she had received from Kogan, the inquiry accepted he was not aware of the deviation from best practice and made no finding about his suitability for the role.
Shadow Culture Minister Louie French has since said of Kogan that a “Labour donor and key crony cannot lead an Independent Football Regulator”.
Kogan said: “I’ve been doing the job properly, and the idea that you would associate that (his history of donations to the Labour Party) with anything to do with the politics of what’s going on at the moment around Manchester City is just frankly ludicrous.
“I’m not in the slightest bit concerned about accusations about my probity. I think it stands up to scrutiny, and you’re more than welcome to scrutinise it.”
The ‘State of the Game’ report highlighted how the Premier League’s administrative costs in fighting legal cases had soared from £45million in 2015-16 to £212m in 2024-25, covering most of the period where the league was fighting its main legal case against City and separate ones against the club related to the league’s associated party transaction (APT) rules.
Kogan said the bill for any future IFR legal case against City would ultimately be paid by the clubs themselves.
“We wouldn’t go into legal action unless we thought we were going to win,” he added.
“Whereas the Government will be cash-flowing us to do stuff – and they absolutely have to do that because we’re not going to go into legal action unless we know we can afford to pay for it – then ultimately, that will be charged back to football as part of the levy mechanism.
“I don’t expect a problem with the Treasury or with DCMS if we’re suddenly facing a substantive legal challenge, assuming we believe that legal challenge is one that we’re prepared to fight and prepared to win.”
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