Another week, another new regulator. Last week it was the Fair Work quango created by Angela Rayner’s plans to clog up our labour market. This week, we discover the new souped-up football regulator, a bad Tory idea made worse in Labour’s new Football Governance Bill that landed in Parliament today.

I know, dear reader, you may think football should stay on the sports pages. But bear with me. It’s a parable for our times. “The government is the solution to every problem.”

The calls for government regulation began with the financial collapse of Bury FC in 2019. But the idea was turbo-charged by half a dozen of England’s leading clubs attempting to set up a new European Super League in 2021. That project collapsed too, but not before Boris Johnson had asked a Conservative MP, Tracey Crouch, to conduct a “fan-led review” of English football.

This whole saga gets not a word in Boris’s memoirs, which shows you how much he really cared about it. But the train was now in motion. Under the leadership of Ms Crouch – a self-declared “compassionate conservative” whose principal achievement seems to have been resigning in protest against inadequate controls on gambling – it was always clear what the destination would be: more state regulation and control. And so it proved. Her proposals for a new football regulator finally reached Parliament in the dying days of Rishi Sunak’s government – and expired with it.

They’ve now been resurrected. Under the new Bill, the regulator gets the power to intervene on proposals to move stadiums, on the distribution of funds between leagues and clubs, on ticket prices, and – as this is a Labour Bill – on diversity and inclusion. All this will bring further cost, complexity, bureaucracy, and intrusion. This mission creep shows how dangerous it is for Conservatives to constantly drift Left and concede ground to Labour. The train the Tories started running has gone well beyond its planned destination; it would have been better not to put it on the tracks at all.

Why do so many people want a football regulator? It is clearly based on something many fans feel, which is that their club is special, rooted in the community, yet perpetually vulnerable. As Lisa Nandy puts it, “financial instability has meant loyal fans and whole communities have risked losing their cherished clubs as a result of mismanagement and reckless spending”. She wants to put “fans back at the heart of the game”, and help “to put clubs up and down the country on a sound financial footing.”

I’m not persuaded. You’d think from Lisa Nandy that English football clubs were crashing and burning as fast as Iranian drones over Israel. In fact, most English football clubs have been around a very long time, often well over a century, and few ever go bust permanently. This makes football very unusual as an industry, but not in the way Nandy suggests.

Moreover, a regulator was not needed to sort out the original problems that caused the fan -led review. Bury FC was bought out and resurrected, if now in the league’s nether regions. The club I follow, Derby County, had its own near-death experience but survived and is prospering. The European Super League never happened. All these things occurred in the normal way, under normal rules, with governments exerting reasonable leverage, but without a quango stepping in.

The problem with a permanent regulator is that over time it substitutes its own judgment for that of those running the actual industry. We’ve seen this in other areas, most notably finance. Keeping the regulator happy becomes a top priority, and firms become reluctant to cross it because it has so many different ways of making their life difficult. The same will happen to football clubs.

There will also be more mission creep. It’s hard, in practice, for ministers to distance themselves from a so-called independent regulator – after all, they set it up, and they can always change its rules. So the government becomes responsible for everything that goes wrong, and expects to have the powers to deal with these things. And gradually everyone starts to focus on lobbying the regulator rather than running the industry. I predict now that, over time, this will weaken the English game, particularly the Premier League.

Satisfying government officials will become more important than making money or keeping supporters happy. I know many supporters will say this doesn’t happen now. Maybe so. But be careful what you wish for. When officials have the final say, it tends to be their preferences that prevail. And if you think football clubs are inflexible and secretive, wait till you’ve spent a bit of time dealing with government.

It’s all so unnecessary. The Premier League is a genuine British national asset and a source of real soft power. It won’t be the same when it’s under the thumb of the Football Directorate of DCMS.

Yes, football clubs get things wrong. So do governments, and it’s a lot harder to correct them when they do. English football – clubs, players, fans – will rue the day the state took control of the beautiful game.