The Nottingham Forest points deduction was never going to be accepted by anyone

Changing the rules will only ever mean that who's complaining will change. Until English football experiences a cultural shift away from the idea that money solves all problems, this will continue.

One of the most striking details at the heart of the argument over Premier League Profit & Sustainability Rules (PSR) has been the attempts of those on the receiving end of their first sanctions to justify why they should have been allowed to break them. In the case of Nottingham Forest, who’ve been deducted four points—for now—over their horrendous accounts for their first season back in the Premier League, it was apparently all a matter of timing.

Forest insist that the sale of Brennan Johnson to Tottenham Hotspur for £47.5m at the end of the transfer window should be allowed for the 2022/23 season because had they sold him by the actual cut-off date of the 30th June they would have received less money for him. It’s not, when you consider how cut-off dates and the reason for having them in the first place, a particularly persuasive argument.

The 30th June date is a clear dividing line between the 2022/23 season and the 2023/24 season. That much should be obvious. Regardless of the amount of money changing hands, Johnson went to Spurs on the 1st September, a date which squeezed inside the summer transfer window by the skin of its teeth, but which cannot reasonably be considered to be anything to do with the previous season.

And this is obviously problematic. The 1st September was so late that it fell after the 2023/24 season had already started. The idea that the club should be allowed to include the money from his sale in their 2022/23 figures because they could have sold him earlier and for less money is obviously absurd. Really, it doesn’t matter how much they got for him on the 1st September or might have got for him on the 30th June because they fall within different seasons.

We probably shouldn’t be surprised by this, because if there’s one word that better sums up the ongoing caterwauling surrounding this issue, it’s ‘absurd’. It’s absurd that, although the PSR rules were commonly known in advance, the supporters of clubs caught out by owners who didn’t budget for it are attacking the Premier League for upholding rules that they voted for in the first place.

It’s absurd that there are fans bouncing around social media who clearly have less than no idea what they’re talking about parroting buzzwords like ‘corruption’ and ‘unfit for purpose’. All the more so when these buzzwords are amplified by senior politicians who, in all honesty, should know better. The Premier League may well be unable to regulate itself, Mr Burnham, but this precedes Everton’s points deduction by quite a long way.

Over the course of three transfer windows, Nottingham Forest spent a quarter of a billion pounds on 42 players. This is not sustainable spending, by any reasonable calculation. And the argument that they had no choice but to bring in a lot of players during the summer 2022 transfer window because they’d got promotion into the Premier League in the first place with a squad built largely from loanees isn’t really a winning argument either, because to assemble an entire first team squad on that basis was Forest’s choice, rather than one that was forced upon the club.

Farhad Moshiri and Angelos Marinakis will continue to underwrite these losses, it’s said, apparently without reflection that perhaps being in the richest league in the world and with a television contract that practically every club in Europe would give its high teeth for should negate any need to even get substantially into debt in the first place. There was a time when supporters used to protest against owners loading clubs with unsustainable debt. In 2024, fans protest because there are rules in place which prevent these owners from putting the clubs into even greater debt.

And of course, clubs can’t just acknowledge that they messed up and get on with the rest of their lives any more, still less not break these rules which have been absolutely common knowledge since the day they were announced first place. They have to issue a statement which falls somewhere between pugnacious and whining, which seeks to blame their own mismanagement on others and the rules themselves.

Of course, it remains the case that the Premier League has only itself to blame for putting the size of the deductions handed out in the hands of an independent commission. The clubs may have voted for this in the first place (it’s easy to forget this when the standard response to getting tripped up by these rules now seems to be somewhere between denial and blaming the rulemakers), but that lack of clarity was always going to be an issue if clubs were found to be breaking these rules.

Again, these rules need sanctions that are set in stone. When an automatic points deduction was introduced for entering into administration, there were no conversations about extenuating circumstances. The rule was put in place, nine points in the Premier League and ten in the EFL, and that was that. This rule is still in place and is largely just accepted for what it is. The reasons for the Premier League wanting to put these decisions to an external body, but it must surely be apparent to them that this way of doing things isn’t working.

Of course, with the Premier League being the Premier League, the talk is that they’re going to respond to this criticism by changing the rules in the summer in such a way that it may even validate the conspiracy theorists who believe that PSR rules were brought in to protect a ‘cartel’. If, as has been suggested, the Premier League are thinking of bringing in new rules which limit clubs to ‘only’ spending 85% of their revenue, then that will have the likely long-term effect of calcifying league positions to a far greater extent than the current rules would. Being able to spend 85% of, say, £1bn would bring significant advantages over being able to spend 85% of £200m.

It remains the case that football clubs can only ever be trusted to support their own narrow self-interest. This isn’t exclusive to Nottingham Forest, Everton, or any one specific club. We can see that from the failure of the Premier League and the EFL to agree to new settlement for football ahead of the introduction of an independent regulator.

There are a couple of comments in the Forest statement that we can all agree with, most notably that wild overspending might be the only way of trying to break through the glass ceiling. But having identified an obvious problem, the proposed solution remains as flawed as ever. ‘Just let us spend whatever we want’ isn’t the winning argument that its proponents seem to believe it to be when so many of the clubs that have found themselves insolvent over the last two decades have been those who’ve chased the pot of gold at the end of the Premier League rainbow and ended up falling short.

Clubs from below the Premier League should be able to compete upon promotion. It shouldn’t be a fait accompli to simply predict that the three newly-promoted clubs will be relegated back from whence they came. It shouldn’t need a nine-digit ‘investment’ to be able to maintain a place in the top flight.

But that’s a corruption of the game that has now been going on for more than three decades, not the attempts to save clubs from the worst of their excesses. It’s long been the case that giving football clubs £1 to spend will result in them spending £1.50. It will require a cultural headshift away from the notion that money will solve all problems before this can be changed, and that seems further away than ever.