The Athletic.

Hello, I'm Mark Chairman, welcome to the Business of Sport podcast on The Athletic.

As ever, we're joined by much later, a football news reporter at The Athletic.

So last week, the UK government announced a nine-person panel for its fan-led

review of English football. The panel aims to canvas fans' views on ownership, governance and

financial flows within the game. We're joined by Tracy Crouch, a former sports minister for the

British government, and she is currently the elected member of Parliament for Chatham and

Ailsford in the south-east of England. Well, Tracy, thank you very much for doing this.

I suppose the first thing is, how has the panel been made up and put together?

It was a combination of suggestions from me and from others as to who I thought would be good in terms of supporting

me as we go through this process. The panel are the experts in various different parts of

the ecosystem in football. We are all fans, but the process is the fan-led bit, not the panel.

When you talk about the process, before you've even had your first proper meeting,

how long do you expect the process to last? Well, I've been asked to put an interim report out

by the beginning of the summer recess, which is the end of July, and then final report in October.

So it's not going to take very long. Is that the right amount of time?

I do think so, in part because I think there's a real desire and an appetite for a great

deal of work to be done and recommendations to be made as soon as possible. Fans and everybody

involved in football doesn't want this to be long and pushed into long grass and everything

else. But let's be clear, I've got a commitment from both the Prime Minister and the Secretary of

State saying that if radical changes need to be made and legislation is going to be done,

then it will happen. So let's, you know, jump on that and make sure we take advantage of it.

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