New regulator could remove 'rogue' owners faster, says Fair Game

MANCHESTER, March 25 : The incoming Independent Football Regulator (IFR) could speed up the removal of "rogue" owners from English clubs and prevent the kind of financial turmoil currently afflicting Sheffield Wednesday, according to campaign group Fair Game.

Fans of second-tier Wednesday resorted to mass boycotts of home games to force out owner Dejphon Chansiri after the club's finances reached crisis point last summer.

Wednesday were subsequently docked 12 points after Chansiri eventually placed the club in administration in October and another six for various financial breaches, resulting in the earliest ever relegation from the second-tier Championship.

Chansiri, who led a Thai consortium to buy the club in 2015 and invested heavily in the early years of his ownership in a bid to reach the Premier League, was subsequently prohibited from being an owner or director of any English Football League (EFL) club for three years.

Niall Couper, CEO of Fair Game - an independent campaign group and think tank dedicated to reforming the governance of English football - believes that had the IFR already been in place, Wednesday's situation would not have become so dire.

'START LOOKING AT RETRO-FITTING'

"One of the big things from a Fair Game perspective is you have to start looking at retro-fitting," he told Reuters at the Fair Game conference at Manchester's National Football Museum on Wednesday.

"At the moment we're talking about new owners coming in and that's where the remit is. The key is that the previous rules (on club ownership) were not fit for purpose.

"The hope is the new system will bring in much stronger rules and we can say 'let's start looking under the bonnet of these clubs' and see how clean our national game is.

"The