Is your club ready for IFR licensing?

Understanding your current IFR licensing position is the necessary first step before any compliance work begins.

This free online IFR assessment covers the six criteria the Independent Football Regulator will scrutinise when reviewing your club's operating licence application: financial resilience, ownership integrity and ODSE approval, governance standards, fan engagement, ground safety and infrastructure, and regulatory and legal compliance history. Answer each question honestly based on what your organisation has in place today, not what you intend to build. Your results will give you a clear, immediate view of where you stand and where the priority gaps are.

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Next Steps

Turn your results into a plan

Wherever your club landed, there is a level of support built for it.

Your results show where the gaps are. What you do next depends on how much internal capacity your club already has -- and Lagom Sports Compliance offers three ways to close those gaps, so you only pay for the support your club actually needs.

Review Only

Your club prepares its own application and evidence pack. We carry out a full criterion-by-criterion review, identify gaps, annotate the submission and provide prioritised recommendations before you submit.

Part Support

Your club leads on what it can cover internally. We run a gap analysis, agree which specific workstreams we own, support drafting in specialist areas, and provide a consolidated pre-submission clearance note.

Full Support

We take ownership of the entire licensing project, from readiness assessment and evidence gathering through to document drafting, ODSE alignment, IFR liaison and post-submission support -- led by a named senior consultant throughout.

  • The Independent Football Regulator assesses six core criteria before granting an operating licence: financial resilience, ownership integrity and ODSE approval, governance standards, fan engagement, ground safety and infrastructure, and regulatory and legal compliance history. Each area carries its own evidence requirements, and the IFR expects documented proof of how a club actually operates -- not simply policies that exist on paper.

  • Financial resilience requires clubs to hold audited accounts, meet a minimum revenue threshold appropriate to their competition tier, and produce financial projections alongside a documented financial sustainability plan demonstrating the club can meet its obligations over the full licence period. This is one of the highest-complexity criteria in the IFR's framework, and it is the area most clubs underestimate the evidence burden for.

  • ODSE stands for Owners, Directors and Senior Executives. Every individual holding one of the IFR's six Specified Senior Management Functions must be disclosed and individually approved by the IFR, with the assessment covering financial standing, integrity, competence and disqualification history. Critically, the regime is not prospective only -- existing owners, directors and senior executives already in post must also apply, not just new appointments.

  • Yes. The IFR requires a documented governance framework covering board structure, committee terms of reference, delegation of authority, decision-making processes and conflicts of interest management. The regulator specifically looks for evidence of how governance functions in practice -- board minutes, delegated authority in use, conflicts genuinely managed -- rather than a policy document that has never been tested.

  • No. The IFR requires formal, structured and documented engagement with a club's supporter base, including evidence of consultation processes, genuine consideration of fan views, and how the club accounts for engagement outcomes in its decision-making. A communications programme -- newsletters, social media updates, one-way announcements -- does not on its own satisfy this requirement, because it is not a two-way consultation process.

  • Clubs must demonstrate that their stadium meets relevant safety standards and that the club maintains proper governance over its ground obligations, including lease arrangements and capital maintenance planning. This sits alongside, rather than replaces, existing ground safety certification requirements clubs are already subject to.

  • Not automatically. The IFR requires declaration and evidence of any relevant regulatory, legal or disciplinary history affecting the club, its owners or its senior executives. Adverse history does not, on its own, disqualify an application -- but it must be disclosed and properly contextualised. Failing to disclose relevant history is a materially greater risk than the history itself.

  • A self-assessment tool like this one is designed to give clubs an immediate, honest snapshot of where they stand across the IFR's six licensing criteria, and to surface priority gaps quickly. It is a valuable first step, but it is not a substitute for a full evidence-based readiness review ahead of an actual licence application, which requires deeper verification of documentation, governance evidence and financial modelling than a short online questionnaire can capture.

  • This varies significantly by club and by how large the identified gaps are. Financial resilience and ownership integrity and ODSE approval are consistently the highest-complexity criteria and tend to take the longest to address, particularly where financial sustainability plans need to be built from scratch or where existing owners and directors have not yet gone through the ODSE approval process. Clubs that start early, rather than close to an application deadline, are significantly better positioned.