A reference model for transparent, community-governed football.
Football was supposed to belong to nobody in particular. All it ever needed was a ball and a bit of flat ground.
Somewhere along the way it became one of the most tightly held assets on earth. Not held by the people who play it, coach it, referee it, or stand in the rain for it, but by a small number of institutions that answer mostly to themselves. Ask any supporter what happened and you get the same story with different details: prices climbing faster than wages, tournaments awarded in rooms nobody was allowed to enter, kickoff times arranged for markets on the other side of the planet, and every few years a scandal that arrives, appalls everyone for a fortnight, and changes nothing at all.
The World Cup has just finished. It was the most expensive in the tournament's history. For the first time, ticket prices rose and fell with demand the way airline seats do, and supporter organizations eventually took their complaint to the European Commission rather than to football's own governing body, because complaining to the governing body had stopped meaning anything. Politicians came to be photographed. Sponsors had their seats. A great many of the people who actually make football what it is watched from home, if they could afford the subscription.
Now look ahead. The next tournaments are already allocated, by processes almost nobody outside the room could inspect, to hosts chosen against criteria almost nobody outside the room has read. We know how this goes, because we have watched it go this way before.
This document was published now on purpose.
Twelve pages proposing a way to organize football without concentrating power in bodies that cannot be inspected from outside. It is a reference model, not a constitution: it describes properties that any honest implementation has to satisfy, shows one plain language example of how each could be met, and openly names the questions it has not solved.
A taste of what is inside:
- Decisions recorded so that nobody, including whoever runs the system, can quietly change them afterwards.
- One person, one voice. Voting rights bound to real people and clubs, impossible to buy, sell, or accumulate.
- Tournament hosting by a published rotation instead of a bidding contest, interruptible only by a veto that needs a large majority and published written reasons. No auction means nothing to buy and nobody to thank afterwards.
- Money flows any member can recalculate with the published figures and a pocket calculator.
- The people who sign the contracts can be removed by the people they serve, and that power sits in the founding documents rather than in anyone's goodwill.
Not a federation. Not a league. Not a coin, not a token sale, not a startup, not a funding round. There is nothing here to buy and nobody collecting anything. If you came looking for an investment opportunity, this is the wrong document and, frankly, the wrong sport.
This will probably not change anything.
It is a document written by one person with no institution, no budget, and no standing in the game. Parts of it are certainly naive. Parts of it are probably wrong in ways that would be obvious to anyone who has actually run a competition. It has never been tested on a real pitch, and a governance model that has never survived a season is a hypothesis wearing a suit.
What it does have is a shape you can argue with. That is the whole ambition: to be specific enough to be criticized properly, rather than another opinion about how somebody ought to do better.
This document was written with the help of AI, and it would be odd to hide that in a paper about transparency.
The reasons are unglamorous. One person, no research assistants, no co-authors to read drafts at two in the morning, no legal department, and a subject that touches law, economics, governance, and technology all at once. AI made it possible to work through that material properly instead of gesturing at it, to be argued with when an idea was weak, and to find the holes before a reader did. The questions, the decisions, and the judgment calls are mine. Several chapters exist only because something pushed back hard enough to make me change my mind.
A document arguing that power should be inspectable would be a poor advertisement for itself if it were coy about how it was made.
Do what you want with it.
Fork it, translate it, argue with it, take one chapter and throw away the rest, implement it somewhere small and tell everyone what broke. There is no version number here and nobody in charge of the next one. Nothing has to come back to me.
It is entirely possible that something like this already exists and I have simply not found it. If so, please point me at it, and consider this document a vote of confidence in whoever got there first.
And if one small piece of this survives contact with reality and makes football a little more everyone's again, that is already more than this deserves.
Read the full document: open-football-reference-model.pdf (canonical version, citable) or read it as plain text: open-football-reference-model.md (working version, fork it, edit it, make it yours)
Contact: masato.niwayama@proton.me
Open Football: A Reference Model © 2026 by Masato Niwayama is licensed under CC BY 4.0.