'Football clubs are the heart of the country - we must protect them from financial ruin'

Last summer the club I've supported all my life, Swindon Town, found itself in a precarious situation.

With just a handful of players, unpaid staff and impending court cases, the future looked bleak.

The club was on the verge of bankruptcy, the players weren't getting paid on time and just three weeks before the start of the new season, they were without a manager, chief executive, a director of football or coaches.

The prospect of Swindon without its football club was unthinkable for many.

The historic club is a pillar of its community.

Thankfully, with just days to go Swindon was saved by Australian businessman Clem Morfuni and the Robins are now thriving in League Two.

The fact that a former Premier League team in Swindon went to the brink of non-existence is frightening.

Why wasn't something done earlier to protect the club?

The signs were pretty ominous but still nothing was done.

It’s why I and many other fans would like to see radical reform in the beautiful game.

And there need to be significant changes to the current ownership model in the English game.

Proposals made by MP Tracey Crouch in a fan-led review could go some way in solving football’s current crisis.

The key recommendations are a creation of independent regulators, a shadow board of fans and the establishment of a new fit and proper owner’s test.

If these things all became a reality, the demise of Bury FC in 2019, which left a sore taste in the mouths of many football fans, could have been avoided.

It was a club with a 125-year history, but after it couldn’t afford to pay its debts, it was expelled from the English Football League.

Bury would not become a one off but instead a worst-case scenario, as many high-profile clubs found their backs to the