They haven't labelled ours as higher tier breaches.
Not picking on you, but it surprises me how much misinformation there is knocking about when the reports are there in public record for all 4 verdicts so far
Ignore the 10 point verdict for a moment as it served only to eventually settle on an approximate benchmark for PSR deductions once the appeal was heard.
To give you the very abridged versions:
Everton - 6 points. Appeal docs didn't originally state how this was calculated, but we were given no credit for any of our arguments as to mitigation. 6 points was deemed to be appropriate for a breach of that level (£19.5m). It was later revealed in the FY23 decision report that the Appeal Board in this case increased an initial three-point penalty (now accepted as the starting penalty for any PSR breach) by one point for every £6.5 million or so and that "a breach in the order of 20%' was deserving of an additional three points, or one point for every 6.67% over the Upper Loss Threshold"
Nottingham Forest - 4 points. The penalty itself was set at 6 points but Forest were credited 2 points back for early admission of guilt and exceptional co-operation. None of their other points of mitigation were accepted. The £34.5m breach was deemed to be "significant" by the commission who, because Forest's breach overlapped into their EFL years with lower thresholds, said "The Commission considers that it would assist to band breaches into “minor”, “significant” or “major” breaches, to remove the focus on the absolute number, especially when different PSR Thresholds can apply." They did assert that a starting point of three points would be the benchmark for ANY PSR penalty, with the additional points added based on the severity of the breach.
Everton - 2 points. The commission in this case rejected the Forest commission's methodology of banding breaches into categories. Instead they settled on a formula of 3 points for a breach (as per the Forest commission) but also rejected the formula used by the Everton FY22 appeal board of about £6.5m per point penalty. Instead they decided the breach here exceeded the Upper Loss Threshold by 15.8%. They believed that was less than “in the order of 20%” and meant an extra 3 points would be too much, so 2 points seemed the right amount to add onto the starting position of 3. The commission accepted the double jeopardy argument and said that since the latest FY23 losses were 51.6% of the overall PSR loss, they would deduct 2 points from the 5 based on the fact that they could only deal in whole numbers. We were then given credit for early admission and that, combined with the evidenced loss of revenue of the USM Finch Farm deal, was enough to constitute another point reduction, bringing it down to 2.
The major issue which sort of gets missed (because hundreds of pages of legal speak is too much for your average fan to want to digest) is that all 4 hearing outcomes have resulted in different methodologies applied when coming up with the penalty.
FFS.
