How is the EFL promising to learn lessons after the expulsion of Bury?

The EFL’s executive chair, Debbie Jevans, who said she is devastated by having to expel the club, has committed to preventing such a crisis ever happening again, saying on Wednesday: “I absolutely want this to be the last time.”

Her main focus, she said, will be to encourage clubs to support further measures protecting against overspending, which was the immediate cause of the insolvencies at Bury and Bolton. Jevans said she personally would support salary caps.

More generally, the EFL has an ongoing review of its governance, and Jevans has said that Bury’s collapse will inject into that a greater focus on the reforms needed – stressing that it is the clubs that must agree and vote through any rule changes.

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Should the ‘fit and proper persons test’ be strengthened?

The EFL knows it must and its staff, board and executives will be painfully aware of the disdain supporters have for something widely seen as far too cursory. No longer even called the “fit and proper persons test” but the more neutral “owners and directors test” it allows anybody to be a director or 30% owner as long as they do not, essentially, have an unspent conviction for dishonesty and are not disqualified as a director or football official.

An expansion of these rules was agreed last summer, after the Blackpool owner Owen Oyston was found by the High Court to have “illegitimately stripped” the club of £26.77m. That still did not disqualify him under the current owners and directors test. The new rule would in principle allow the EFL to take “direct action” for: “A very serious single act or persistent serious acts – where the individual’s conduct is clearly damaging to the standing and reputation of the wider profession and the game of football.”

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However, the detail of this rule and how it will work in practice has still not been worked out and passed by the clubs. Further work must now be done to try to equate the “test” with a supporter’s idea of what “fit and proper” should mean in practice. The Bury North MP, James Frith, who is calling for independent regulation of football, has said there should be a pre-qualification process, which would scrutinise a potential owner’s funding, intentions, business record and knowledge, before they are allowed to buy a club.

The Football Supporters’ Association, which is calling for an independent body under the remit of the Football Association to carry out these regulatory roles, has recommended a similarly strengthened process for potential owners and directors.

Proof of funding

This process went catastrophically wrong over the £1 takeover of Bury by Steve Dale in December, and that was the principal reason ultimately for the club’s expulsion. The EFL rules state that a prospective owner must show the league he has the necessary money, and the legitimate source of that money, to fund the takeover and club. This should take place before a takeover and the EFL has blocked takeovers where it is not satisfied the funding is there.

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Dale, however, bought the club from Stewart Day without going through that process. The rules state that it should happen at the latest 10 days after a takeover – which is itself a flaw; funding should always be proven before anybody is allowed to take over a club. Once Dale was in control, he never satisfied the EFL that he could pay its debts or fund it for the season. Yet the EFL could not step in and undo his takeover and instead the club itself has been expelled and supporters left distraught.

What about Player Wages Cost Controls?

This is another area of the EFL’s rules that Bury’s failure has exposed as inadequate. Jevans is proposing a salary cap to replace it, rightly identifying excessive spending as the core reason for clubs’ crises. The League One and Two “salary cost management protocol” is fundamentally flawed because the clubs designed it to allow owners’ money to subsidise wages, as long as it is invested in shares, not loans. Bury’s example showed that once an owner like Day suffered his own financial difficulties and was unable to pour more money in, the wage bill was immediately unpayable. Ruin followed within months.