Arguably, clubs should have done this years ago. While the recent doomed European Super League attempt opened some serious wounds, it also started the ball rolling in this regard with Chelsea, Arsenal and Spurs – who were all burned by their part in the venture – immediately announcing plans to giving a fan, or fans, a much louder voice within the club. Other, smaller, clubs have followed suit, including my team, Walsall, with fan representation on the board. It’s not before time, but why has it not happened much sooner? If it had, some of the depressing events at the aforementioned clubs who’ve gotten into financial difficultly might well have been avoided.

But we are where we are. Time, and the impact of this review, will tell if this is something that has real legs. We’ve seen already this season that football has a tendency to revert to type very quickly after such a crisis. When stadiums were empty, income was badly hit and the ESL was threatening to suck the sole out of the deeper English football pyramid, there was a lot of noise about how fans were now ‘more important than ever’ and that a new focus on them was the clear and obvious way forward.

Yet, when stadiums opened fully in August, you’d have struggled to know anything had changed at all, save for a few mask-wearing staff at a minority of clubs and an extra poster about hand-washing in the toilets. Yes, most clubs had a Covid charter but they were buried deep in websites and barely read by anyone. That’s not criticising the clubs or the fans for that; merely highlighting that the rush to normality on both sides saw it banished to nothing more than an afterthought.

So, will the review have longer-term success at provoking real, long-term change? It’s hard to tell. There will still be some in the game that will want it swept under a carpet or at least kicked into the long grass for the foreseeable future, in the hope it’s eventually forgotten and we can all just carry on as we were.

But hopefully not everyone. It was said during the height of the pandemic that if football cannot change now, then it never will. It’s the same now. If there is no appetite for change at this point, when the inadequacies and unfairness of the current agreements and structures have been laid bare, then there will never be an appetite.

If the game has to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future by this IREF then, even if it has to abide by some of the decisions, it will be done under duress. And that will mean that corners will be cut, work under-budgeted and outputs not taken seriously enough.

If there is one thing worse than a club having no fan representation, it’s a club pretending that they have.

But done properly, putting fans first doesn’t mean having to give up on dreams. Realism and sustainability don’t automatically equate to mid-table mediocrity. Exeter City are showing how a fan-owned club need not be dis-advantaged because they don’t have a wealthy benefactor who’s prepared to put the club into debt to further ‘their’ ambitions.

It’s just that – too often – the kind of funds that could be invested in the fans, their experience and, ultimately (because this is how clubs attract the next generation), the club’s future, goes instead on another squad player who barely gets on the pitch and is often released – and quickly forgotten – at the end of the season.

Until clubs alter that level of thinking, no independent review is ever going to help them.