Here’s the Martin Samuel article from the Times…he has no concrete evidence that we will be charged on Monday.
This is how convinced the Premier League is of the worth of its profit and sustainability rules. From August 2024, they change. Quite how isn’t yet in the public domain, but the expectation is for a system more aligned with the Uefa model, focusing on wages to turnover. So, on Monday, the likelihood is that Everton and Nottingham Forest will be charged and, if found guilty, potentially relegated, for falling foul of a system rated so highly by its enforcers that it has eight months to live. There’s governance for you. Watch out, the Post Office.
Changing profit and sustainability rules (PSR) is a tacit admission that, in the present state, they are no longer fit for purpose. This would figure as the system hasn’t really evolved since 2014 and does not take into account changes in the football landscape. Yet, while admitting that the rules need updating, the punishments have become draconian if Everton’s ten-point deduction is now the benchmark. This will come to its head when Manchester City eventually answer 115 charges for breaching rules in a system that has already been discarded. It could be that Everton may even pass PSR, as they will exist in August, having suffered relegation in May under the redundant system.
And rules are rules, as we often hear. Clubs break rules as they were, not as they will be at a future date. But punishment shouldn’t be punishment, not on such a ruinous scale, when so much is in flux. There should be proportionate tempering that takes this into account. Instead, the Premier League insists on donning the black cap. Peter Allen and Gwynne Evans were the last men sentenced to death in Britain, and were hanged on August 13, 1964. Capital punishment was later suspended and finally abolished in 1969. The Premier League, meanwhile, is intent on hurrying through capital sentences, in the weeks before capital punishment is done. And is the sentence fitting the crime? In the present five-year period — from summer 2019 to summer 2024 — Everton are 18th in the Premier League net spend table, with only Luton Town and Brighton & Hove Albion below them. It is hard, then, to view this club as the epitome of all that is wrong in football.
The argument that financial controls are what makes English football competitive also foundered in a week when this season’s success story, Aston Villa, and the bright sparks of last year, Newcastle United, both admitted, through the Villa head coach, Unai Emery, and the Newcastle chief executive, Darren Eales, that they would have to sell good players to comply with PSR rules. These are two great clubs finally in a position to compete after so long in the wilderness. And forcing them to shed talent to meet regulations that are being consigned to the bin before the end of that same transfer window is of benefit to the English game?
So Everton and Forest are lawyering up. Everton have engaged Laurence Rabinowitz KC to fight their case, Forest have enlisted Nick De Marco KC. They’ll be condemned for doing that, too, if City’s experience is anything to go by. Many feel it unfair that City’s lawyers have slowed the progress of the 115 charges to a crawl, yet it’s a strange world in which a club can’t use lawyers to fight a legal process.
Those who have watched Mr Bates vs The Post Office will know what can happen on entering court armed with little beyond a feeling of righteousness. The clubs may not win but, with the Premier League coming over all masterful, they would be mad not to meet a legal challenge head-on.
If this were a gold-standard system, if it took into account the way the game has evolved through ownership, transfer fees, compound interest, inflation and a hundred other tiny factors, the punishments would be more palatable.
As it is, a soon-to-be discarded system could be about to do immeasurable, potentially irreparable, harm. Profit and sustainability? As Premier League entities, Everton and Forest may yet be regulated to death.
