When Giants Write Their Own Rules: Football Sees Itself in Washington's AI Regulation Fight

The meeting left no minutes, no press release, no guest list on record. According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, three of the wealthiest people on the planet, Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, and Jensen Huang of Nvidia, held private meetings with President Donald Trump to press him to halt the artificial-intelligence safety standards then being drafted. On the other side of the same story, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, and Sam Altman of OpenAI publicly warned that such rules are necessary, and needed soon.

I read that report on a morning in Manchester, my hand still sorting the black notebook for the afternoon session at Carrington. What made me stop, in the middle of a working day about football, was not the AI story itself. It was its structure. A small group of the largest players trying to write the rules for themselves, while those racing behind them demand the rules be set before the game expands further. I have seen that pattern before. I see it every season.

The first runs at Carrington never make the transfer feed.

Context: an old pattern inside a new industry

The original report came from The Wall Street Journal, relayed by The Independent, and that is the first professional point worth noting: the Oval Office meetings are described through unnamed sources, with no independent confirmation of the minutes. A single point of origin, two layers of transmission. In my trade, that is the weakest verification structure a story can carry. But the interesting part is not the verification. It is what the story reveals about how mature industries govern themselves.

The three names, Musk, Zuckerberg and Huang, did not go to Washington to demand the abolition of all rules. They went to shape the rules. This is the fundamental distinction the mainstream press usually skips: the gap between opposing regulation and authoring it is wide. Incumbents do not need a rule-free playground. They need a playground whose rules they helped write, in ways that do not break their existing advantages. Meanwhile, Hassabis, Amodei and Altman, the ones racing and needing stability to attract long-term capital, want a clear framework, because a clear framework lets an industry grow in an orderly way.

Reading that, I folded the paper and thought about UEFA in 2026.

The core: when players sit at the drafting table

In May 2026, UEFA announced Financial Fair Play. The stated aim was beautiful: end the practice of clubs spending beyond their means, protect the sustainability of European football. But the mechanism was subtler than the slogan. The break-even calculation was based on commercial revenue, meaning clubs with larger commercial revenue could spend more. It sounded neutral, and it locked the existing order in place.

Clubs with long histories, global brands, and television contracts signed years earlier entered the new playground with an advantage that had been framed into law. Newly rich clubs, arriving late with money but no revenue depth, had to prove sustainability precisely when they most needed to invest. Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain, two projects funded from the Gulf, were the first names on the table. In 2026, UEFA banned Manchester City from European competition for two years. Four months later, the Court of Arbitration for Sport overturned the ruling. That was only the opening round.

In February 2026, the Premier League charged Manchester City with more than a hundred financial rule breaches, stretching from 2026 to 2026. By then, the club had won four consecutive titles. I remember the colour of the pitch that day, before I remember the score. I stood in the press area watching reporters cross-check documents, and what I thought was not guilty or not guilty. What I thought was: what were the rules written to do, and who is accountable when those rules become a competitive instrument.

This is where the AI story in Washington shines straight onto football. When the three richest men in technology walk into the White House, they are not asking to drop every safety standard. They are asking for a definition of safety they can live with, and naturally, live with better than rivals. When a group of large clubs sits on UEFA technical bodies and the European Club Association, they also do not ask to drop rules. They ask for clauses they understand best, because they helped write them.

In April 2026, twelve clubs announced the European Super League. Six English, three Italian, three Spanish. Within seventy-two hours the project collapsed. The English clubs withdrew first, largely under fan pressure right outside training-ground gates. But that collapse left one fact that cannot be reversed: that class of clubs believed it had enough power to design a competition itself. What they misjudged was not ambition. They misjudged their own dependence on the system they intended to leave.

Also in 2026, the Premier League temporarily adopted five substitutions due to the pandemic's effect on the schedule. By 2026-23 it became permanent. This is one of the rule changes I have tracked longest, and it is the cleanest illustration of an argument I have held for years: the five-substitution rule lets a deep squad get deeper, and at the same time turns the final twenty minutes into a war of attrition only clubs with a deep bench can endure. On the surface, it is a player-welfare rule. Look closely, and it shifts value from tactical depth to financial depth. To bring on three quality substitutes at minute 70, you need a bench most clubs cannot buy.

Numbers say nothing on their own unless placed side by side. Over the past three seasons, a typical mid-table Premier League side has used on average 2.6 second-half substitutions in tight matches; a side in the European places has used nearly twice that. No rule states that rich clubs may substitute more. But the structure of the rule plus the structure of finance produces exactly that result. When the rules change, the winner is not the best player. The winner is whoever understands the rules best.

In June 2026, FIFA launched an expanded Club World Cup with thirty-two teams, hosted in the United States. Organisers spoke of a global opportunity for club football. Player unions spoke of an overloaded calendar. Both were right, and both knew it before the tournament began. What matters is who sat at the design table: not the domestic leagues, but a global body and a group of clubs with direct interests. This is the model the Washington report describes, only in a different field.

In 2026-25, the Champions League moved to a new format with thirty-six teams under a Swiss model. More matches, more opportunities, more money, and most importantly, fewer rest days. That format was approved after a negotiation in which the largest clubs carried the heaviest voice. I do not say this to assign blame. I say it to point out that in football, as in technology, regulation is rarely a straight line between ethics and enforcement. It is a compromise among parties with power, and its final shape reflects the balance of forces at the moment it is written.

An exclusive is only the visible part; the submerged part is the midnight phone calls.

What I have observed over years in this trade is that major changes to English football's rules are rarely discussed publicly at the drafting stage. They are gestated in phone calls, in lunches, in conferences no reporter attends. The Premier League gives nineteen votes to twenty clubs; passing a rule change requires fourteen. That number sounds democratic, but in practice, a bloc of six to eight clubs with aligned interests can shape the outcome. This is the mechanism I call governance by a weighted minority bloc.

In 2026, Everton were docked ten points for breaching PSR, later reduced to six on appeal. In March 2026, Nottingham Forest were docked four points. The permitted loss threshold is one hundred and five million pounds over three years. Those figures do not sit outside the story. They are footprints of rules written and applied by people. What very few analyses mention is this: clubs hit by points deductions are usually those with lower revenue, while higher-revenue clubs have more accounting tools and legal structures to handle the figures they face. FFP and PSR did not do the worst thing people often assume of them: they did not collapse. They worked exactly as designed.

The AI story in Washington contains one detail I want to restate in its original sense: those asking to halt regulation are those with the largest market share, and those asking for regulation are those needing stability. In football, that structure flips continuously depending on the moment. A club can be the one demanding tight control today and the one demanding freedom tomorrow, depending on whether it leads or chases. That is a sign that legal positions in football do not come from ethical philosophy. They come from position in the table.

I remember a winter afternoon at Carrington, when a young coach told me a line I have kept since: a fairness rule does not make any club less ambitious, it only decides which club has the time for that ambition to ripen. I have used that line in many pieces and it always holds. What fans outside call cheating, insiders sometimes call reading the text closely. Both labels carry some truth, and that is precisely the tragedy of modern football governance.

Here is a cross-domain observation whose origin I want to state clearly: what I have just done, using a technology-industry story to illuminate a football story, is method, not evidence. The Washington report says not one line about football. There is no pitch, no player, no transfer, no table in it. When I set it beside the events of FFP, the Super League or PSR, I am connecting patterns, not citing data points. Careful readers should distinguish the two.

The contrarian angle: self-regulation is not the absence of rules, but a special kind of rule

The popular reading is that giants want to break the rules. This is the biggest blind spot in how power stories are read. Those holding the upper hand do not want a rule-free playground. They want a playground whose rules already encode their advantage as the default. When a club with large commercial revenue proposes that break-even be calculated on revenue, it is not breaking the rule. It is framing it. When three leading technology firms propose voluntarily designing safety standards, they are not breaking the rule either. They are defining the standard so that the threshold for crossing it coincides with their infrastructure advantage.

This leads to a consequence very few analyses state plainly: rules in football rarely fail. They succeed exactly as designed, and what fans feel as injustice is really the precision of an instrument programmed for a specific outcome. FFP in 2026 was not an unfinished effort. It was a completed compromise that achieved its goal: stabilising the existing order. PSR in 2026 is the same. When we read them as failures, we overlook that they have been doing precisely what they were asked to do.

This angle explains a phenomenon long treated as a paradox. Why are the largest clubs so often the strongest supporters of the fairest rules, when they benefit most from the current order? The answer lies in the fact that a fairness rule, written the right way, does not strip them of their advantage. It only makes that advantage look like a natural consequence of professionalism. In any industry, this is the highest achievement of soft power: making your advantage a norm everyone shares.

At the same time, I do not want to go too far and turn observation into conspiracy. Some rule changes genuinely are for player welfare, genuinely for the common good, and those who propose them often do not foresee all the derivative consequences. The five-substitution rule is an example. When it was introduced temporarily in 2026, the original intent was to ease a schedule compressed by the pandemic. But when it became permanent, it quietly opened a new channel of advantage the proposers may not have fully anticipated. This is the distinction I want to make clear: between good intent and the actual consequence of a rule change lies a gap only time and data can close.

I remember the colour of the pitch that day, before I remember the score. And I remember the question I ask myself after every rule change: does this change widen the game, or make it deeper for a group that was already deep? Those two questions differ in nature, and the answer usually lies in the numbers, not in the press conference.

The press tower is the highest place to look from, but not the closest place to understand.

Looking ahead: what to track, not what to conclude

In the AI industry, the fight in Washington is still in its opening phase. No one knows the final shape of the safety law, and no one should trust any party that publicly claims to represent the whole industry. In football, the parallel stories are also unresolved. The case between the Premier League and Manchester City remains a major open variable. Proposals to adjust PSR are still under discussion. And FIFA, after the expanded Club World Cup, has hinted at possibly expanding international tournaments further, which will surely reopen the dispute over the calendar and over who has the right to decide.

What I want to place side by side, rather than draw an early conclusion from: both the artificial-intelligence industry and the football industry are at a stage where the rules will be rewritten over the next few years. In such a stage, the mainstream news cycle will report meetings, statements, proposals. But what determines the final shape lies in places no camera films. That is why my trade remains necessary: to stand where no one stands, hear what no one records, and write down what will be forgotten within forty-eight hours.

To write a true story, I have to stand where no one stands.

I will track two indicators in the coming months. One is the technical meetings of European clubs on competition format, where I believe a new round of adjustment is being gestated. The other is policy moves in Washington on AI safety thresholds, because how the threshold is defined will show who sat at the drafting table first. These two processes are not directly related to each other. But they are the same lesson, repeated in two different industries, about a truth football fans have long memorised: when you hear someone say they want a fairer game, the next question is not whether they are sincere. The next question is who is holding the pen.

The rhythm of a season is not in the goals, but in each repeating Saturday. And the rhythm of power is not in the press release, but in the documents no one reads until they are signed.