The new Independent Football Regulator (IFR) should empower fans to decide what heritage means to them – and be prepared to confront wealthy speculators who show little regard for local histories.

In case you hadn’t noticed – the 2026 World Cup is underway. It is one of those summers when it is hard to find a pub, street, or indeed any public place without some visual reminder of the tournament. In most countries around the world, and certainly in England, football is the most popular outdoor pastime. Over the last century-and-a-half, it has become particularly important in industrial (and post-industrial) towns where the local football club is often the most visible link back to ways of life that have otherwise disappeared. We spent the last twelve months interviewing fans and non-fans alike in towns across the North of England to try and understand why we invest so much time, energy and emotion into the sport. Our findings suggest football fandom is about much more than the game itself, with implications for how policymakers, including the Government’s new Independent Football Regulator (IFR), should recognise and protect English football’s cultural heritage.

Because football clubs are often the longest-surviving institutions in former industrial towns, the sport has become deeply entangled with their collective sense of history, family and identity. Asked for an image that sums up their relationship with their club, most of the people we spoke to fell into two categories. Many presented cherished images of their families decked out in club colours. However, a significant minority preferred images of their town’s industrial heritage that, at first glance, seemed to have nothing to do with football. The Transporter Bridge (pictured) was particularly popular among Middlesbrough fans.

These images exemplify the intergenerational memories, relationships and connections to place and family that are forged in and through football fandom. As their industries declined, and everyday life was transformed in coal, cotton and steel towns across the country, football stadia provided a space where old solidarities could be kept alive. For Craig, a 60-year-old Middlesbrough supporter:

‘After all the old certainty getting ripped apart in the 80s and the 90s the Boro was always there to give people identity. … You’re with everyone when you come through those gates. You’re as equal as anyone else. And your voice counts the same.’

Gavin, a 40-year-old Blackburn Rovers supporter, likewise told us how his son attends games wearing a cap bearing Rovers’ red rose crest that once belonged to his great-grandfather. His very presence at games is a tribute to the generations who lived and worked in the town during its industrial peak.

The IFR is set to begin operations by the end of the year. Its dual mission, laid out in the 2025 Football Governance Act, is to ensure football clubs are financially sustainable while protecting ‘the heritage of English football.’ The Act specifies that ‘a club’s heritage includes … the club’s home ground, crest, predominant home shirt colours, [and] team name’ and that owners who alter these components of club identity without consulting supporters will be censured. The FGA is silent, however, on the intangible links to the past our participants cared about most.

The Act also says little about potential tensions between heritage protection and its other key mission to ‘protect and promote the systemic financial resilience of English football [and] individual clubs.’ However, the money that has poured into English football since the 1990s has often come with strings attached. Many of our participants told how their club’s identity has been profoundly harmed by the commercialisation of the game. Blackburn Rovers’ wealthy owners have not visited their Ewood Park home in over a decade amidst long-running disputes with local fan groups. Football fandom is inherently intergenerational, but rising prices and prohibitive digital ticketing systems that have made it harder to attend games with friends and family across the country are clear examples where football authorities have prioritised revenue over social capital.

All too often, public bodies overlook the importance of intangible heritage – but the IFR has a real opportunity to break the mould. The concept was little discussed before UNESCO’s 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, defined as ‘attributes of a group or society inherited from past generations, maintained in the present and bestowed for the benefit of future generations … such as folklore, traditions, language, and knowledge.’ This is the stuff football fandom is made of. Their very intangibility makes them difficult – but not impossible – to capture in the necessarily precise language of policymakers. Since 2003, UNESCO has recognised 849 intangible heritage objects across 157 countries and called on Governments to safeguard them in ways that honour the communities that created them.

Communities in the North of England have been badly neglected by politicians who have often seen industrial decline as an unavoidable part of England’s ‘natural’ evolution into a service economy. It is a strange irony that, while the products of our economy have gradually become less tangible, official accounts of working-class history remain fixated on physical objects. For Gavin, the badge on his son’s cap is only important because of the history it represents:

‘When you talk about heritage, it’s about tradition. It’s about the badge. For me it’s about that rose. It’s about Arte et Labore. It’s about family. It’s about that loyalty.’

The towns we visited need investment, secure work and functioning services more than warm words about their past. However, as things stand, there is a risk that the Regulator may overlook the very things that matter most to supporters. Football clubs are among the most valuable – and most coveted – assets many towns have left. Roughly one in five clubs in the English Football League lives hand to mouth, making them easy pickings for buyers with no stake in the local area. A more expansive conception of heritage that lets fans define what is worth keeping would give communities a way to push back.

We believe two steps are necessary to protect the intangible heritage most valued by the supporters who participated in our project. First, the IFR should empower fan groups to define what heritage looks like for their club and encourage them to nominate a broad range of tangible and intangible heritage objects for IFR protection. This bottom-up process would provide a strong indication that the IFR is committed to fan democracy and add much needed depth to the one-size-fits-all conception of heritage in the 2025 Football Governance Act.

Second, the IFR should establish clear procedures for arbitrating between its ‘heritage protection’ and ‘financial sustainability’ missions where conflicts arise. We encourage the IFR to champion grassroots communities against wealthy speculators whose intentions do not match their own and so seize a once-in-a-generation opportunity to redress the balance between social and financial capital in English football. This could be achieved by enabling supporters to raise formal objections where they feel owners’ actions pose an unacceptable risk to cherished aspects of their clubs’ identity. Blackburn Rovers supporters incensed at their overseas owners’ decision to bar the Lancashire Telegraph from its property would then have a formal means of repairing a vital link between club and community – one that had endured since the town’s industrial heyday in the late nineteenth century.

Football will reach a worldwide audience this summer, but that is not why a man in Blackburn gets a lump in his throat watching his son pull on a tattered old cap. Attachments to football clubs are more about the local than the global. That is, the families, industries, and departed ways of life that brought England’s football culture into being. Their descendants should be given more control over how that history is protected in the future.