Whose ‘Absolute Power’? The Regulator That Sanctions Owners, Not Clubs

Alastair Campbell's question on The Rest Is Football podcast sounded almost harmless: if a club owner simply refuses to comply with the regulator's order, what happens then? David Kogan's answer — 'absolute power' — became the headline within hours. Two words, one narrow legal explanation, and then a week of coverage. Lower down in the same report, Kogan himself concedes the regulator cannot deduct points from a club, and cannot block a state-backed takeover merely because of its origin. Manchester City's 114-charge case is now under appeal, and the outcome of that appeal will determine when and how the regulator uses its heaviest weapon. Sitting in Barishal, filling dates into my governance tracking sheet, the old line came back: the number was clean; the match refused to be. Kogan is not a new character, and 'absolute power' is not an off-the-cuff remark. He chairs the Independent Football Regulator, established in July 2026 — a newborn body with a two-pillar mandate: club financial sustainability, and the conduct of owners and senior directors. Choosing a football podcast rather than a legal or financial outlet is itself a communication decision. It reaches fans directly, bypassing specialist press. The presence of Gary Lineker and Campbell is not incidental — a former political communications director is well placed to probe exactly where a power claim might buckle. Kogan is careful, procedural, and simultaneously promotional. All three at once makes the analyst's job harder. Note the article's architecture. The headline is about power, but the most consequential fact — a proposal to more than double Premier League money flowing to the lower leagues — sits in paragraph eighteen. That is journalism's natural gravity: the most quotable line at the top, the most important information at the bottom. My job is to invert it. Start by separating the two sanction toolkits, because the entire story rests there. The Premier League holds club-level weapons: fines, points deductions, 'or whatever it may be'. The IFR holds individual-level weapons: removing an owner, director or executive; conduct-based intervention. In Kogan's own framing, the regulator can force an owner to step away from a club; it cannot deduct a club's points. Everton and Nottingham Forest were docked points in 2026–24 — that is the club-level precedent. The new regulator deliberately avoided that model, because points deductions punish the fans most. For an institution that is months old, this is its smartest structural choice. The design carries a cost. Individual-focused sanctions mean the regulator cannot touch debt structures directly — only the conduct of the people who built them. And that is exactly where Kogan's own remarks fracture. He flags two concerns: league-wide agent fees 'over half a billion pounds', and inter-club transfer debt in the 'billions', 'rising dramatically'. Both are genuine systemic risk indicators. Neither falls inside the IFR's direct remit. Agent fee regulation sits with the FA and FIFA; inter-club debt is a contractual structure, not personal conduct. Be careful with the agent-fee number, because language and accounting have merged here. The FA publishes an annual intermediary-fee table, and the Premier League aggregate has sat in the £400m–£500m+ range in recent seasons — the exact figure should be verified against the current FA publication. But Kogan's framing — that the money would be better 'spent on players' — is a value judgement, not financial analysis. Agent fees are already part of the cost of acquiring player services; the claim that the money does not reach players is economically imprecise and rhetorically effective. The transfer-debt figure matters more, and the report underweights it. Inter-club debt represents deferred payment obligations — clubs buying in instalments. A rising aggregate means clubs are increasingly leveraged against future revenue. That is a classic liquidity warning, and precisely the exposure a financial regulator is built to monitor. The complication: the risk is not evenly spread. The largest deferred obligations usually sit with the biggest spenders. The report does not say which clubs carry how much — and that gap is the real analytical centre. Set beside it the redistribution story. The Premier League is reportedly discussing more than doubling solidarity payments to the lower leagues, while proposals exist to reduce parachute payments. On first read both look like sustainability measures. The second is not. Cutting parachute payments while raising Championship funding is a competitive-balance intervention. Relegated clubs arrive in the Championship with a financial advantage that makes promotion close to a formality; narrowing that distortion is a sporting objective, not a solvency one. And Kogan's phrasing — the Premier League is 'now talking about' it — is the language of an ongoing negotiation, not a settled deal. The biggest legal admission comes on state ownership. Kogan states plainly that the legislation does not allow the regulator to block something 'just because it's a Norwegian sovereign fund'. Ownership tests are conduct-based, not origin-based. Since Newcastle United's PIF takeover in 2026, the political demand to 'stop state money' has only grown — and this legal limit turns that demand into a political time bomb. The regulator cannot deliver the outcome most demanded of it. Here is my second objection, and it is about method rather than statistics. 'Absolute power' is not a legal term. No regulator in a common-law jurisdiction holds truly absolute power; judicial review is always available. The headline generalises a narrow answer to a specific question — what happens if an owner refuses — into a claim about overall authority. I have seen this pattern before. In 2026, charting the Bangladesh–Afghanistan AFC Asian Cup qualifier from a Dhaka desk, I logged 14 Bangladesh shots for 0.87 xG against Afghanistan's 1.12 xG — and Bangladesh scored from a 0.08 xG chance. That night taught me that numbers do not lie, but my trust in them was incomplete. I rebuilt the model after the stadium went quiet: the empty-stadium Revierderby of 2026, Dortmund covering 113.2 km to Schalke's 107.8 km, Dortmund's PPDA at 7.1, and home win rates falling from 43.2% pre-lockdown to 33.3% after. The lesson repeats: a benchmark carries its birthplace. Importing European FFP logic into a new statutory regime runs the same trap — the principle is familiar, the jurisdiction is not. My third objection concerns sourcing. The report is a single-source interview. Every substantive claim traces to one person; there is no Premier League response, no Manchester City response, no EFL position. The 114-breach figure is attributed to 'Verdict/Premier League' without a link to the actual verdict. This is not a question about Kogan's honesty — the quotes are likely accurate, since podcasts are recorded. It is a question about the status of his legal interpretation, which is his own and may be contested. Then there is the sequencing problem, which I consider the largest risk. The regulator has explicitly committed to waiting for the appeal; in Kogan's words, pre-empting it would be 'a colossal mistake'. Procedurally correct, strategically protective — nobody can accuse it of prejudging. But it means the regulator's most consequential decision is deferred indefinitely. 'We will have to decide whether we're going to mount our own investigation' — that sentence confirms the strongest tool remains unused and undecided. A double-jeopardy scenario follows: if the appeal fails, Premier League sanctions apply, and the regulator may then open a separate process against individuals. The sequencing logic is sound, but the regulator has not committed to it — and that uncertainty keeps Manchester City at the centre of English football governance. Overall I rate the risk medium-to-high, and the reason is institutional rather than sporting. English football now has two parallel regulators — the Premier League's PSR regime and the IFR — with different sanction toolkits, partially overlapping jurisdiction, and no published rule of precedence. Each individual risk is medium; the aggregate complexity is high. So I split 'absolute power' in two: power over people — real, legal, significant; power over outcomes — limited, conditional, judicially reviewable. The first awaits its first genuine enforcement action. The second is already bounded by Kogan's own sentences. Watch three signals over the next four to six months, and all three sit off the pitch. First, the Manchester City appeal verdict — date unknown, yet the key variable for the regulator's next move. Second, publication of the ownership and director test criteria — without the criteria, 'absolute power' stays operationally unverifiable. Third, the outcome of the Premier League–EFL redistribution talks — potentially the largest structural financial intervention in English football since the Premier League's formation in 2026. Every transfer rumour is a variable waiting for a timestamp; here too — the claim exists, the date does not. The question is no longer how much power the regulator holds. It is this: if an institution publicly diagnoses diseases outside its own remit — agent fees, transfer debt, redistribution — and cannot treat them, who carries the weight of the expectations it has accumulated? The next time English football hears 'absolute power', the right question is whose power, over whom, and where is the paperwork.