🚨BREAKING :Gary Neville attacks Premier League after threat of barring Nottingham Forest

Gary Neville has accused the Premier League of behaving like “bullies” ahead of the Football Governance Bill, which sees the creation of an independent football regulator under a new Labor government.

   Support for the creation of an independent regulator began in the wake of the European Super League farce in 2021. The recently ousted Conservative government presented the plans, but since coming to power Labor has promoted the idea, claiming it would “protect” football clubs.  by “ensuring their financial sustainability”.    If passed by Parliament, the bill will give the regulator safeguarding powers to intervene in football if necessary.

   Neville remains a staunch advocate and believes its introduction would protect the interests of English football fans across the pyramid, reports our sister title the Manchester Evening News.    The Premier League, on the other hand, was dubious, with the organisation’s chief executive Richard Masters warning it would be a “risk”.

   So now the Sky Sports pundit has berated the Premier League for this hesitancy in PA commentary at the Labor Party conference.    He remarked: “We’ve got a Premier League that’s entitled, they feel they’re entitled. I won’t use the word greedy, I just have.

   “They’re selfish and I can’t understand that way of thinking. It’s almost like they’re the big brothers sitting there handing out scraps to the little brothers at the table.

   “That’s not what you do when you’re in a family. Their mentality is so violent. Their mentality is that they think they can influence the regulator once the regulator is in place and on the other side they can get a better deal for the regulator. And that,  what they’re using is their soft power and their influence to try to create scare stories and scares like we had a few weeks ago.”

   Amid potential approval from the independent regulator, there have been suggestions that clubs such as Nottingham Forest or Neville’s former Manchester United could be banned from future UEFA competitions because of the organisation’s policy against state interference.    At the same event, Labour’s Minister for Culture, Media and Sport Lisa Nandy called the idea “ridiculous”.

   Nandy also assured that the government would not take a “heavy-handed” approach, stressing the desire to address the lack of sustainability in parts of the football pyramid.

   The Premier League has hit back at Neville’s accusations that he is behaving like a “bully”, saying discussions are currently underway with the new government about football’s regulator.    They suggested that “lightly targeted and proportionate legislation can be effective”, citing comments from the Masters chief executive at the end of last season.

   He warned: “My main concern is that the Bill will reduce our competitiveness and weaken the incredible appeal of the English game. Our competition is the most watched and commercially successful football league in the world. Thanks to this success, Premier League clubs are able to give 1 every three years,  £6 billion – 16 per cent of our total revenue – to the wider game, helping it become the envy of the world.

   “There is a risk that the regulation will undermine the global success of the Premier League and thereby harm the goose that lays the golden egg of English football.”

   Referring to Europe’s other domestic football leagues, he added: “These competitors enjoy the possibility that the Premier League is uniquely limited. Empires rise and fall and while I am confident about the league’s immediate future, it would be a mistake to be complacent if our place is  the most popular league in the world.

   “The risk is to introduce uncertainty and bureaucracy into an industry that is heavily dependent on a relatively small circle of investors who often view club ownership as a passion project and business.  As vibrant as the sport is today, it would be so easy to divert our world-leading investment elsewhere Before it even arrived, the promise of regulatory intervention in the football economy changed the incentives for new voluntary regulation.

   “We have spent the last year in discussions with the EFL about an even more generous financial settlement. But these talks have only highlighted how destabilizing intervention can be. The government claims its regulator will not interfere on the pitch but by intervening in the carefully calibrated distribution of income and  it upsets the balance of competition, it’s already doing exactly that.”