RiskSmart Enters Football Through Lagom Referral Partnership

RiskSmart, a governance, risk and compliance (GRC) software provider, has signed a referral partnership with Lagom Sports Compliance to offer football club compliance software ahead of new licensing rules covering about 116 English clubs.

The deal is a referral arrangement. It is not an acquisition or a funding round, and the companies did not disclose financial terms or name any clubs, leagues or agencies already running on the platform.

For compliance teams in the game, the timing matters. England’s Independent Football Regulator (IFR) will begin accepting provisional operating licence applications in November 2026, and the regime applies from the 2027/28 season. Clubs that have run obligations through spreadsheets and email will need to show evidence of governance to a regulator for the first time.

How the football club compliance software deal works

Lagom Sports Compliance is a GRC and anti-financial crime adviser that works only with professional football. Under the agreement, Lagom will run the routine parts of its retained advisory work on RiskSmart wherever it can.

Clients that need to hold and manage their own compliance infrastructure will be directed to RiskSmart and can license the platform directly. Lagom now sits within RiskSmart’s partner network, which spans contract management, data intelligence, cyber security and regulatory content.

The two companies are also translating football’s regulatory duties and controls into RiskSmart’s data schema. Clubs, agencies and investors can start from a framework built for the sector instead of assembling an obligations library themselves.

Claudia Coutinho-De Somma, account executive at RiskSmart, said sport looks different to banking or payments on the surface, but the underlying problem is the same. “Obligations that live in nobody’s system, owned by nobody in particular, until a regulator asks to see them,” she said.

“Football is about to feel that pressure fast, often with a compliance team of one or two people,” Coutinho-De Somma said. “Rather than build football expertise from scratch, we’re building the infrastructure alongside people who already have it.”

Why football club compliance software is in demand

The Football Governance Act 2025 created the IFR and gave it power to license clubs in the top five tiers of English men’s football. The Act makes a licence a condition of competing in those divisions. The regime covers roughly 116 clubs.

Jonathan Greenstein, co-founder and director of Lagom Sports Compliance, said clubs are being asked to evidence their governance to a standard that banks and payment firms have lived with for years. “They are being asked to do it inside eighteen months,” he said. “Spreadsheets will not survive that.”

Greenstein said RiskSmart gives Lagom’s clients a single place where obligations, controls and evidence sit together. A board or a regulator can see the position “without anyone having to go digging,” he said.

The problem is familiar to compliance officers in other sectors. Duties accumulate, accountability blurs, evidence ends up scattered across email attachments, and reporting falls on a handful of staff. Many clubs are entering this phase with compliance teams of one or two people and no central system for tracking obligations. RegTech Post has covered how compliance officers can escape the spreadsheet trap in banking and other regulated industries.

Financial crime rules reach the transfer market

Financial crime supervision is arriving alongside licensing. In February 2026 the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the IFR signed a memorandum of understanding setting out how the two bodies will work together where football and financial services overlap. The document covers cooperation principles and the sharing of information and intelligence, and the regulators will review it annually.

In the European Union, Regulation (EU) 2024/1624, the bloc’s single anti-money laundering rulebook, makes professional football clubs and licensed football agents obliged entities. That means they must carry out customer due diligence and report suspicious activity, as banks do. The rules apply to football from July 10, 2029, later than the July 2027 start date for most sectors.

For clubs, the regulation reaches transactions with investors, sponsors, agents and other intermediaries, and with player transfers. Member states can exempt clubs in whole or in part where the risk is proven to be low. Supervision will sit with national authorities and the EU’s new Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA).

The role these rules create inside clubs will look familiar to readers who know the work of an AML compliance officer. Clubs will have to build it from a standing start.

Investors face licensing exposure of their own

The partnership also gives RiskSmart a route to investors. Private equity firms and multi-club groups with holdings in English clubs would absorb the financial impact of a licensing failure themselves.

It also remains unclear how the IFR will treat funds and holding structures when it assesses suitability. That exposure and uncertainty make documented governance a commercial priority for owners as well as for clubs.

The same logic applies to agencies. Agents sit inside the EU rules as obliged entities in their own right, so they face their own obligations alongside the clubs that hire them.

What RiskSmart and Lagom still have to show

RiskSmart sells GRC software to regulated businesses and is entering a sector where the buyer is small and the deadline is close. Lagom brings the football-specific mapping of duties and controls, and RiskSmart supplies the system to hold them.

The referral structure keeps the commitment limited. Lagom keeps its advisory model and sends work to RiskSmart where a client needs its own instance, and RiskSmart does not take on football expertise of its own.

The first test is adoption. Neither company has said how many clubs or investors will use the framework, or when the first deployments will go live. Clubs applying for provisional licences have until the application window closes in early 2027 to submit.

The IFR opens that window in November 2026 and expects the licensing regime to apply from the 2027/28 season. The EU’s football anti-money laundering obligations follow on July 10, 2029.