FA Rule N: What English Football's Workforce Data Actually Shows

FA Rule N is the section of The Football Association's rulebook that obliges every club affiliated to the Premier League and English Football League to collect and publish workforce-diversity data on a two-year cycle. It came into force ahead of the 2024-25 season and the first public reporting deadline was June 2025. The Women's Super League and Women's Championship are not yet inside the mandate — both are scheduled to be folded in by 2027.

Each club asks staff to complete an anonymous, voluntary questionnaire covering five characteristics: age, gender, ethnicity, disability and sexual orientation. The responses are aggregated, benchmarked against the 2021 Census, and published in the club's own corporate or fan-facing area of its website. Premier League submissions add a layer of granularity that EFL clubs are not required to match — Premier League data is broken down by Board and Senior Leadership, Senior Coaching, Other Coaching, and Other Staff, so a reader can see whether boardroom representation differs from coaching or back-office representation. Several Premier League clubs (Wolves and Brentford were among the early publishers) chose to release the report as a standalone PDF on their corporate site; others fold it into a wider EDI annual report.

Two patterns are visible across the first cycle of published reports. First, the response rate is high — the Premier League aggregated figure is around 87%, which is unusually strong for voluntary workforce surveys. That gives the published numbers more weight than a typical opt-in employee questionnaire. Second, the gap between general workforce representation and senior-leadership representation is consistently wider than the gap to general coaching staff. Boardrooms remain the part of the building that looks least like the communities clubs serve, even at clubs whose general workforce data tracks the local census reasonably well.

The report deliberately leaves out two large groups. Event-day staff (stewards, hospitality, casual matchday workers) are excluded unless the club opts to include them, and external contractors are similarly excluded. The Premier League and EFL set this boundary so the data reflects the people whose careers actually run through the club. The practical effect, though, is that workforce snapshots understate the diversity of the people fans interact with on matchday and overstate the homogeneity of the people who run the institution day-to-day. Reading the numbers requires holding both halves of that ledger in mind.

FA Rule N sits inside a broader transparency push that has built up over the last five years. The earlier Football Leadership Diversity Code was a voluntary commitment set up in 2020 to raise representation in senior leadership, coaching and football operations; it produced three annual progress reports before Rule N moved equivalent reporting from voluntary to mandatory. The new framework also dovetails with the powers of the Independent Football Regulator that came into being under the Football Governance Act — workforce-diversity reporting is one of the explicit transparency expectations the regulator can lean on when assessing whether a club meets its custodianship obligations.

For anyone reading the data with a long horizon, the most useful comparison is club-to-club within the same role band rather than club-to-club overall. A boardroom-level comparison between similarly-sized Premier League clubs is signal; an overall headcount comparison between a 600-employee top-tier club and a 40-employee League Two club is noise. The role-band breakdown is the part of Rule N that turns the dataset from a compliance artefact into something a fan, journalist or regulator can actually use.

• 92 clubs in scope — every Premier League and EFL men's side.
• 5 protected characteristics — age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation.
• Bi-annual cycle — next mandatory publication is the 2026-27 season report.
• Premier League adds role splits — board, senior leadership, senior coaching, other coaching, other staff.
• Benchmarked against the 2021 Census — published figures are absolute counts plus a comparison to the local catchment.
• Excluded by default — event-day staff and contractors (unless the club opts in).
• Women's competitions — WSL and Championship to be folded in by 2027.

Kick It Out maintains a central index linking to every one of the 92 published reports. Most Premier League clubs host the data on a corporate-information page (Liverpool, Tottenham, West Ham, Manchester United, Manchester City), an EDI-policy page (Luton Town, Chelsea), or alongside their annual report (Arsenal). EFL clubs vary more: many publish a single PDF named "Rule N submission" hosted on their CDN, a smaller number embed the data inside a longer equality monitoring report. Stockport County was the only club to appear without a linked submission at the time of the index's publication.

For comparison purposes, the most useful files to download are the Premier League PDFs that follow the standardised template — they make role-band comparison possible across clubs. EFL files vary in granularity; some include disability and sexual-orientation breakdowns at the level of detail the Premier League template demands, others stop at age, gender and ethnicity. Treat the EFL cohort as a directional dataset until the next reporting cycle pulls more clubs onto the standard template.