Welcome to the Premier League’s latest sensational product innovation: the courtroom drama relegation battle. Two things seem certain after the decision to dock four points from Nottingham Forest over breaches of profitability and sustainability rules. First, this isn’t over by any measure.
Buckle up for some really excellent legal wrangle content over the coming months as Forest, Everton and at least four other clubs cling like Indiana Jones on a collapsing rope bridge to a league table primed to shuffle and rejig with every fresh tribunal hearing and special circumstances appeal.
And second, as supporters on all sides sift through issues of blame and fault, in a sport increasingly vulnerable to conspiracy theory and disinformation, it seems certain there will be plenty of people out there looking for someone to blame; all the while ignoring the most obvious candidates.
At which point it is worth redefining some basic terms. Clubs may dislike the rules they signed up to. They may object, legitimately, to the extent of the sanction. But this process can’t be corrupt, or unfair, if the rules of a competition are transparent, unchanged and subject to warnings every time you get close to breaking them.
It can’t be a conspiracy if you’re one of 20 parties who sign those rules off every year. This is in fact the opposite of a conspiracy. It’s due process in action. And while the sense of incompetence and double-dealing some Forest fans will feel is entirely justified, it would make a lot more sense if those feelings were directed towards their own club’s ownership.
Who is really to blame here? The rules? Or a club executive that thought it was a good idea to overspend on 29 new players while being co-steered through these treacherous waters, if we are to believe the iconography, by the owner’s then 23-year-old son? Hmm. Tough one. Whatever else, £6m in wages on Jesse Lingard was definitely good content.
It is worth walking through once again how this happened. Forest and Everton were charged with breaching the rules on the same day, 15 January, with Everton due to get the results of their (second) hearing some time in April.
The rules state Premier League clubs are allowed a maximum loss across a three-year period. Forest have been deemed to be in breach. They can now appeal against the punishment with a backstop date for a decision five days after the end of the season.
A further appeal (in “exceptional circumstances”) could take the whole process up to 8 June, with a final call on who actually gets relegated potentially delayed to that point.
There are two chief objections to Forest’s punishment. Neither relate to whether the club actually broke the rules, but relate instead to not liking the rules. Most credible is the argument it is unfair that years in the English Football League should be subject to EFL spending caps, when they could instead be retrofitted with far more appealing Premier League level spending caps.
Because two of the years in question were spent in the Championship, Forest are only given £61m to play with, not the full £105m. Had they been allowed the full Premier League whack, despite not having been in it, they would have stayed within the limits.
It has some obvious merit as a tweak to the system, a way of helping promoted clubs compete. An argument against is that the rules are intended to discourage clubs from gambling on jam tomorrow. This might have the opposite effect. As for right now, and Forest’s current case, rules are not fungible things. The EFL rules for that period would have to be retrospectively abandoned. This is a flaky road to head down. Others stuck to the rules. You don’t get to suggest an alternative version just because you knew what was right and decided to do what was wrong. Why reward overspending with a get-out-of-jail-free card? And does everyone get one?
The second point relates to the timing of Brennan Johnson’s sale, which the club say needed to be delayed to maximise the fee for the player, thereby taking it out of the relevant accounting period. Surely, Forest say, the point of the rules is to maximise our revenue.
But this is to deliberately miss the point. Fixing sustained overspend with a fire sale of one player is the kind of rabbit-out-of-a-hat stuff the rules are there to discourage.
The issue is buying 29 players in a single year, spending more than every year of your entire club history combined, more than Barcelona, Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain. Failing to make the emergency stop because you’re careering off the mountain side is really an issue about careering off the mountainside in the first place. Football follows the market. If Johnson were more valuable to more clubs he might have been sold in time for the right amount. He wasn’t. So pay up.
It will still seem hard to digest the fact that Forest are being punished while Manchester City’s charges remain unanswered and Chelsea have somehow splurged a cool billion apparently without sanction. City are subject to 115 charges, all denied, many of which refer to complex issue of good faith and disclosure. This is football’s Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Chelsea took advantage of a loophole. The man may still be coming around.
And none of this means the rules couldn’t do with a refresh. There needs to be more detail. What are the actual rules for clubs such as Everton being punished twice in the same season? Don’t know. Let’s see. The level of (semi-) permitted debt has been set at £105m since 2013. Factor in “football inflation” and this could be up at £200m by now. There is a sound argument for ramping it up.
Meanwhile there are also some who would abolish regulation altogether, a line that tends to coincide with a tribal interest in a club with bottomless pockets, often backed with talk about some kind of ruling overclass plot to crush the little (extremely rich) guy. But most industries have regulation. Spending what you earn is hardly a revolutionary idea. As for freedom and the laissez-faire economy, overspending in aid of a propaganda project, or to sate your own oligarch-showman egomania is hardly an example of a properly functioning market.
For now the moral of this story is obvious enough. Forest fans love Evangelos Marinakis because he is decisive and charismatic, because he acts and looks like the imperial commander of the intergalactic pirate fleet, and above all because he has brought success. But the fact remains this is still a case of taking your medicine.
The year after their mega splurge, a period when signings were being reeled off every few days on the Marinakis Jr Instagram reel, Forest released 33 players and hired Nuno Espírito Santo, the seventh manager of the current era. Anyone looking for blame here, for obvious fault, for wrong turns along the way, should probably be looking at the bespoke padded throne in the directors’ box.
