Who is David Kogan, the future football regulator facing the ‘piranha club’?
David Kogan once claimed to have helped introduce bingo to Daily Star readers but his forthcoming job as chair of the independent football regulator represents an altogether different kind of gamble – and some much bigger numbers.
Subject to a pre-appointment grilling by the Culture, Media and Sport select committee early next month, the seasoned media executive and Tottenham Hotspur supporter will begin steering the watchdog tasked with ensuring the sustainability of the national game later this year.
Among the regulator’s powers will be mandating a new financial redistribution agreement between the Premier League and the EFL, which runs the three divisions below the top flight, if fresh talks between the parties do not arrive at a resolution.
It is probably helpful, then, that former BBC producer and Channel 4 director Kogan is better acquainted than most with the Premier League’s formidable financial muscle and soft power, having played a key role in creating it.
As an advisor on the sale of media rights, he oversaw a period in which the league’s income from TV contracts ballooned from the low hundreds of millions of pounds to billions per cycle. He has also advised the EFL, European governing body Uefa and rugby rights holders.
That experience should mean that Kogan is well equipped to withstand any pressure that the regulator comes under from the Premier League’s biggest clubs, particularly over the key question of how much of its bounty gets shared out to the have-nots.
Kogan ‘won’t be pushed around’ and ‘knows football inside out’
“He won’t be intimidated by anyone. He won’t be pushed around,” says one person who knows the 67-year-old. “His knowledge of the game is so strong; he knows football inside out. He is a very articulate, accomplished individual.”
Kogan’s links to the Premier League, however, have also sparked questions about whether he will favour it over the EFL. The Mail quoted one executive at a second-tier club as saying: “How on God’s earth is this not a conflict of interest? Everyone is deeply unimpressed.”
Other senior figures at EFL clubs take a more considered view. “His policies, tone and approach will all come in time but the appointee was never going to be a stooge for either the Premier League or EFL,” one CEO told Morning Wire. “To judge him on day one based on services offered to X or Y a number of years ago is a cheap shot.”
On Kogan’s ability to stand up to the most powerful clubs, they added: “I don’t know David other than by reputation, but I know he knows the game, the media interface and – in the right way – has enough of an ego and broad shoulders to handle the piranha club.”
Far from appearing to side with the Premier League, Kogan has been clear about his concerns for clubs in the EFL.
Discussing changes to the Champions League on a 2021 podcast, he said Uefa and top teams had “basically rigged it so that clubs lower down the pyramid will probably end up getting far less television money over the course of the next five years”.
Kogan has been equivocal when discussing the football regulator, saying in 2022 that it was “not necessarily a bad idea – the question is how knowledgeable that regulator is”. He added: “The Premier League in many ways has got itself to blame.”
MPs prepare to question football regulator’s independence
Another question likely to be aimed at Kogan is about his and the regulator’s independence from the government, an issue that Uefa has raised and could, if compromised, in theory see England and English teams banned from cross-country competition.
Away from his media career, he is a noted Labour historian, having written books on the party and even donated to it. When Kogan’s candidacy for chair of the football regulator leaked, shadow sports minister Louie French called him a “crony”.
Caroline Dinenage MP, chair of the CMS committee that will quiz him on 7 May, has already trailed her concerns saying the hearing will seek to “establish whether he has the required independence and experience in regulation to carry out this crucial new role”.
Others see his recommendation for the job as evidence of the government treading a fine line between protecting the game and not stifling its growth.
Says Matt Lavelle, senior associate in the sports law team at Brabners: “Taken together with the recent concessions to the Football Governance Bill in response to the House of Lords Report, the move may be seen as an attempt to strike a careful balance between the two competing forces shaping modern English football – the need to remain an attractive proposition for investors and the need to ensure clubs remain rooted in their communities and accountable to their supporters.”
Kogan went to state school, where he developed his lifelong attachment to Spurs, before reading history at Oxford and then “blagged my way into the marketing department of the Daily Star and Daily Express in 1979 where I sat on the marketing committee that helped invent bingo for the Daily Star”, he told the Guardian in 2015.
After a stint as a local government reporter with LBC, he became a producer at the BBC, where he worked on news and current affairs programmes. From there he became managing director of Reuters Television before setting up his own business.
He came into his own advising for his Reel Enterprises, which he sold to Wasserman before setting up a new venture, Exile Enterprises. The keen photography fan also had a spell as CEO of celebrated agency Magnum Photos.
Discussing the challenge of reviving Magnum, he quipped: “I have the delightful position of being the one warring leader of the organisation. Therefore all the blame is mine and all the strategy I suppose.” That sounds like good preparation for chairing the football regulator.