Warner said he would like to see Federations run by individuals that have been nominated and gone through appointment processes, rather than those that have been elected.

He pointed to the fact that this will be the case for all governing bodies in the United Kingdom under the new Corporate Governance Code.

The Code is a set of standards for good practice in relation to board leadership and is part of UK company law, which is overseen by the Financial Reporting Council.

Warner said that there will continue to be significant flaws in the way in which international sport is governed until the likes of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), FIFA and UEFA are headed by individuals that somehow are selected.

The IOC is currently led by German Thomas Bach, an Olympic gold medallist in men’s team foil fencing at the Montreal 1976 Games, while Warner’s fellow Briton Sebastian Coe, a two-time 1500 metres Olympic gold medallist, heads the IAAF.

Swiss-Italian Gianni Infantino and Slovenia’s Aleksander Čeferin were elected President of FIFA and UEFA respectively last year.

Speaking here at SportsPro Live, Warner said: "I spend far too much of my time, and I have done over 10 years, having to worry about how you get people elected to high office in International Federations.

"It’s a ball-breaker and it doesn’t necessarily lead to their sports being run in the right way.

"But I don’t know quite how it will be resolved because you’re asking turkeys to vote for Christmas."

Warner also said not all governing bodies in the UK should be "tarred with the same brush" as British Cycling, which has been marred by controversy in recent times. 

"If you role back a few years, cycling had no independent non-executive directors," he added. 

"Is it any wonder the problems that have emerged around bullying, the way women were treated in that organisation, the way Para-cyclists were treated?"

Warner was speaking in a session entitled "What next for governing bodies", which also featured Badminton England chief executive Adrian Christy.

Badminton was one of the five Olympic sports - along with archery, fencing, table tennis and weightlifting - which had its UK Sport funding cut entirely for the four-year Tokyo 2020 cycle.

It was a surprising omission from the funding list when it was announced in December after Marcus Ellis and Chris Langridge claimed an Olympic bronze medal in the men's doubles at Rio 2016 to exceed the sport’s medal target for the Games.

Warner, whose background is in the financial services industry, was extremely critical of the decision which he described as "disgraceful".

"Nothing would give a lot of people, including me, greater pleasure than seeing some of the sports which have been chopped from funding to go to Tokyo and win medals and be able to stick a metaphorical two fingers up to those that said right now they don’t have those chances," he said.

Christy spoke of his surprise at the decision, saying the organisation had not seen it coming.

"We’ve all seen funding alarm bells ringing for a few years now, but we just didn’t anticipate ours to come as quickly as it did given what we achieved last year," he said.

"The thing for us right now is financial resilience and financial sustainability.  

"I’m somebody who firmly believes that sport should always be funded by Government.

"I think we play a massive, massive role in society and the economic impact on this country.

"But I do also think that we can’t take funding for granted any longer and certainly the wake-up call that we’ve had in the last few months is that we absolutely won’t be doing that anymore."

Despite failing to overturn UK Sport's decision not to award them any financial support for the Tokyo 2020 cycle, Badminton England did benefit from Sport England’s third batch of four-year grants and has been given £2.8 million ($3.5 million/€3.3 million) to develop the next generation of top players.

This is on top of the £7.25 million ($9.05 million/€8.44 million) the non-departmental public body awarded in December to support its regular players.

Badminton England intends to use its funding to develop better technology and training practices so that they can cut the time it takes for a player to reach peak performance, a process which it claims to currently take eight to 12 years.

Additionally, young talented athletes on the England Junior Performance Programme will get individual support and be given access to sport science expertise.

The organisation will also strive to improve training environments and access to coaching by working closely with the National Badminton Centre in Milton Keynes and high-performance environments at a number of universities.

"I think there’s a different energy around our organisation at the moment, particularly from me," Christy added.

"I do feel really quite energised towards the team to grow and deliver our sport in the way that we have been doing in recent years, which I think has been very successful - our growth, our revenues - but we have now got to push so much harder and there is an energy about that."