Regulation in the time of conspiracy theories is proving a bind for the Premier League

How on earth do you even begin to apply any semblance of 'rules' when everybody believes that everyone else is out to get specifically them and them alone?

There are times when, with the absolute best will in the world, you look at the discourse surrounding football and start to wonder whether people are being deliberately obtuse. As Everton and Nottingham Forest were hauled before the beak over their spending, the clarion call of the apparently witless started to become audible yet again. “But what about the Manchester City charges?”

So, once more, for the hard of understanding. If proved, the 115 charges levelled against Manchester City will, if confirmed, be a whole other order of financial chicanery, the sort of financial cloak and dagger that would be considered a highly serious matter in just about any sphere of business. Just the allegation that City’s owners systematically and significantly blocked the Premier League’s investigation alone makes this a completely different investigation to that which has faced these other two clubs.

And then you have to take into account that City will throw not just the kitchen sink but the entire kitchen—or perhaps even some sort of gold-plated mansion—at wriggling out of it. Every single aspect of this far more complicated set of charges has to be forensically checked. Yes, it’s going to take considerably longer than the considerably more open and shut cases of Everton and Nottingham Forest.

It is reasonable to argue that, by coming down so hard on Everton in the first place, the Premier League (and their independent commissioners) have made a rod for their own back. In galaxy-brained football world, the assumption has already been made that if Everton were to be docked ten points for their shenanigans, then City will have to be docked at least a million, while the instant gratification of the world of football doesn’t sit comfortably with the sedate pace at which legal wheels can turn when matters become complex.

And all of this comes before we even start on the partisan tribalism which means that many—likely most—fans will want their clubs to avoid punishment no matter what they did wrong while demanding that others are punished for the same. Newcastle supporters were perfectly happy with FFP regulations until they were bought by somebody richer than Croesus.

This January, with Newcastle hamstrung in the transfer window by their previous overspending, there have been a number of articles written by tame journalists arguing that financial restrictions should be lifted because the club cannot be ‘competitive’ without it. It would at least be more honest if someone wrote an article on the subject entitled, “Why won’t the Premier League let us buy the title this season?”

FFP long ago became impossible to discuss in anything like a serious or sensible matter because everyone’s a conspiracy theorist, nowadays. If you believe Everton’s supporters, the Premier League is “corrupt”, even though precisely zero evidence of corruption has ever been brought to the table. The Mayor of Manchester has started weighing in on the subject to such an extent that the people of the city that he’s supposed to be governing could be forgiven wondering why he’s spending so much time fixating on goings-on in another city (that a good number of them don’t even like very much) forty-odd miles up the road.

Then, of course, you also have to add ‘refereeing standards’ and VAR to this increasingly toxic stew. This is, of course, a whole other can of worms, but it won’t stop people from theorising that refereeing is all part of the same conspiracy. When the supporters of every club that has a 50/50 decision go against them starts complaining that the scales are tilted against them, the idea that there’s some sort of ‘conspiracy’ afoot seems somewhat ridiculous.

But that hasn’t stopped it from happening anyway. And those who believe that Everton are on the receiving end of it won’t be persuaded by the fact that if there was a ‘shadowy cartel’ seeking to relegate that particular club for some reason presumably, it would have been substantially easier to do so when they were hovering around the relegation places, which is just about any time over the last couple of years. Everton, the second longest serving top flight club, a club which has been playing at this level uninterrupted now for 70 years, are not the subject of a ‘conspiracy’ to relegate them.

The same could be said for Nottingham Forest. Everybody knew at the time that Forest’s ascent to the Premier League was risky in the first place because they’d been so dependent on loan players from the Premier League to get there. This was the reason they needed to bring in an almost completely new squad in the summer of 2022 in the first place. And their spending was enormous, without that many players that they could sell on to mitigate the cost of bringing in replacements.

Nottingham Forest’s net spend on transfers in the summer of 2022 was almost £135m, just £2m short of the £137m that they made from television and prize money in the season that followed. This figure, of course, doesn’t take into account wages or performance-related bonuses. Even taking into account amortisation, paying in instalments, and the various other accounting sleights of hand which have become commonplace in the spending of football clubs in recent years, there really is no other way to describe that level of spending than as hopelessly unsustainable.

It is not difficult to imagine how Forest could be saved by these regulations. It’s not difficult to visualise a world in which the club is relegated from the Premier League with a squad of players that they can’t shift, with wages too high for others to be interested and no relegation clauses written into contracts. All it would take would be for Angelos Marinakis to decide that he couldn’t be bothered with underwriting this level of financial profligacy any more and walk away, and the club could be sent into a financial downward spiral from which it would prove difficult to recover. It can hardly be said that we haven’t witnessed this before.

To an extent, Everton were unlucky. The timing of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was disastrous for that club, although it might also be added that the role of ‘main sponsor’ Alisher Usmanov probably deserved closer attention at the time than it received. But again, this was an arrangement that had been in place for several seasons. No thought ever seems to have been given to what would happen if Usmanov wasn’t there any more, and then suddenly he wasn’t. That sucks, but it doesn’t bring the club within the rules.

And that spending had consequences for others. In 2021/22, Everton survived relegation by four points. Last season they survived by just two. And on both of those occasions, someone else was relegated at a cost of tens of millions of pounds. Can we say for certain that it was this spending that saved Everton those six combined points? Obviously not. But considering how badly the club spent its money over a period of more than just those two seasons, it’s difficult to make a case that it didn’t, as well.

None of this is to say that FFP is even any good. I’ve been arguing for more than a decade now that, without significant rethinking on how money is distributed within the game, it would result in something that could only realistically be considered as a calcification of the power structures of clubs. But the fact of the matter is that hyper-inflation has ramifications that spread like a ripple down through the entire game as other clubs push themselves to the limits in order to try and stay in touch. We can see this right now this minute near the foot of League One with Reading, where spending on wages alone reached 214% of the club’s annual income in an utterly fruitless attempt to buy their way up from the Championship when faced with the monolith that is parachute payments.

If there’s little sense from a competitive standpoint in tying what a club can spend to a proportion of its income, then something even more radical might be required. A flat annual spending cap would see howls of protest from the biggest clubs (and might not even be legal), but it would at least be fair in a sporting sense. Saying to every Premier League club, “Okay, you can spend [insert an amount of money of your own choosing here] on transfer fees and wages” may force clubs to spend their money more wisely.

In what is ostensibly still marketed as a sport, why shouldn’t everyone start with the same amount of money to spend each season? Why should some be able to spend multiple times what others can on new players because they’re ‘bigger’? What’s sporting about that? You wouldn’t let one competitor only run 70 metres in a 100m sprint because they’re richer than the other people taking part. Why should football be so different? The bigger clubs would still presumably be the bigger draw. The name, the history, the huge crowds and iconic stadia would continue to have the same pull to give them some form of advantage over the others. Is that not enough?

But the problems with this would be multitudinous because English football doesn’t exist in a bubble. If the caps were set fairly low, the best players would go abroad and the Premier League would lose the lustre it’s spent the last three decades developing. And if they were too high, then we’d be faced with exactly the inequalities that we have now; perhaps worse, if the brakes were taken off what state public investment funds could pour in at the same time.

And regardless, this wouldn’t end the arguing and the complete self-centredness. It probably wouldn’t end the attempts at cheating either. It would just alter the ways in which it was carried out. When the entire football world is arguing in bad faith, cloaking their own narrow self-interest in tear-stained calls for equality (a version of which, not uncoincidentally, primarily benefits them to the disadvantage of everybody else), there’s almost no point continuing to try and make a point which isn’t about that narrow self-interest. Nobody would be listening anyway.