Fit & Proper

Regulatory compliance for English football clubs

The Independent Football Regulator is licensing your club. We get you through it.

A specialist consultancy for clubs facing licensing under the Football Governance Act 2025, with published prices and its own platform.

See services and pricing

The provisional licence application window closes on 26 February 2027.

The window opens on 2 November 2026 and closes on 26 February 2027. Licences take effect on 1 June 2027. 116 clubs in the top five tiers need one to compete from 2027/28.

Free check

The owners and officers regime has been live since 5 May 2026, so parts of this are already running.

Start with a free check

The IFR readiness check: fourteen questions, scored instantly in your browser with statutory citations. No email address, no sign-up. The first question is below.

Could the club produce a financial plan today setting out its funding and the source of that funding, expected revenues and expenses, and a financial risk assessment covering the remainder of this year and the two following years?

These are the contents the statute itself specifies for the financial plans condition, and the licence application's business plan is built from the same material.

The thirteen remaining questions continue on the tool page, scored in your browser. There is also a shorter ownership and control check.

Three stages, with the prices attached

Our prices are published here. The assessment is a fixed fee agreed before any work starts; implementation and the retainer are quoted from scope, with typical figures below. You will not need a phone call to find out the order of the numbers. Figures exclude VAT and apply to engagements agreed before 30 June 2027.

Readiness assessment

£3,000 to £5,000fixed fee

A written assessment of your club against every requirement of the Act and the IFR's rules, with a prioritised remediation plan. An assessment first: the two later stages are scoped from what it finds.

For clubs in League One, League Two and the National League; Premier League, Championship and group structures are quoted separately. The fee is credited in full against implementation begun within six months.

Implementation

Project feescoped from the assessment

We build what the assessment found missing: governance structures, ownership documentation, the financial plan, fan consultation arrangements. Most implementations for the divisions the assessment covers land between £10,000 and £20,000; the assessment tells you where yours sits before you commit.

Retained support

£6,000from · a year

The Schedule Five platform, the four-report annual cycle, and advice whenever a question lands on your desk.

The full service ladder

What non-compliance costs

Schedule 9 of the Act sets out what the regulator may do about an infringement, and in what order.

  • You play on, but it is on the record

    The regulator's first responses do not stop a club competing. They do land in public, and they cost money.

    • A censure statement, published and naming the club, setting out the requirement breached and the reasons.
    • A skilled person nominated by the regulator, whom the club must cooperate with and give access to its premises, people and information.
    • A financial penalty capped at 10% of total revenue, calculated worldwide and across the group, with a daily rate available on top for a continuing breach.
    Football Governance Act 2025, Schedule 9, paras 4, 5 and 6.

  • You do not get on the pitch

    Suspension or revocation of the operating licence. This is not the regulator's opening move: it needs an aggravating condition, such as an intentional and persistent infringement once the earlier stages are exhausted, or one that jeopardises the regulator's objectives. One detail is pure football: where the decision lands mid-season, it cannot take effect before the season ends.

    Football Governance Act 2025, Schedule 9, paras 8 and 9, including para 9(3).

Schedule Five

A consultancy with software inside

Advice on paper goes stale. Our platform holds the compliance position live, built on the rules as the IFR published them on 1 July 2026 and versioned as they change.

  • Gap analysis against every requirement, each one cited to the Act and the IFR's rules.
  • Ownership analysis under Schedule 1, including indirect chains and joint arrangements.
  • Evidence library with versioning and a full audit trail.
  • Notification log and rules-derived deadlines: the events you record generate the annual declaration, and the dates come from the rules rather than a spreadsheet.
About the platform

Latest analysis

Written for the people at clubs who have to do the work, and checked against the primary sources.

All insights

Who does the work

Fit & Proper was founded by two specialists in UK legal and regulatory compliance, one of them a lawyer, whose careers have been spent on licensing, ownership analysis and reporting to statutory regulators in financial services and healthcare. Both are football obsessives. No adviser anywhere has yet taken a club through an IFR licence, because the first have not been granted; that is also why the assessment is a fixed fee. More about the firm.

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