What FIFA's Governance Research Tells Us About Every Federated Sport

I spend most of my working life thinking about the boundary between a governing body and its clubs. Where does the federation's authority end? Where does the club's autonomy begin? And - the question nobody asks enough - how does information actually travel across that boundary?

So when I came across the CIES governance study commissioned by FIFA, I read it cover to cover. Twice.

Not because I work in football. I don't. But because researchers Camille Boillat and Kevin Tallec Marston, working out of the International Centre for Sport Studies in Neuchatel, had done something nobody else had attempted: they surveyed 18 leagues and 141 clubs across all six FIFA confederations and mapped, empirically, how the governance relationship between national associations, leagues, and clubs actually works in practice.

The finding that stopped me was this: there is no single model. Not even close.

The four models nobody agrees on

Boillat and Tallec Marston identified four distinct governance models describing how national associations relate to their leagues and clubs. They're worth understanding because they apply well beyond football.

The NA-integrated model. The league is a department inside the national association. No independent regulations. The national body controls everything. FIFA's own association directory lists 211 member associations, and in countries like Australia, India, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, and Papua New Guinea, the league doesn't act as an intermediary at all. In Australia's case, there is no league general assembly, no league executive committee, no league president. Football Federation Australia runs the A-League directly.

The shared NA-league model. The league exists as an independent body, but responsibilities are split. Poland's Ekstraklasa manages marketing and first-instance disciplinary proceedings. Everything else is regulated by the national association. In Jamaica, voting power at the league assembly is split nearly evenly between club representatives and the Jamaica Football Federation. Neither side has clear dominance.

The independent league model. The league operates outside the national association with its own regulations. The national body retains influence - usually through representation on the league executive committee - but clubs have the stronger voice. Japan's J.League fits here. The JFA has two seats on the J.League executive. But the clubs govern.

The strong independent league model. The league and its clubs operate almost entirely apart from the national association. MLS in the United States is the clearest example. The USSF has virtually no direct role in league management. Clubs manage the league collectively on a near-horizontal basis.

What I found most striking about this typology is the sentence that follows it in the CIES research: "Not every league fits perfectly into a given model and not every model represents entirely a given league."

That's not a caveat. That's the central finding.

The boundary problem

The CIES study set out to "define where club responsibilities end and league ones begin." Across ownership requirements, political representation, financial rights, player status, infrastructure, promotion and relegation, and disciplinary processes - they found that the answer changes depending on which category you examine.

A league might give clubs enormous freedom on ownership structure while maintaining tight control over disciplinary proceedings. Another might let clubs manage their own finances entirely but centralise all media rights negotiation. The boundary between federation authority and club autonomy is not a line. It's a set of boundaries, plural, and they're drawn differently for every issue.

This resonated with me because I see exactly the same pattern outside football. Every sport I work with - netball, cricket, rugby, hockey, athletics - has its own version of these boundary questions. And almost none of them have resolved them cleanly.

A national sporting body I work with in the UK has 2,000 affiliated clubs. They need to know that every club has current insurance, a safeguarding officer, and an up-to-date constitution. But they don't run those clubs. The clubs are independent incorporated associations with their own committees, their own AGMs, their own members. The national body has constitutional authority over affiliation standards. It has no constitutional authority over how a club manages its Friday night canteen roster.

That distinction matters enormously. Get it wrong in either direction and you break the relationship. Too much oversight and clubs rebel. Too little and governance becomes fiction - policies exist at head office, but nobody knows whether they're being followed at the local level.

What the CIES study missed

I say this with respect for what Boillat and Tallec Marston achieved - their work is rigorous and genuinely useful. But the study is built around professional football. The 141 clubs in their sample are professional clubs with paid staff, commercial operations, and formal administrative structures.

The governance challenge at the grassroots level is harder. Much harder.

A professional club has a CEO, a compliance officer, a finance department. When the league sends a governance requirement, someone's job is to read it, implement it, and report back. A grassroots club has a volunteer committee of seven people, most of whom took the role because nobody else would, and whose email inbox already has 200 unread messages from the state body.

The International Sport and Culture Association and Transparency International identified this gap in their Guidelines for Good Governance in Grassroots Sport. They described a "systematic approach" to governance that includes an ethics code, risk analysis, communication, education, whistleblowing, and investigation. All necessary. All difficult to implement when your governance workforce is unpaid, part-time, and turns over every two years.

The CIES study gives us the taxonomy. It shows us what the governance models look like. What it doesn't address - and what nobody in the academic literature has adequately addressed - is the operational question: how do you actually make governance work across a federated structure where the clubs are autonomous, the volunteers are overstretched, and the only communication infrastructure is email?

Where this gets practical

I've spent years building TidyConnect for exactly this problem. Not because I read the CIES study and had an idea. The other way around - I read the CIES study and recognised what we'd been solving through experience.

The four CIES models describe different constitutional arrangements. NA-integrated, shared, independent, strong independent. But regardless of which model a sport operates under, the operational challenge is the same: the governing body needs visibility, and the clubs need autonomy. Both at the same time. Neither one at the expense of the other.

In Australia - which the CIES study identifies as an NA-integrated model - the challenge is that everything runs through the national association. Football Federation Australia manages the A-League as an internal department. At the professional level, this works because the clubs are commercial entities with full-time staff. At the community level, with thousands of grassroots clubs, the same model creates a visibility vacuum. The national body has constitutional authority but no mechanism to see what's happening at the local level without manually chasing every club for every piece of information.

In the UK - where Sport England and UK Sport both require governance compliance as a condition of funding - the model is closer to the independent or shared model. National governing bodies set standards. Clubs are expected to meet them. But the feedback loop is broken. A club might have an out-of-date safeguarding policy for six months before anyone at the NGB notices. Not because nobody cares. Because there's no system that shows the gap in real time.

The CIES study found that "supporters are not well organized or integrated into the governance of clubs and have little to no decision-making role." At the professional level, that's a democratic deficit worth discussing. At the grassroots level, supporters ARE the club. They're the committee, the coaches, the volunteers, the parents. Their integration into governance isn't a nice-to-have - it's the entire structure. When those people leave, the governance leaves with them.

The insight that changes everything

The most useful sentence in the entire CIES study, for me, is this one: "More weight and/or freedom to the clubs in one area does not always equate to the same power in others."

This is what most governance technology gets wrong. It assumes a single relationship model - either the federation controls everything, or the clubs control everything. The CIES research proves that governance is a matrix, not a hierarchy. A club might have total freedom over player selection while having no voice in broadcast rights negotiation. A league might audit club finances while having no authority over coaching appointments.

Any platform that tries to impose one model onto this reality will fail. It'll either be too controlling (and clubs will resist adoption) or too permissive (and the governing body gets no visibility).

What's needed is infrastructure that mirrors the actual constitutional relationship. Where the federation has authority - safeguarding standards, affiliation requirements, financial reporting - it gets compliance visibility. Where the club has autonomy - internal operations, member management, committee decisions - it operates independently. The boundary isn't a single line. It's a permission set.

That's what we built TidyConnect to be. Not a top-down control system. Not a bottom-up communication tool. A governance layer that maps to whatever constitutional arrangement the sport actually has - and shows both sides exactly what they need to see, and nothing they don't.

What comes next

The CIES study was published in 2016. A decade on, the governance landscape has shifted. FIFA established a Professional Football Department. Club licensing has expanded across confederations. The EU White Paper on Sport principles of democracy, accountability, transparency, and stakeholder inclusion have moved from aspiration to audit requirement in many countries.

But the fundamental question Boillat and Tallec Marston asked hasn't been answered. The boundary between federation and club is still drawn differently everywhere. The governance models are still diverse. And at the grassroots level, where 89% of sport organisations operate with zero paid staff, the gap between governance policy and governance practice is wider than it has ever been.

The research tells us what the models are. The question now is whether sport has the infrastructure to make any of them work.

References

• Boillat, C. & Tallec Marston, K. Governance Models Across Football Leagues and Clubs. CIES, 2016. ISBN 2-940241-25-2.
• Boillat, C. & Poli, R. Governance Models Across Football Associations and Leagues (PDF). CIES, 2014.
• FIFA Foundation. FIFA-mandated study by CIES analyses football governance. March 2016.
• FIFA. FIFA Member Associations. 211 member associations.
• ISCA & Transparency International Germany. Guidelines for Good Governance in Grassroots Sport (PDF). 2013.
• European Commission. White Paper on Sport. COM(2007) 391.
• Sport England & UK Sport. A Code for Sports Governance.
• CIES. International Centre for Sport Studies. Neuchatel, Switzerland.