The Sunday Signal: Clearing The Record

Issue #32 Friday 5 December 2025. This week: drawing a line under WANdisco, the opportunity Bruce Katz sees for South Yorkshire and what Football Manager teaches us about ignoring technical debt

Dec 05, 2025

The Bottom Line Up Front

The FCA has closed its investigation into WANdisco with no action taken. A two-year cloud has lifted. The noise that surrounded this period never reflected the truth. Now an independent regulator has confirmed it.

At the same time, I want to focus on what comes next. I spoke recently with Bruce Katz, one of the world’s leading thinkers on cities and industrial strategy, about the once-in-a-generation opportunity in front of South Yorkshire. And in my Yorkshire Post column this week, I explored how the cancellation of Football Manager 2025 reveals a much deeper crisis inside organisations that have ignored their own technical debt for too long.

Three signals. One message. You cannot build the future until you clear what sits unresolved behind you.

Clearing the Record

When the FCA decision was published in Friday’s RNS, it finally put into writing what I had known from the start. No action. No criticism. No findings against me. I had acted properly, in good faith and with integrity.

But the hardest part of the past two years was not the process. It was everything that filled the silence around it.

From the moment I uncovered the irregularities in 2023 and escalated them, misinformation moved faster than truth. Entirely false briefings were handed to journalists by people who should have known better. Assumptions became stories. Stories became narratives. And those narratives were often written by people who had never been in the room and never had access to the facts.

It is a strange feeling to watch a version of your life being constructed by others. It is worse when you are not allowed to correct it in real time.

That noise caused real harm. Not just to me but to people around me who were already carrying their own pressures. My colleague and friend, Peter Scott, was dealing with the slow and painful loss of his father during the height of it.

There’s a line from Martin Luther King Jr that stayed with me:

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

Those words stayed with me because they were true.

You learn who stands with you when the weather turns. Some people moved closer. Others drifted away. A few simply waited to see which way the wind would blow. Meanwhile, the quiet messages from those who believed in the truth landed with enormous weight. They mattered more than I can ever express.

That is why the FCA’s clarity this week carried such significance. An independent regulator examined every disclosure, every process and every decision. The conclusion is unambiguous. The concerns about my conduct were unfounded.

And then, on Tuesday, I saw something I will never forget.

A headline in the Yorkshire Post that read:

“Probe finds WANdisco’s ex boss acted properly.”

A simple sentence. Yet for my family, my colleagues and the people who supported me, it represented the end of a long and painful chapter. It meant that the truth had finally replaced the noise.

This experience has changed me. It has stripped away illusions about how public narratives form. It has sharpened my purpose. And it has reminded me that resilience is not a posture but a practice, developed quietly under pressure.

To those who stood by me, thank you.

To those who stayed silent, I heard that too.

A line has now been drawn.

Onwards.

A Once-in-a-Generation Opportunity for South Yorkshire

A few weeks ago I sat down with Bruce Katz to record an episode of The Digital Forge. His background is extraordinary. He helped craft US housing policy during the Reagan years, served as chief of staff at the Department of Housing and Urban Development under President Clinton, co-led the housing transition for President Obama and founded the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings. Today he runs the Nowak Metro Finance Lab and advises governments around the world.

I asked him what he sees when he looks at South Yorkshire.

His answer was crystal clear. The world has changed in ways that favour regions with deep industrial capability. Advanced energy. Advanced materials. Robotics. Secure supply chains. These are the arenas that now anchor global competition.

Bruce believes South Yorkshire has the assets the twenty-first century actually needs. Not nostalgia but real capability. Precision engineering. A world-class applied research ecosystem. The AMRC. A workforce that still understands how to design and build physical systems. Supply chains that already connect to nuclear technologies and could soon anchor Small Modular Reactor production.

He pointed to Pittsburgh as the nearest analogue. A city dismissed as a relic after its steel collapse, yet rebuilt as a global hub for robotics and AI. The turning point was not a federal decree. It was a local decision to build around its true identity.

Bruce’s advice to us was direct.

Stop waiting for permission from London.

Be honest about what this region is best at.

Unify institutions around that mission.

Tell the world what we do and invite capital to back it.

When I asked him what success would look like in ten years, his reply was striking.

“You would be globally recognised as one of the core nodes of advanced industry in the world.”

Not a slogan. A realistic outcome if we choose it.

The FCA decision has cleared the mental and emotional space for me to focus entirely on this mission. Yorkshire AI Labs exists because I believe South Yorkshire can lead Britain’s industrial revival. The opportunity is here. The question is whether we seize it.

Watch The Full Episode

When Old Software Sinks New Dreams

My column this week begins in a cold student house in the early nineties. Six of us. One PC. Championship Manager. Coloured dots drifting across the screen and hours disappearing into the early morning.

Three decades later, my son and his friends are doing the same with Football Manager. The dots returned, the rituals endured and the game became one of the most beloved franchises in the world.

Which is why this year’s announcement shocked so many. Football Manager 2025 was cancelled outright. Not delayed. Cancelled. The developers admitted that the new version was not good enough. Their transition to a new engine had gone wrong. Years of accumulated workarounds had piled up. Technical debt had caught up with them.

Technical debt is what happens when you choose the quick fix over the right fix. It is the old system nobody dares to replace. The dependency nobody understands. The patch upon patch upon patch that eventually collapses under its own weight. Every shortcut is a loan. The interest always arrives.

Sometimes it arrives brutally. Knight Capital lost hundreds of millions in under an hour because old code was accidentally reactivated. Equifax exposed the personal data of almost half the United States because a patch was not applied. Airlines have collapsed operationally because their scheduling systems were built for a world that no longer exists.

Football Manager’s decision was painful but brave. It hurt financially. It disappointed fans. But it preserved something more important than a yearly product cycle. It preserved trust.

There is a wider lesson here for leaders across every sector.

Britain is running on organisational and technical debt that can no longer be ignored.

Legacy IT. Outdated regulations. Business models designed for a different world.

If we want to compete in AI, if we want to reindustrialise, if we want to build the future, we must first repair the foundations. Football Manager faced its debt before it became a crisis. Most do not.

As for me, I have downloaded Football Manager 2026. I am attempting to take Buxton from the sixth tier to glory.