The Footie Thread

[HampshireHog]

3 excellent goals so far.

I’d really like Brentford to get into Europe next year but fear they’ll struggle to stay in the PL if they do.

 

[Lord Tyrion]

mmm....looks like my support isn't going to be nearly enough to help Wolves who appear to have problems all over the park.

Apparently it is enough

 

[nickjdavis]

3 excellent goals so far.

I’d really like Brentford to get into Europe next year but fear they’ll struggle to stay in the PL if they do.

mmm....if they struggle at home to Wolves then a few of the European regulars will see them off without issue.

Come on Wolves....lets see a winner.

 

[HampshireHog]

mmm....if they struggle at home to Wolves then a few of the European regulars will see them off without issue.

Come on Wolves....let’s see a winner.

Galatasaray?

 

[nickjdavis]

...well that result blows the race for 7th place wide open.

 

[Neilds]

With the amount of debt in football, how can anyone say that the rules on FFP are working? Most PL clubs have debts in the 10s, if not 100s of millions but are still said to be successful, doesn't make sense to me.

 

[Lord Tyrion]

With the amount of debt in football, how can anyone say that the rules on FFP are working? Most PL clubs have debts in the 10s, if not 100s of millions but are still said to be successful, doesn't make sense to me.

You only have to see the debt that Man Utd announced recently to realise the nonsense of FFP or accounting in general

 

[Billysboots]

You only have to see the debt that Man Utd announced recently to realise the nonsense of FFP or accounting in general

United are a slightly unusual case in as much as a huge cause of the debt was the Glazer family’s purchase of the club. They didn’t use their own money, they borrowed the best part of £800m and then loaded all of that onto the club.

 

[Lord Tyrion]

United are a slightly unusual case in as much as a huge cause of the debt was the Glazer family’s purchase of the club. They didn’t use their own money, they borrowed the best part of £800m and then loaded all of that onto the club.

Yes, but it is still debt on the club. How it got there is scandalous, but it is still there.

Is there a date for when it will be paid back or is it interest payments only?

 

[Billysboots]

Yes, but it is still debt on the club. How it got there is scandalous, but it is still there.

Is there a date for when it will be paid back or is it interest payments only?

I have no idea what the long term plan is. But, until such time as the Glazer’s sell, United have effectively bought themselves for the best part of a billion quid. And people question why the fans are cheesed off.

 

[Arthur Wedge]

Yes, but it is still debt on the club. How it got there is scandalous, but it is still there.

Is there a date for when it will be paid back or is it interest payments only?

The bank will never be worried about it as they just hoover up the interest payments each year

 

[Swango1980]

Yes, but it is still debt on the club. How it got there is scandalous, but it is still there.

Is there a date for when it will be paid back or is it interest payments only?

In short, no

Legacy debt (from buyout) repayment not expected until 2030-2036. Refinancing expected in 2027. Then there is the Stadium Project, and how that will impact upon debt. Hopefully all you tax payers agree that you should pay for it. It'll be a lovely stadium, something for all you Brits to be proud of

 

[Red devil]

United are a slightly unusual case in as much as a huge cause of the debt was the Glazer family’s purchase of the club. They didn’t use their own money, they borrowed the best part of £800m and then loaded all of that onto the club.

Like buying it with a credit card and only making the minimum payment every month

 

[road2ruin]

Lifted from X but an interesting article into the Chelsea affair especially when you contrast it to the penalties applied to both Forest and Everton....

How Chelsea's Sanction Agreement brings Premier League consistency issues into sharp focus

Between 2011 and 2018, Chelsea Football Club made at least 36 secret payments totalling £47.5 million through offshore entities associated with Roman Abramovich. There may well have been more - those we know about were uncovered by a combination of Boehly/Clearlake due diligence and investigative media coverage.

The payments were made to players, agents and staff, were not disclosed to the Premier League, and were, in the league’s own words, “not only obvious and deliberate breaches of the rules, but also … involved deception and concealment in relation to financial matters.” Over the same period, Chelsea won two Premier League titles, two FA Cups, the Champions League and the Europa League.

The sanction for that wholesale, deliberate, concealed and deceptive conduct? A fine of less than the compensation paid to Graham Potter. And neither the new owners nor Chelsea themselves will even pay that. Ridiculously, it will be a disputed charitable foundation that will effectively pay every penny.

The Premier League’s published Sanction Agreement runs to 28 pages. It is technically coherent but beneath its careful language lies a series of methodological choices that, taken together, produce a result so favourable to Chelsea that it raises serious questions about whether the league’s enforcement framework has been applied consistently or proportionately.

What was admitted, and what was quietly ignored

The facts themselves are not in dispute. Payments were routed through third-party entities to ensure players chose Chelsea over rival clubs. The Times reported last year that Eden Hazard signed for the club after Manchester United refused to make an off-the-books payment of more than £5 million to his representative. The names include many transfer “hits” of that generation: Hazard, Willian, Ramires, David Luiz, André Schürrle, Nemanja Matic, Samuel Eto’o and others. Payments were also made to senior figures including the club’s former director of football Frank Arnesen and scout Piet de Visser.

The Sanction Agreement is notable, however, for a conspicuous omission. Throughout its analysis of aggravating and mitigating factors, the phrase “sporting advantage” does not appear once. This is a remarkable gap in circumstances where secret payments were made specifically to ensure that Chelsea could acquire players that competitors were unwilling or unable to obtain through legitimate means - a sporting advantage. Those players undoubtedly contributed to Chelsea’s success during that period. One of them delivered a near £100m accounting profit when he finally departed in 2019 which, quite apart from helping with Profitability and Sustainability Rules (PSR) for FY2019-2021, also enabled the next tranche of acquisitions that culminated in the 2020/2021 Champions League and led to the club’s qualification into the lucrative Club World Cup.

The Premier League board went to some lengths to model out the counterfactual of whether the payments would have caused a breach of the PSR between 2011 and 2018 had they been properly accounted for. The concealed amounts, it was concluded, would not have pushed Chelsea beyond the permitted rolling three year £105 million loss threshold even if properly disclosed.

That finding then did much of the work that followed, functioning as a kind of absolution that shaped every subsequent step of the analysis. The question of what other competitive benefit was derived does not appear to have received any attention whatsoever. Likewise, nobody seems to have asked why Chelsea and Abramovich would have gone to the trouble of having multiple senior executives and directors conspire to hide almost £50m of payments from auditors, leagues, regulators and fans alike.

Those questions should have sat at the very heart of the matter and a proper sentencing framework would have begun there as it has done in each of the recent cases with Everton, Nottingham Forest and Leicester City.
Moreover, the absence of a PSR breach does not diminish the seriousness of the underlying deception; it merely means the payments served a purpose other than masking PSR losses. Which returns us, inescapably, to the question the league chose not to ask: if not to conceal financial losses, then why? And with what sporting consequence?

A methodology inverted

Standard disciplinary practice, whether in sport, law or professional regulation, follows a recognisable sequence. First, the seriousness of the breaches are established, and a starting-point sanction is identified. Then mitigating and aggravating factors are considered, adjusting that starting point upward or downward as appropriate. The aggravating factors are applied to increase severity. The mitigating factors reduce it. This has been the process of every recent Premier League case.
Notwithstanding that a Sanction Agreement is specifically designed to avoid the normal adversarial independent commission, the Premier League’s approach here departed from that sequence in a manner that deserves scrutiny.
The Premier League board identified the aggravating factors clearly enough: the length of time over which the conduct occurred, spanning what it acknowledged to be an eight-year period; the scale and number of the payments; the fact that they occurred with the knowledge and approval of senior officers and directors; and the deliberate and concealed nature of the deception. The board also stated that it: “considers that the obligation to act in utmost good faith requires Clubs to act honestly and fairly in their dealings with the League, including, in particular, by fully, frankly and accurately disclosing all financial information to the League which is relevant, or likely to be material, to any decisions to be made under the Rules. Failure to do so is not only a breach of Rule B.16 (as it then was) in and of itself, it also aggravates the other breaches of the Rules admitted by the Club”

It is worth remembering that although overturned on appeal in the Everton case, the original independent commission felt that failing to act in good faith and being “less than frank” with the league, was worthy of between 1 and 4 points of additional sanction.

In this case, it should be barely controversial that the aggravating factors applied to any starting point, would suggest a sanction at the serious end of the available range.
The potential mitigating factors were also identified as follows:

• the new owners had voluntarily disclosed the existence of potential breaches;
• Chelsea had provided exceptional cooperation throughout, reviewing in excess of 200,000 documents;
• the conduct had taken place entirely under the previous ownership and was not the responsibility of those now running the club;
• that the unprecedented circumstances of the acquisition, with the former owner subject to government sanctions and the club facing potential insolvency, had materially constrained the time available for due diligence; and
• that a substantial financial penalty of €10 million had already been imposed by UEFA in respect of overlapping conduct and that the FA was likely to impose a further significant sanction in its own proceedings covering some of the same transactions.

What happened next is where the analysis becomes difficult to defend on grounds of internal consistency or simple fairness.
The board concluded that two sporting sanctions were potentially appropriate: a transfer ban and/or a points deduction. It then decided that a points deduction was not appropriate at all, citing mitigating factors. Having removed the most material sanction entirely on the basis of mitigation, it proceeded to apply the same mitigating factors a second time, to reduce the financial penalty by approximately 50 per cent from what it described as the otherwise appropriate level (£20 million). And then, having halved the fine, it applied the same mitigation factors a third time, to suspend the transfer ban rather than impose it unconditionally.
This is not proportionality. These are the same mitigating factors doing three rounds of work on behalf of the same club. In any coherent sentencing framework, mitigation is a discount, not a skeleton key that opens (or closes) every door sequentially. Once exceptional co-operation has been credited to eliminate a points deduction, it has been spent. It cannot then be used again to halve a fine and used again once more to convert a transfer ban into a theoretical future threat.

The Forest comparison

The Premier League’s own conduct in comparable proceedings makes this triple deployment of mitigation particularly hard to square.

In the Nottingham Forest PSR case, the league submitted formally that a 50 per cent discount for cooperation and an early plea would be “disproportionate to the conduct being rewarded” and would “give too much credit for admission and co-operation.” The league went further, arguing before the independent commission that the maximum permissible reduction in sanction for a guilty plea, including by reference to the Sentencing Council’s guidelines, was one third. It argued this with vigour. It won that argument. Forest received a four-point deduction.

In the Chelsea matter, co-operation and voluntary disclosure were used not to discount a starting point sanction by a third, or even a half, but to eliminate the prospect of sporting punishment altogether before being applied again to substantially reduce the financial penalty that remained by half.

No two cases are identical and the Chelsea circumstances do carry genuine mitigating weight. The conduct occurred under previous ownership. The new owners voluntarily disclosed the issues and co-operated throughout a lengthy investigation. These are not trivial considerations.

But it is worth noting that the voluntary disclosure was not entirely without self-interest. The Premier League rules require self reporting. A failure to do so would have been a further breach once discovered in due diligence. Crediting it as exceptional altruism, and then doing so three times over, strains the logic of the mitigating discount.

The Everton “sanction policy”

In the Everton proceedings, we learned that on 10 August 2023 the Premier League board adopted a sanction policy that it considered to be appropriate to breaches of the PSR - a fixed starting point of six points for any breach, with an additional point for every £5 million by which the club had exceeded the £105 million threshold. Whilst in the hearing itself there was some walking back of that position by the Premier League, it remains difficult to reconcile this board view of sanctions for financial matters with where it landed in this Chelsea case.

Everton, whose PSR breaches related to accounting treatment, disputed exceptional circumstances and overspending rather than to deliberate concealment or deception, ultimately lost six points in their first case. In both Forest and Everton, mitigation only trimmed a starting point including, in Forest’s case, where exceptional co-operation and early admission was accepted and endorsed by the Premier League.
Those clubs received sporting consequences that had immediate effects on their final league positions and in Everton’s case, their proximity to relegation. In addition, points deductions also meant financial penalties in the form of lower merit awards.

Who actually pays, and to whom the money flows

When Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital acquired Chelsea for £2.5 billion in May 2022, they retained £150 million from the agreed purchase price specifically to cover the cost of any proceedings arising from the Abramovich era. It is from this fund that the £10.75 million fine will be met. The UEFA fine of €10 million, paid in 2024, has already been drawn from the same reserve. A further sanction from the FA, which has brought its own charges covering overlapping conduct, will likely draw on whatever remains.

So neither Chelsea nor its new owners are paying anyway. What makes this arrangement particularly striking is its terminal destination. Under the terms of the purchase, whatever sum remains of that £150 million holdback after all proceedings have concluded will be released to Abramovich’s vehicle, Fordstam, in May 2027 and form part of the currently frozen cash pile.
Those frozen assets are reportedly to be transferred to a charitable foundation for the benefit of the victims of the Ukrainian war. So every pound the Premier League collects will reduce the amount that will go to the foundation and ultimately, Ukraine.

What this all means for Manchester City

Manchester City are watching all of this carefully. Their case, involving 115 alleged charges of financial rule breaches spanning a decade, awaits the initial decision from the independent commission 15 months after the hearing concluded. The Sanction Agreement with Chelsea contains a notable passage - absent the cooperation and voluntary disclosure, the board suggests, an appropriate sanction would have been a ban from registering new players for two complete and consecutive transfer windows.

The remarkable implication is that deliberate financial deception, even of the most serious kind, does not in itself automatically warrant a points deduction. City’s legal team will have noted that surprising conclusion with interest especially if, like Chelsea, City can show that any established breaches made no difference to its PSR compliance.

Another two tier system?

None of the above is to say that the Chelsea sanction is straightforwardly wrong in every respect. Co-operation should be rewarded. The conduct of the previous ownership is a genuine distinction from cases where the incumbent club is responsible for the breach. The absence of a PSR consequence is a material fact. And Sanction Agreements (ie settlements) are different from disputed charges in front of an independent commission.
But regulation draws its authority from consistency and credibility, not from the technical defensibility of individual decisions taken in isolation. That is why a Sanction Agreement needs ratification from an independent commission - in this case one including Robert Glancy KC who heard the Premier League’s views on co-operation first hand in the Forest case. When a league simultaneously argues before an independent commission that a 50 per cent co-operation discount is excessive, then later agrees to a sanction in which co-operation eliminates sporting consequences altogether before also halving the financial penalty, it is not applying a single coherent framework. It is applying different starting points to different clubs in different forums, and hoping the contrast is not noticed.

It has been noticed.

When Everton supporters ask why their club lost points, twice, for overspending while Chelsea has faced no sporting consequence for deliberate, concealed and systematic deception, the honest answer is that the rules, as applied, do not produce the same answer for everyone.

And when Richard Masters mistakenly referred to “small clubs” in the DCMS hearing in early 2024, he was forced to clarify that “It would be incorrect to infer from this that there is any unfair treatment based on Club size, as suggested in the Committee’s media statement. Indeed, the point I made was the opposite, in that the Premier League Board applies the Rules consistently, irrespective of the Club in question.”

Never has that question of consistency been more in focus.

 

[4LEX]

Like buying it with a credit card and only making the minimum payment every month

The greatest sports business deal of all time really.

Used about £40m of their own money, borrowed the rest and used the clubs profits to service it the debt. Saw the value of the club sky rocket and will walk away with around £5-6 billion profit when they sell. Already made £1.25b from Ratcliffe for 25%. You wonder what the 75% will be worth in a decade with a new stadium and if there's some serious success on the pitch?

It's morally wrong but genius from their point of view.

Sir Alex largely behind a lot of their good fortune. His row with two shareholders opened the door to The Glazers buying their shares and his quality allowed the club to continue winning major trophies from 2005-2013 when he retired. During those years The Glazers refinanced and reduced their risk to practically zero.

Most other clubs use fancy accounting to cover losses, Man Utd actually make a profit despite throwing away £50m a year plus in interest. If you look at the amount of interest paid over the 21 years it will total over a billion. A billion just stolen fron the club. At steel prices a decade ago, that's not far off a new ground.

 

[Arthur Wedge]

The greatest sports business deal of all time really.

Used about £40m of their own money, borrowed the rest and used the clubs profits to service it the debt. Saw the value of the club sky rocket and will walk away with around £5-6 billion profit when they sell. Already made £1.25b from Ratcliffe for 25%. You wonder what the 75% will be worth in a decade with a new stadium and if there's some serious success on the pitch?

It's morally wrong but genius from their point of view.

Sir Alex largely behind a lot of their good fortune. His row with two shareholders opened the door to The Glazers buying their shares and his quality allowed the club to continue winning major trophies from 2005-2013 when he retired. During those years The Glazers refinanced and reduced their risk to practically zero.

Most other clubs use fancy accounting to cover losses, Man Utd actually make a profit despite throwing away £50m a year plus in interest. If you look at the amount of interest paid over the 21 years it will total over a billion. A billion just stolen fron the club. At steel prices a decade ago, that's not far off a new ground.

Hicks and Gillette are a perfect example of when that model doesn’t working

To be able to service the debt the club needs to be bringing on huge revenues

That was the issue with Hicks etc - didn’t have the revenues and they didn’t have the money

 

[Red devil]

Hicks and Gillette are a perfect example of when that model doesn’t working

To be able to service the debt the club needs to be bringing on huge revenues

That was the issue with Hicks etc - didn’t have the revenues and they didn’t have the money

You had a lucky escape.

 

[Arthur Wedge]

You had a lucky escape.

Didn’t feel like it at the time

Was very scary period , don’t think it would have happened but the threats of calling in the loans and administration certainly woke up a lot of people

Too many at the time were blaming Rafa etc until the whole truth came out

FSG have made mistakes but they have been excellent owners and wouldn’t want to change them for anyone that I see in modern football

 

[Slime]

Just come accross this and I find it quite astonishing, especially when you realise how poor United have been these last few years when compared to both Real Madrid and Barcelona.

 

[Pin-seeker]

Lifted from X but an interesting article into the Chelsea affair especially when you contrast it to the penalties applied to both Forest and Everton....

How Chelsea's Sanction Agreement brings Premier League consistency issues into sharp focus

Between 2011 and 2018, Chelsea Football Club made at least 36 secret payments totalling £47.5 million through offshore entities associated with Roman Abramovich. There may well have been more - those we know about were uncovered by a combination of Boehly/Clearlake due diligence and investigative media coverage.

The payments were made to players, agents and staff, were not disclosed to the Premier League, and were, in the league’s own words, “not only obvious and deliberate breaches of the rules, but also … involved deception and concealment in relation to financial matters.” Over the same period, Chelsea won two Premier League titles, two FA Cups, the Champions League and the Europa League.

The sanction for that wholesale, deliberate, concealed and deceptive conduct? A fine of less than the compensation paid to Graham Potter. And neither the new owners nor Chelsea themselves will even pay that. Ridiculously, it will be a disputed charitable foundation that will effectively pay every penny.

The Premier League’s published Sanction Agreement runs to 28 pages. It is technically coherent but beneath its careful language lies a series of methodological choices that, taken together, produce a result so favourable to Chelsea that it raises serious questions about whether the league’s enforcement framework has been applied consistently or proportionately.

What was admitted, and what was quietly ignored

The facts themselves are not in dispute. Payments were routed through third-party entities to ensure players chose Chelsea over rival clubs. The Times reported last year that Eden Hazard signed for the club after Manchester United refused to make an off-the-books payment of more than £5 million to his representative. The names include many transfer “hits” of that generation: Hazard, Willian, Ramires, David Luiz, André Schürrle, Nemanja Matic, Samuel Eto’o and others. Payments were also made to senior figures including the club’s former director of football Frank Arnesen and scout Piet de Visser.

The Sanction Agreement is notable, however, for a conspicuous omission. Throughout its analysis of aggravating and mitigating factors, the phrase “sporting advantage” does not appear once. This is a remarkable gap in circumstances where secret payments were made specifically to ensure that Chelsea could acquire players that competitors were unwilling or unable to obtain through legitimate means - a sporting advantage. Those players undoubtedly contributed to Chelsea’s success during that period. One of them delivered a near £100m accounting profit when he finally departed in 2019 which, quite apart from helping with Profitability and Sustainability Rules (PSR) for FY2019-2021, also enabled the next tranche of acquisitions that culminated in the 2020/2021 Champions League and led to the club’s qualification into the lucrative Club World Cup.

The Premier League board went to some lengths to model out the counterfactual of whether the payments would have caused a breach of the PSR between 2011 and 2018 had they been properly accounted for. The concealed amounts, it was concluded, would not have pushed Chelsea beyond the permitted rolling three year £105 million loss threshold even if properly disclosed.

That finding then did much of the work that followed, functioning as a kind of absolution that shaped every subsequent step of the analysis. The question of what other competitive benefit was derived does not appear to have received any attention whatsoever. Likewise, nobody seems to have asked why Chelsea and Abramovich would have gone to the trouble of having multiple senior executives and directors conspire to hide almost £50m of payments from auditors, leagues, regulators and fans alike.

Those questions should have sat at the very heart of the matter and a proper sentencing framework would have begun there as it has done in each of the recent cases with Everton, Nottingham Forest and Leicester City.
Moreover, the absence of a PSR breach does not diminish the seriousness of the underlying deception; it merely means the payments served a purpose other than masking PSR losses. Which returns us, inescapably, to the question the league chose not to ask: if not to conceal financial losses, then why? And with what sporting consequence?

A methodology inverted

Standard disciplinary practice, whether in sport, law or professional regulation, follows a recognisable sequence. First, the seriousness of the breaches are established, and a starting-point sanction is identified. Then mitigating and aggravating factors are considered, adjusting that starting point upward or downward as appropriate. The aggravating factors are applied to increase severity. The mitigating factors reduce it. This has been the process of every recent Premier League case.
Notwithstanding that a Sanction Agreement is specifically designed to avoid the normal adversarial independent commission, the Premier League’s approach here departed from that sequence in a manner that deserves scrutiny.
The Premier League board identified the aggravating factors clearly enough: the length of time over which the conduct occurred, spanning what it acknowledged to be an eight-year period; the scale and number of the payments; the fact that they occurred with the knowledge and approval of senior officers and directors; and the deliberate and concealed nature of the deception. The board also stated that it: “considers that the obligation to act in utmost good faith requires Clubs to act honestly and fairly in their dealings with the League, including, in particular, by fully, frankly and accurately disclosing all financial information to the League which is relevant, or likely to be material, to any decisions to be made under the Rules. Failure to do so is not only a breach of Rule B.16 (as it then was) in and of itself, it also aggravates the other breaches of the Rules admitted by the Club”

It is worth remembering that although overturned on appeal in the Everton case, the original independent commission felt that failing to act in good faith and being “less than frank” with the league, was worthy of between 1 and 4 points of additional sanction.

In this case, it should be barely controversial that the aggravating factors applied to any starting point, would suggest a sanction at the serious end of the available range.
The potential mitigating factors were also identified as follows:

• the new owners had voluntarily disclosed the existence of potential breaches;
• Chelsea had provided exceptional cooperation throughout, reviewing in excess of 200,000 documents;
• the conduct had taken place entirely under the previous ownership and was not the responsibility of those now running the club;
• that the unprecedented circumstances of the acquisition, with the former owner subject to government sanctions and the club facing potential insolvency, had materially constrained the time available for due diligence; and
• that a substantial financial penalty of €10 million had already been imposed by UEFA in respect of overlapping conduct and that the FA was likely to impose a further significant sanction in its own proceedings covering some of the same transactions.

What happened next is where the analysis becomes difficult to defend on grounds of internal consistency or simple fairness.
The board concluded that two sporting sanctions were potentially appropriate: a transfer ban and/or a points deduction. It then decided that a points deduction was not appropriate at all, citing mitigating factors. Having removed the most material sanction entirely on the basis of mitigation, it proceeded to apply the same mitigating factors a second time, to reduce the financial penalty by approximately 50 per cent from what it described as the otherwise appropriate level (£20 million). And then, having halved the fine, it applied the same mitigation factors a third time, to suspend the transfer ban rather than impose it unconditionally.
This is not proportionality. These are the same mitigating factors doing three rounds of work on behalf of the same club. In any coherent sentencing framework, mitigation is a discount, not a skeleton key that opens (or closes) every door sequentially. Once exceptional co-operation has been credited to eliminate a points deduction, it has been spent. It cannot then be used again to halve a fine and used again once more to convert a transfer ban into a theoretical future threat.

The Forest comparison

The Premier League’s own conduct in comparable proceedings makes this triple deployment of mitigation particularly hard to square.

In the Nottingham Forest PSR case, the league submitted formally that a 50 per cent discount for cooperation and an early plea would be “disproportionate to the conduct being rewarded” and would “give too much credit for admission and co-operation.” The league went further, arguing before the independent commission that the maximum permissible reduction in sanction for a guilty plea, including by reference to the Sentencing Council’s guidelines, was one third. It argued this with vigour. It won that argument. Forest received a four-point deduction.

In the Chelsea matter, co-operation and voluntary disclosure were used not to discount a starting point sanction by a third, or even a half, but to eliminate the prospect of sporting punishment altogether before being applied again to substantially reduce the financial penalty that remained by half.

No two cases are identical and the Chelsea circumstances do carry genuine mitigating weight. The conduct occurred under previous ownership. The new owners voluntarily disclosed the issues and co-operated throughout a lengthy investigation. These are not trivial considerations.

But it is worth noting that the voluntary disclosure was not entirely without self-interest. The Premier League rules require self reporting. A failure to do so would have been a further breach once discovered in due diligence. Crediting it as exceptional altruism, and then doing so three times over, strains the logic of the mitigating discount.

The Everton “sanction policy”

In the Everton proceedings, we learned that on 10 August 2023 the Premier League board adopted a sanction policy that it considered to be appropriate to breaches of the PSR - a fixed starting point of six points for any breach, with an additional point for every £5 million by which the club had exceeded the £105 million threshold. Whilst in the hearing itself there was some walking back of that position by the Premier League, it remains difficult to reconcile this board view of sanctions for financial matters with where it landed in this Chelsea case.

Everton, whose PSR breaches related to accounting treatment, disputed exceptional circumstances and overspending rather than to deliberate concealment or deception, ultimately lost six points in their first case. In both Forest and Everton, mitigation only trimmed a starting point including, in Forest’s case, where exceptional co-operation and early admission was accepted and endorsed by the Premier League.
Those clubs received sporting consequences that had immediate effects on their final league positions and in Everton’s case, their proximity to relegation. In addition, points deductions also meant financial penalties in the form of lower merit awards.

Who actually pays, and to whom the money flows

When Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital acquired Chelsea for £2.5 billion in May 2022, they retained £150 million from the agreed purchase price specifically to cover the cost of any proceedings arising from the Abramovich era. It is from this fund that the £10.75 million fine will be met. The UEFA fine of €10 million, paid in 2024, has already been drawn from the same reserve. A further sanction from the FA, which has brought its own charges covering overlapping conduct, will likely draw on whatever remains.

So neither Chelsea nor its new owners are paying anyway. What makes this arrangement particularly striking is its terminal destination. Under the terms of the purchase, whatever sum remains of that £150 million holdback after all proceedings have concluded will be released to Abramovich’s vehicle, Fordstam, in May 2027 and form part of the currently frozen cash pile.
Those frozen assets are reportedly to be transferred to a charitable foundation for the benefit of the victims of the Ukrainian war. So every pound the Premier League collects will reduce the amount that will go to the foundation and ultimately, Ukraine.

What this all means for Manchester City

Manchester City are watching all of this carefully. Their case, involving 115 alleged charges of financial rule breaches spanning a decade, awaits the initial decision from the independent commission 15 months after the hearing concluded. The Sanction Agreement with Chelsea contains a notable passage - absent the cooperation and voluntary disclosure, the board suggests, an appropriate sanction would have been a ban from registering new players for two complete and consecutive transfer windows.

The remarkable implication is that deliberate financial deception, even of the most serious kind, does not in itself automatically warrant a points deduction. City’s legal team will have noted that surprising conclusion with interest especially if, like Chelsea, City can show that any established breaches made no difference to its PSR compliance.

Another two tier system?

None of the above is to say that the Chelsea sanction is straightforwardly wrong in every respect. Co-operation should be rewarded. The conduct of the previous ownership is a genuine distinction from cases where the incumbent club is responsible for the breach. The absence of a PSR consequence is a material fact. And Sanction Agreements (ie settlements) are different from disputed charges in front of an independent commission.
But regulation draws its authority from consistency and credibility, not from the technical defensibility of individual decisions taken in isolation. That is why a Sanction Agreement needs ratification from an independent commission - in this case one including Robert Glancy KC who heard the Premier League’s views on co-operation first hand in the Forest case. When a league simultaneously argues before an independent commission that a 50 per cent co-operation discount is excessive, then later agrees to a sanction in which co-operation eliminates sporting consequences altogether before also halving the financial penalty, it is not applying a single coherent framework. It is applying different starting points to different clubs in different forums, and hoping the contrast is not noticed.

It has been noticed.

When Everton supporters ask why their club lost points, twice, for overspending while Chelsea has faced no sporting consequence for deliberate, concealed and systematic deception, the honest answer is that the rules, as applied, do not produce the same answer for everyone.

And when Richard Masters mistakenly referred to “small clubs” in the DCMS hearing in early 2024, he was forced to clarify that “It would be incorrect to infer from this that there is any unfair treatment based on Club size, as suggested in the Committee’s media statement. Indeed, the point I made was the opposite, in that the Premier League Board applies the Rules consistently, irrespective of the Club in question.”

Never has that question of consistency been more in focus.

Not a chance I’m reading all that