A Football League meeting held at Pride Park in the weeks leading up to Christmas outlined a number of changes that clubs will need to make as the game looks to move on and build on its recent success.

Changes and improvements include increase in size for the dressing room areas, new facilities for match officials, improved lighting requirements and tighter financial controls.

Managing Director John Nixon said: "We already comply in many of the areas discussed but, as we said a few weeks ago, we do have to look at things like our floodlights and our match official changing rooms."

Lord Mawhinney, Chairman of the Football League, also raised concerns over the treatment of travelling supporters during the meeting.

Mr Nixon said: "Every Football League club will have to make at least 200 supporter places available in covered areas.

"We are fine on that, because we have the Cumberland Building Society stand, but there are clubs who will really struggle to meet that requirement. The thinking behind making this decision is sound, but it will cause problems for those clubs who do not have suitably sized areas that can be easily identified and stewarded."

Clubs have also been directed to provide warm-up goals for use during the pre-match build up, with the provision of poles or markers no longer sufficient.

"Our groundsman is very keen to keep players from both sides out of the goal mouth until kick off," he added. "From next season and onwards, warm-up goals have to be provided. The guideline states that they don't need to have nets, but it does mean that we can fence off and protect our goal mouth areas during the build up. A slight continuation of that is that all clubs must have spare goals available for every game. These will provide cover in the event of a broken post or cross bar, or anything like that."

In a further bid to protect the condition of matchday surfaces, ground-sharing also came under the spotlight.

"Any club that has a ground share agreement with a Rugby club, or whatever, will now have to schedule their games according to the new rules.

"No other game, of any kind, will be allowed to take place on the pitch within a 48-hour timeframe. That should give the surface time to recover and make for much better playing conditions."

Further guidelines were issued with regard to the payment of agents, the use of money made from TV deals and the proposal for stricter financial governance across the game. We'll bring full details of these, and more, in a future article.