PSR was introduced under the guise of financial fairness and to prevent clubs from spending beyond their means and racking up huge losses. When it was introduced in 2015, football was still smarting from Leeds’ financial implosion and Portsmouth’s comical run of dodgy owners, leading to the club’s steep decline, among many other clubs from across the football pyramid going bust.
At face value, these regulations appear benevolent, designed to maintain the integrity of the league (and the wider football landscape), protecting 100-year-plus cultural and communal institutions, and ensuring clubs operate responsibly while fostering a level playing field.
However, recent developments and glaring inconsistencies have exposed that benevolence as naked self-interest, shoving PSR’s frailties into the cold, harsh light, leading many to conclude that its effectiveness is not just compromised – it’s dead.
Another Loophole
First, it was hotels, then it was women’s teams, now it’s entities such as ‘Red Football’. Manchester United, whose tax-dodging billionaire part-owner has been sacking regular working people left, right and centre, justifying it by crowing that the club will run out of cash by Christmas, are seemingly navigating PSR with ease – spending £62.5m on Matheus Cunha days after the transfer window opens and are in negotiations to sign Bryan Mbeumo for another £60m+ despite every man and his dog in the football national media claiming the club was up against a PSR wall.
Enter another loophole. According to a clip doing the rounds of Kieran Maguire, PSR applies predominantly to British entities, creating another loophole that can be exploited. Man Utd’s listing on the New York Stock Exchange allows its financial scrutiny to be fragmented. Losses are conveniently distributed across different business arms, with Red Football reportedly showing £100m less in losses compared to Man Utd’s consolidated figures.
This is strategic evasion, exploiting accounting technicalities rather than adhering to the spirit of financial fair play, and it’s also a loophole that the Premier League and footballing authorities could close in a heartbeat, but they don’t (like the hotels and women’s teams) because all they see is self-interest.
From a Newcastle POV, it makes our clubs’ apparent strict adherence to the rules appear grating to some fans and causes ‘the just take the points deduction’ cries to be amplified, fragmenting the fanbase – something else the ‘traditional big clubs’ would love to see.
Disparity in Spending Power
When clubs like Liverpool can spend £150 million on a single player while publicly pleading poverty, it raises serious questions. Yes, the Klopp clip is old now, but his point still stands: there is no glass ceiling for some clubs – it just isn’t Liverpool.
Of course, this isn’t just about Liverpool—it’s emblematic of a broader problem where clubs with significant commercial revenues manipulate accounting practices to maintain a veneer of compliance, whilst trotting out the old line ‘well, it’s based on our history’. And how was that history built? With spending more than anyone else.
From Blackburn to Chelsea to Man City, they all spent the most money. In the 80s when football was broadly more competitive, which clubs pushed for the abolition of splitting gate money? Liverpool and Man Utd. Liverpool also made Emile Heskey the third most expensive player in English football in 2000 when they paid £11m to sign him from Leicester City. Our own club broke the world transfer record chasing success.
In stark contrast, Villa find themselves forced to sell key players to balance the books, and Crystal Palace face potential sanctions from UEFA despite the historical precedent of leniency towards multi-club ownership models.
All the accounting shenanigans and crying financial wolf give the impression of ‘do what I say, not what I do’, of an arbitrary line drawn in the sand, of those rules are for you, but not for us. And it stinks. But in the same vein, United can’t claim poverty either when huge revenue stands like a training ground and kit sponsors remain criminally unused.
What’s Next for PSR?
Well, it’s going to be scrapped from 2026/27, replaced by the equality opaque Squad Cost Control Ratio (SCCR – another abbreviation for our football/pub chat…).
PSR is dead; so this season, clubs have to adhere to a set of rules that have basically been put out to pasture. It’s laughable.
The introduction of the independent football regulator could mitigate biases and conflicts of interest inherent within football’s existing power structures, but governmental lobbying is just as open to corruption as the football authorities. We’re not that far removed from Calicopoli or FIFA’s rampant corruption scandals after all.
Financial rules have not kept pace with the evolving landscape of football, leaving them vulnerable to manipulation, which is being fragrantly orchestrated in front of our eyes, so little do its instigators fear reprisal (115 charges, anyone!).
I know he can be a figure of fun, but Gary Neville has consistently spoken about a bond system, whereby if an owner can put £500m into an open and transparent bank account, which authorities can see, why can’t a club spend it?
If you have owners who are wealthier than all the rest, why couldn’t that figure by £1 billion?
At its core, football is a working-class sport. In my heart, I feel that it was never meant to be a playground for the ultra-wealthy to flex financial muscle unchecked, but that ship has sailed, and not meaning to mix metaphors, but when the cork is out of the bottle, it’s very difficult to get it back in.
The game has already lost its soul. Is it too much to ask that at least the playing field be level?
Add Comment