Gavin Cooney

THE BREAKOUT STAR of this season’s Premier League has been their Profitability and Sustainability Rules. 

Everton fans won’t agree of course, but the league’s version of Financial Fair Play (FFP) has made the season much more interesting. 

Premier League clubs are not allowed to lose more than £105 million over three seasons, and Everton’s 10 point deduction shows that the league are actually serious about enforcing these rules.

This is a fundamentally interesting development: clubs can no longer just spend their way out of their own trouble, and must repent for the sins of their past. 

That money cannot entirely circuit-break the loop of mistake and consequence is entirely proper: no club should be allowed to spend £82 million on Antony without being made to suffer some kind of repercussion. That’s why Manchester United are limited to loan signings in January, and why it looks like Eric Maxim Choupo Moting will be this season’s Wout Weghorst. 

These financial rules are the closest the Premier League can come to meting out some natural justice. Todd Boehly et al are making an exquisite mess of running Chelsea, turning the squad into a kind of portfolio of assets, believing they could circumvent financial rules by writing off transfer fees over yawning, eight-year contracts. But now they reportedly have to sell another academy jewel in Conor Gallagher to comply with the financial rules. 

If anyone is looking for Todd at the moment, you’ll find him hoisted on his own petard: Chelsea’s many disparate parts are barely cohering into a functional team, and now one of the team’s few pieces of glue – the hard-running, committed Gallagher – will have to be sold to pay for the disparate parts. 

Martin Samuel of the Times has been a long-time and vociferous opponent of these financial rules. He has called Uefa’s FFP rules “protectionist” – painting them as a means for the established elite to lock out Manchester City and the rest of the nouveau riche – and has recently taken aim at the Premier League’s version, with Nottingham Forest now at risk of an Everton-style deduction, writing that Forest are being punished for having the temerity to spend like a big club again. 

This is nonsense. Firstly, if Forest are going to be punished, it’s because they broke rules to which they signed up. And on a broader level, why should the league allow teams simply buy their way to success? The financial rules reward the smartest, best-run clubs. Forest spent less than Bournemouth in the summer window and only £22 million – or one Andrew Omobamidele – more than Brighton. 

The imposition of strictures and limits demands and rewards creativity and intelligence, in sport and in every other walk of life. Arrested Development was a work of smart and subversive brilliance when it was straining within the strict 23-minute confines of  American network television, but became a flabby and indulgent mess when it was renewed for another two seasons on Netflix’s infinite canvas. 

Knowing parameters gives us all an understanding and appreciation of successes which transcend those limits. Manchester United’s treble of 1999 has gone down in history because we all understand the sheer improbability of United achieving what they did with so many academy players at a time of far greater financial parity across all of Europe. 

What was chiefly remarkable about Manchester City’s treble was just how dreary it was. There was no sense of over-performance or of upsetting the odds; this felt merely the inevitable bottom line of enormous investment. 

If the Premier League’s financial rules leaves clubs beholden to their own good decision-making rather than just their owners’ cash reserves, then it is a stamp of validation on all future success. 

And on the topic of Manchester City: we still await the outcome of the investigation into their alleged breaches of the Premier League’s financial rules. If they are found guilty at a time the rest of the league are constrained by those rules, it will make any transgressions feel all the more serious.