Plans by the government to introduce a regulator to the football industry – endorsed by all Westminster parties just a year ago – have, to use jargon oddly appropriate in this case, been ‘kicked into the long grass’.

Truss is instinctively against regulating almost anything. When I asked her about the ‘fan-led’ Crouch Report on the campaign trail a few weeks back, she replied, not very cryptically, that she would apply a ‘very high bar’ to any new types of regulation.

So, the news that the legislation has been paused is no great surprise to me.

For what it’s worth, I’m with Truss instinctively and philosophically when it comes to the nanny state. Yet just two years ago, I wrote a letter with Damian Collins MP calling for the establishment of a football regulator (Collins, interestingly, is now a minister in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.)

Why does football need a regulator? Partly because football clubs are social institutions, not just private businesses. When their financial stability is risked in pursuit of short-term success it’s not just the investors who suffer. Football clubs going bust create angst and long-term social damage that goes far beyond their small business status.

The second reason for undoing the proposed pause is perhaps more likely to appeal to Truss herself. As the Thatcher and Major governments needed regulators in privatised industries to ensure fair competition, such is the case in football now, where current practices are protectionist enough to make a Mexican cartel leader wince.

To explain: English professional football is a pyramid of 92 clubs, organised into 4 divisions: Premier League; Championship; League 1; League 2. The idea is that clubs should be able to move up and down this ladder dependent on their playing performance (which in turn is related to their financial performance). The TV proceeds, which now amount to billions of pounds annually, are supposed to be distributed in an equitable way so as to enable this competitive fluidity.

Historically, the proceeds were allocated 50 per cent to the top division and 50 per cent between the next three divisions, on a sliding scale. Since the creation of the Premier League in 1992, the bountiful TV spoils have been skewed 87.5 per cent/ 12.5 per cent in the favour of top-tier clubs. That equation, in and of itself, entrenches the position of recipients and makes mobility far harder.

However, the Premier League also introduced another element which made already distasteful protectionism something far worse. Of the modest proceeds that do get sent to the 72 Football League clubs, around half get given directly to the handful of clubs recently relegated from the Premier League in the form of anti-competitive ‘parachute payments’.

These sums are vast, and they hideously disfigure the principles of competition. A normal Championship (second-tier) club might have revenues of circa £18 million, from ticketing, merchandise and hospitality. A club just relegated from the Premier League not only accrues similar basic income, but also gets a no-strings-attached hand-out from the Prem of £70 million in the first year after its demotion, £50 million in the second and £30 million in the third.

The result is plain to see: every season, more or less the same clubs – Norwich, West Brom, Fulham, Sheffield United – simply bounce between the two divisions. The Premier League has, in effect, largely become a closed shop of the 20 teams currently residing in it, plus the 4 or 5 subsidised clubs in the Championship who can expect to go back up soon.

One of the main purposes of the regulator proposed by the Crouch Report was to remove this cartel-style activity and restore true competitiveness and mobility to the English football pyramid. It would be ironic indeed if a government committed to competitiveness ended up allowing this to continue. Not only would it be a betrayal of the nascent principles of Trussism, but it would also kill the dream for supporters of non-Premier League clubs, and the fear of jeopardy for supporters of current so-called big clubs.

In 1999, Manchester City were struggling in the third division; Charlton Athletic an established force in the Premier League. The reversal of fortunes in the intervening two decades – far from atypical – has long been part of English football’s charm and commercial success. Other foreign leagues simply aren’t as fluid. If the big clubs, however, now mostly owned by American private equity tycoons, are allowed to pull the drawbridge up and strangle our national sport, it will not be the triumph for the free market that Downing Street might fondly imagine.