Last summer the club I've supported all my life, Swindon Town, found itself in a precarious situation.
With just a handful of players, unpaid staff and impending court cases, the future looked bleak.
The club was on the verge of bankruptcy, the players weren't getting paid on time and just three weeks before the start of the new season, they were without a manager, chief executive, a director of football or coaches.
The prospect of Swindon without its football club was unthinkable for many.
The historic club is a pillar of its community.
Thankfully, with just days to go Swindon was saved by Australian businessman Clem Morfuni and the Robins are now thriving in League Two.
The fact that a former Premier League team in Swindon went to the brink of non-existence is frightening.
Why wasn't something done earlier to protect the club?
The signs were pretty ominous but still nothing was done.
It’s why I and many other fans would like to see radical reform in the beautiful game.
And there need to be significant changes to the current ownership model in the English game.
Proposals made by MP Tracey Crouch in a fan-led review could go some way in solving football’s current crisis.
The key recommendations are a creation of independent regulators, a shadow board of fans and the establishment of a new fit and proper owner’s test.
If these things all became a reality, the demise of Bury FC in 2019, which left a sore taste in the mouths of many football fans, could have been avoided.
It was a club with a 125-year history, but after it couldn’t afford to pay its debts, it was expelled from the English Football League.
Bury would not become a one off but instead a worst-case scenario, as many high-profile clubs found their backs to the wall thanks to a combination of mismanagement and Covid-19.
Covid-19 highlighted the ownership crisis in the English game at both ends of the scale.
In December 2020, the Premier League and EFL agreed a £250 million bailout package to ensure smaller clubs financially survived the pandemic.
But not everyone was thrilled.
Steve Parish, the Crystal Palace chairman, complained: “Not one company in any other industry, to my knowledge, is being asked to bail out its competitors. The supermarkets aren't instructed to help the corner shops.”
His comments drew criticism from pundits like Gary Neville, who said the analogy was insulting to local clubs.
“Football clubs are too important to not have better governance and more independence and more transparency,” he said.
“Referring to them as corner shops - the argument that Tesco's don’t give handouts to corner shops - is really disrespectful…we know how important a corner shop is to a community.
“But Sunderland AFC in Sunderland is not just a corner shop, let’s be clear.
"Bristol City or Bristol Rovers in Bristol are not corner shops.
“They’re institutions in the city that are absolutely unbelievably important.
“They’re heritage assets football clubs, they’re what people live their lives for every single week.”
It’s a sentiment backed by Labour’s Shadow Minister for Sport, Tourism, Heritage and music, Jeff Smith.
In an interview for the Mirror’s NextGen project, he told how Ms Crouch’s proposals for a fan-led review must be made into legislation and that the Government needs to move faster on implementing them.
“The recommendations are a good set of proposals and the Government has taken quite a long time to respond and we were promised they’re going to respond in the spring.
“We think they need to come out as quickly as possible and implement the recommendations in legislation.
“That would mean bringing forward a bill of the Queen’s speech in May to implement the proposals. We’ll be pushing the government to stop dragging their heels.”
Mr Smith, a life-long Manchester City fan, understands how vital smaller clubs are to Britain’s football.
“I remember when City were in the third tier and going to small clubs around the country.
“They’re the lifeblood of the pyramid and the game we have in Britain.
“The big clubs don’t exist in isolation from the rest of the football ecosystem.
“We need to protect all the clubs.
“As a City fan, I want to see a healthy game in England and I think the proposals that are in the review will in the long term lead to a healthier game.”
However, he knows too well that resistance is inevitable, highlighting the “vested interests in football”.
The Premier League is widely perceived to be the greatest league in the world but there are clubs who aren’t supportive of Crouch’s report.
“The phrase they’ve used is they don’t want it to kill the golden goose,” Mr Smith says.
“I don’t think the proposals will do that. We can implement a better governing structure for football without damaging the success of the Premier league”.
If anything, those against the report perfectly portray the problem in football - greed.
Something has to be done immediately to protect the nation's favourite game.
After all, football was created by the poor but stolen by the rich.
