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It's become the signature event of a World Cup game: the ref spots some kid with attitude displaying that fatal combination of high studs and backchat and yellow cards him in the first five minutes. Signal: next time you're off and a warning to the rest. In such cases it is seldom just the technical offence that produces the card but the attitude - and indeed reputation - of the player. It is seldom fair in terms of jurisprudence but it works: there have been no brawls, no triple sending-off games, the football flows and is fair.

Now consider the regulation of banking. Every so often an e-mail arrives from the FSA announcing that Mr Acme of Acme Mortgage Brokers has been struck off and fined for enabling the residents of Acmetown - not unsurprisingly given Mr Acme's previous convictions - to gain million pound mortgages on homes that turn out to be lock-up garages. For some reason this form of refereeing is not quite so effective. And now the FSA itself is to be abolished.

The problems with UK financial regulation go beyond structure. Last night's big structural re-hash addresses one problem: the lack of clear accountability for macro-prudential regulation. The Bank was targeting interest rates, the government targeting growth and tax revenues, the FSA - well, it was belatedly targeting Mr Acme and his ilk but somehow missing the fact that major banks were adopting tactics that - to switch back to the football metaphor - were certain to get the club relegated and bankrupted at the same time.

The advantage of swift, pre-emptive, exemplary and above all public regulatory action is well known to judges, policemen and tax collectors. The UK's tax system works superbly, despite its reliance on self-certification, because the penalities and possibility of detection are so great. Even if you've done nothing deliberately wrong, once you attract the attention of the ref you are going to get carded.

Yet the culture of financial regulation is secrecy. Because the first line of regulation is carried out by officers employed by the banks themselves - as the Paul Moore/HBOS scandal showed - there is a conflict of interest at the very root of the system. Then, once the regulator is alerted to a potential problem, it's all sorted out in the back channels. But these back channels do not work.

The FSA's own report on its surveillance of Northern Rock admits:

"The supervisory team did not adequately identify and pursue risks arising in the firm as a whole and in relation to its business model and control framework. Our findings also show a level of engagement and oversight by supervisory line management below the standard we would expect for a high impact firm."

Specifically they decided not to issue Northern Rock with a risk mitigation programme; to lengthen the time between inspections to the longest allowed by regulations (36 months) and to rely on private meetings with the Northern Rock management. These, it turned out, had very rarely taken place and crucially nobody had spotted the risks that were to take the bank to collapse.

Although the Northern Rock example is extreme, it highlights the extreme risks of doing everything in a gentlemanly manner. "Regulatory capture" can occur if there is a revolving door between banks and regulators and if the two sets of human beings essentially share the same culture; and if nobody outside the charmed circle realises how the regulation is taking place.

Compare this again to football. The ref is hated by everybody: he does not go for a drink with the lads afterwards. He is not usually somebody who has recently played centre forward for Inter Milan. The refs develop their own subculture. They are booed and cheered for every decision - and their behaviour is analysed publicly post-match. In cases of "regulatory capture" it is often where a ref is overwhelmed by the crowd (as has been known to happen at Old Trafford) or tricked by clever diving tactics (which has been known to happen at Stamford Bridge) - but it is almost always obvious.

One problem that will remain once the Bank of England takes over the FSA is the level of public scrutiny possible. It's not just that what is secret remains secret, but that what is public is not really open to question. Mervyn King does not do "interviews" in the sense of being interrogated live on TV - whereas Adair Turner would do one at strategic moments. Likewise the Bank of England does not go around commenting or briefing journalists much - and it is virtually the only institution outside security and intelligence that holds press briefings where you are instructed not to mention they have happened. The Bank also revels in long periods of "purdah" during which it can not speak about the very events that it is crucially involved in.

Of course refs are also subject to political pressure - like regulators are. Fifa will tell them to issue more red cards, or punish diving, or keep the flag down for offside more. But again it's nearly always public.

So you can learn a lot about regulation from football referees. The pre-emptive yellow card, waved publicly is better than the red, the ugly brawl, the riot in the stands and the bankruptcy of the club. The hated, aloof ref is better than the matey one who will stand at the bar with the footballers afterwards. And if there is one thing worse than having an ex-Inter Milan player refereeing an Inter-vs-AC match, it is for the ref to believe he will one day soon be playing for Inter. And it would be good if the ref gave interviews.

Oh, and you can sack a terrible ref. No UK banking regulator has yet been sacked - though some went of their own accord.