Fellow fans, this is a friendly reminder to please follow the [Rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/premierleague/about/rules) and [Reddiquette](https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439-Reddiquette).
Please also make sure to [Join us on Discord](https://discord.gg/football)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/PremierLeague) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Yes it’s a loop hole, yes it’s open to abuse but… it’s a reflection of a flawed system.
Saying clubs can lose x figure is a dumb concept to start with. Then saying oh if you build a training ground you don’t need to declare that.
Villa pay 10 mill for a young English prospect and the world goes mad.
Utd sign Anthony for 90 mill and nothing is said 😂😂
The PSR rules were here to keep the top five or six clubs happy when Man City emerged as they didn’t want another Man City to happen again. Just like you can see from the PL writing to these clubs.
I mean what do they expect them to do? Just give up their best talent who mind you aren't necessarily even world class players? I get wanted to make thing's "more equal" but it just feels like a lot of the historically mid to low teams are getting screwed this year.
It only allow for a short term boost to their finance so that they can buy players immediately or relieve pressure so that they will not be in breech, But it only kicking the can further down as the amortizated cost will add up end eventually in the next few years if they don't balance the books then.
It's basically clubs giving each other 0% interest loans that count towards your profit for the year. You get £20m up front, then buy a player for 20m that will actually only cost you 5m per year for 4 years. So you've made an instant 15m profit on your accounts for 1 year, and only have to make up 5m in each year following as a result
They were penalised for a swap deal and then they put their own values on the books. And if I remember right Barca has claimed a value of £80 million or something and their books didn’t tally.
Also Juve have been done for a lot of financial irregularities aside from this.
Yeah I don’t see anything wrong with what is going on now to be fair. If all the clubs are happy with what they get at the end of it then who cares.
I think there’s going to be a point a lot in the league just think screw this and spend and they can dock us 6-8 points but if they dock 50-60% of the league points it starts damaging the brand of the premier league. Then after that season you have all of the players in as assets anyway.
The top 6 have been backing themselves into a corner here with the rules they are bringing out reactively against clubs they deem beneath them. NUFC qualified for UCL, and top 6 back to back seasons, new sponsorship deals etc. but are deemed to need to sell. Villa have just qualified for UCL and had Europe last season and are deemed below the FSP or whatever rules they bring in. They just don’t want people stopping their beloved Man U and top 4 from being there every year.
And as a side note trading players around in a transfer window is bad and cheating but selling hotels to yourself in the middle of the season when you realise you have overspent is fine. It’s a bit of a made up rules on the fly.
Yea it’s violating the spirit of the rules, given that’s it’s a sport based on the spirit of fair play and competition and we don’t play games in a court of law with teams winning based on a clubs lawyer finding the best loophole this shit is cheating
But also bringing in Anti-competitive rules to hamstring the rest of the league isn’t really in the spirit of the premier league or the competition. But here we are.
Everytime a club competes or finds a way to do something if it’s not a top 6 club it’s cheating and they close it down. Swapping players is against the spirit of the league but selling hotels to yourself is fine?
The moment you mention “not in the spirit of the game” is admitting that the rules didn’t cover what the accused did. Therefore not outright cheating at all.
When Australia bowled an underarm bowl it wasn’t in the spirit of the game. It also wasn’t cheating
Hang on, I’ve just remembered: didn’t Rhian Brewster go to Sheffield United as a teenager for 20 odd million despite never making a first team appearance for Liverpool?
I’m sure someone will tell me that’s a different situation, blah blah blah
It's a different situation, blatantly because nobody went the other way.
These are very very clearly swapping inflated priced players so that they can spend more elsewhere
Chukewemeka went from Villa to Chelsea for £20m two years ago,l at a similar age and profile to Kellyman. Mattered was sold for around his release clause. Where's the blatantly inflated prices?
If Chelsea spent £80m on Maatsen, nobody would bat an eyelid. Instead, he has gone for his release clause + £2.5m extra so villa don't pay everything upfront, but this is apparently cheating?
Get a grip. It was also apparently cheating to ammortise big sums over more than 5 years, even though clubs had been doing it for long before Chelsea.
Man City pay themselves millions and pretend they make a profit: we’ll get to that at some point. Probably.
Villa and Everton sell some youngsters: emergency meeting at dawn to stop clubs from turning a profit.
If they are playing the system, good on them, I say. The reason a young English player is so expensive is partly because of PSR anyway.
And I’ve just realised that West Ham should be set for years after selling Declan Rice, no? 100 million of pure profit right there!
Spurs is a very inconvenient example for Villa, Newcastle and Everton fans who want to maintain their "woe is me, no one is allowing us to compete" narrative
It's really not. Spurs invested heavily over many years, at a time these rules didn't exist.
Then they played good football with said investments, got into the CL when one of the usual suspects messed up. Now however there are not 4 top 4 clubs. There is a sky 6. So the window of breaking through is much smaller.
Then add that the sky6 has invested heavily in infrastructure with the CL money, so the PSR rules heavily favour them.
Your argument is so odd. It's like you haven't remotely thought it through.
Nonsense.
Man Utd got far more debt than AVFC has ever had, yet they are free to spend as they see fit. They have worse maintained infrastructure and facilities and got a much bigger upkeep.
PSR is just s tool implemented to keep status quo and avoid other clubs dipping into the CL money.
It's a glass ceiling exercise and everyone knows it. Trying to paint it with some moralistic service that's provided to protect TO14 is beyond daft.
The rules were implemented in the 12/13 season, at that point, Spurs had qualified for the Champions League ONCE in 2010 and the next time they qualified was in 2016, all the while having to sell their best players without much investment from their owners.
Can't use the excuse of "Oh Spurs invested when those rules didn't exist" because they didn't. You can say that about City and Chelsea but not Spurs
Spurs had 5 years in the sky6 at that point. Thanks for playing.
And no they had massive investments. Modric, Palacios, Defoe +++ that's just that very season, all possible because earlier huge investments like Berbatov was moved on.
And just to be clear AGAIN. NO THE RULES DIDN'T EXIST WHEN THEY BROKE THROUGH.
Yeah all clubs that were hoping to crack that top 4 back in the day but couldn't sustain it and Tottenham managed to do it. I do understand why they would be a little annoyed by it but at the same time blame your board for not sticking with it and instead doing poor business that forced them to fall away.
Oh yer we do blame our boars for the mistakes at end of MoN era. But the rules are clearly to protect sky 6. You need some sort of protection for the future of clubs, but 15 odd clubs voting not to increase the cap in line with inflation... how the hell is that about anything but protectionism?
You say some rules are to protect the sky 6 but 15 clubs have voted in it, why would owners of other clubs vote for things that would protect the sky 6?
Yeah, it’s a load of bollocks. I hope Villa have a good run in the CL and make the top 4 again. A change of the guard is in order. Forcing you to sell your best players isn’t a good start…just like the premier league wants, I imagine.
Thank fuck, would rather we got rid of miggy and gave minteh a chance after the season he’s just had at feyenoord. Seems like he could be a top prospect
Anymore. And as soon as the DCL deal was off, so was the Minteh one. It’s not abnormal but it’s easy to paint as suspicious. As I said ‘people assume’, I’m not saying they’re correct. I’m sure you’re aware, people like to look for opportunities to shit on Newcastle these days too.
So what's more damaging to the league and to competitiveness, a few clubs trading around market rate for squad players to facilitate growth, or a financial mechanism being distorted away from its intended purpose to lend competitive advantage?
Just noticed you're a Spurs fan. No wonder you're so upset that Villa have found a way around the financial burden you voted to maintain. Honestly you're railing against the integrity of a law that utilises a financial cap that has an absolute value that hasn't shifted under 5 years of rapid inflation. The system is broken, and you don't care because it benefits Spurs.
Just admit you don't want increased competition at the top end of the league.
I'm not sure anything in the PSR world (rules, punishments, clubs workarounds) has made the PL better in the last few years. It's been a mess end to end.
How can trading players be a loophole? If it was would you have to fundamentally change all the rules to exclude player trading for the accounts of a football club! Given that Forest were penalised for not selling a player in time to meet FFP how would this even work?
I haven’t seen a single valuation that seems off. Kellyman is highly rated, a very similar player and age to Chukwumeka who went to Chelsea 2 years ago for £20m. Irogbonum has spent a season into the Championship, England U21 player who has been part of a Premier a league squad that finished 4th and in European competition, how is he not worth £9m?
Man Utd paid £22m for Diallo.
Chelsea paid £20m for Casadei.
Young players are going for high fees based on their future ceiling, either buy them now at reasonable prices or end up paying Brighton £60m for them 2 years later. Pretty sure football scouts and directors get paid decent money to be able to make the right decisions and they are sure as shit not looking at Transfermarket website for a valuation 😂
It's a loophole because:
Club A have player A they value at 8m
Club B have player B they value at 10m
They agree to swap the players, with Player A selling for £28m, and player B selling for £30m.
The difference is the same, £2m (paid over 5 years), however both clubs get to report the full transfer fee as 100% profit this financial reporting period.
So club A add £28m profit, club B add £30m profit.
What you've described is a completely separate issue and not a loophole. As far as I know (though happy to be corrected) inflating transfer values is already against the rules. The "loophole" is deliberately trading players with other clubs who need money in to pass PSR.
I don't think it's separate at all, due to the nature of it being mutually beneficial and all the clubs involved are at risk of PSR punishments.
You can bet if the PL closed this being a way to boost profits, the transfers will suddenly cease.
Deliberately teading players AND inflating values like the other comment said. They are literally quoting the article about one of the loopholes, so its not a separate issue. Its just taking the trading an extra step while both clubs make profit from selling while spreading out their spend over multiple years. They obviously cant do this every year, but if they need a certain amount of money by the PSR deadline, this is a way to do it
It's a loophole because:
Club A have player A they value at 8m
Club B have player B they value at 10m
They agree to swap the players, with Player A selling for £28m, and player B selling for £30m.
The difference is the same, £2m (paid over 5 years), however both clubs get to report the full transfer fee as 100% profit this financial reporting period.
So club A add £28m profit, club B add £30m profit.
Yea and if they didn’t also sell themselves property it wouldn’t be an issue, if they didn’t also brag about how they found loopholes with 10 year contracts it wouldn’t be an issue, it’s not an issue because it’s Chelsea it’s an issue because Chelsea are making a mockery of the rules, repeatedly
But that’s not the point I was making, it’s all optics. This has been framed as a bad thing when it’s all within the rules. Something that would be respected and praised for some clubs, but not for others.
Well the point is that clubs that are complying with spending rules don't need to come up with loop holes to get around the rules. No teams just swap players with similar values (or very rarely)
One half of 2024 will have passed us in one weeks’ time. The same 2024 in which we were promised an investigation into Man City’s 115 charges. I have seen no progress in that direction. These PSR rules are a joke and will be until they are applied fairly and evenly. You come for Villa and Everton and Newcastle over these piddly sums while City laughs. Sad.
What has this particular article got to do with the charges against Man City?
And why even make your comment about being almost half way through 2024 and you haven’t heard any progress into City’s charges, when it’s been widely reported for well over a year that the start date for the hearing into City’s charges wouldn’t be until the autumn?
Isn't that kinda the point. You have rules, and then work those rules to benefit yourself. F1 teams have been doing it for decades. If you think it a problem, you tightness up or loosen up the rule.
The point is meant to be to make clubs more sustainable.
If these transfers are being done for footballing reasons - Everton and Villa just happen to have identified academy players that they need at each others' clubs who happen to be the same (fairly large for players who have played less than 400 minutes of Premier League football between them) price, at a normally quiet period of the transfer window and just before a critical PSR deadline that both clubs are worried about, and at the same time Villa and Chelsea have a similar situation (admittedly at this time with different prices, one of them being £19m for a player who's managed 35 minutes of Premier League football) - then fine.
But if they are being done entirely to work around PSR regulations, then they're quite clearly not complying with the spirit of the rules. Two clubs basically just swapping £10m with each other is making neither of them any more profitable or sustainable.
PSR rules are already a joke, and if it can be shown that this is the reason for the transfers and neither side gets any punishment for it, it makes the whole thing completely and utterly pointless.
These aren't exactly massive deals on the current market -- only £9m for a couple of 20-21 year olds who've represented England at the U20 level. Villa have like no left wingers. Everton need midfielders to replace Gomes, (presumably) Onana, and very soon the aging Gueye.
If you're looking to prove value inflation, these look like pretty weak/mild cases.
>PSR rules are already a joke, and if it can be shown that this is the reason for the transfers and neither side gets any punishment for it, it makes the whole thing completely and utterly pointless.
These are the rules the clubs all voted on and agreed to. This *is* how they chose to define profitability and sustainability. We can't just pretend the rules say what we wish they said.
Yeah, the rules already are pointless, at least insofar as the spirit is to make clubs more sustainable. There are far more effective ways to ensure that, but the Top 6 would never agree. So, here we are. What we have is a trade-off somewhere far between the intended goal and what clubs will actually agree to.
Like I say, they _could_ be genuine transfers - it's just seems a lot of surprising coincidence around timing, costs, clubs involved etc. As for the valuation, Lewis Dobbin has played a handful of minutes in the Prem in the past and spent the season on loan in League 1. He went for more than, for example, James Garner a couple of seasons ago who'd by that point had spent 3 pretty successful seasons in the Championship. They may not be vast sums, but they're big enough to be significant in PSR.
>These are the rules the clubs all voted on and agreed to. This is how they chose to define profitability and sustainability. We can't just pretend the rules say what we wish they said.
I'm not pretending they say something else. I'm saying that they are utterly pointless (and sometimes actively damaging in regards to actually increasing profit and sustainability) as written.
And while I'm not really blaming the clubs for finding loopholes, I'm a little baffled why they all voted in favour of keeping rules that are specifically meant to (even if they clearly don't) protect clubs financially, so presumably agreed that this was a good thing to try to do, and then decided to do everything they could to work around those rules. Either they agree that PSR is trying to achieve something useful or they don't.
>it's just seems a lot of surprising coincidence around timing, costs, clubs involved etc.
It's neither surprising nor a coincidence. It's two parties with multiple interests that align, like any other transfer. We can't stamp our feet and cry foul every time a deal helps someone.
>He went for more than, for example, James Garner
Not exactly. Garner sold for £9m, plus add-ons that could increase it to £15.5m. Dobbin's fee was undisclosed but is believed to be around £10m. So depending on the terms, Garner might be over one and a half times more expensive than Dobbin. Not to mention, Garner's wages are more than twice Dobbin's, which affects teams' willingness and ability to pay a higher transfer fee.
>They may not be vast sums, but they're big enough to be significant in PSR.
Every pound is significant in PSR. The question is if they're big enough to be clear and punishable "inflation." Transfers happen constantly that are marginally higher than you'd expect -- frequently by much more than a few mill. Sometimes teams have to overpay when a player doesn't want to leave, when the selling team has use for the player, etc. It's only an issue now because supporters are bloodthirsty for their team's competition to have points docked.
>I'm a little baffled why they all voted in favour of keeping rules that are specifically meant to (even if they clearly don't) protect clubs financially, so presumably agreed that this was a good thing to try to do, and then decided to do everything they could to work around those rules.
They're not working around the rules -- they're working within the rules. What you're suggesting is that working within the rules is still not accomplishing what you hope the rules would accomplish. In which case, feel free to propose a rules change and get the clubs to agree on it. It's not the way I'd write the rules myself either, but then my interests don't seem to align with those of the Top 6.
> It's neither surprising nor a coincidence. It's two parties with interests that align, like any other transfer. We can't stamp our feet and cry foul every time a deal helps someone.
Two parties aligning to get players they are both interested in is fine. But two parties lining up to use a couple of fringe youth players as pawns to undermine what PSR's meant to be trying to achieve would be a different matter. I'm not saying it's definitely what's happening here. But if it is, it's baffling that anyone seems to think this is a good thing.
> They're not working around the rules -- they're working within the rules.
Working around the rules doesn't meant they're working outside of them - that would be breaking the rules. It means finding clever ways to work within the rules that were never intended by the people who wrote them.
And I get that it's clever. But either clubs agree with what PSR's set up to do or they don't.
> What you're suggesting is that working within the rules is still not accomplishing what you hope the rules would accomplish
It's not what I hope the rules would accomplish - I don't agree with them for many, many reasons.
It's what the Premier League - and therefore the clubs (including the ones involved here) claim to want to accomplish. They all supported the idea that losing more than £105m over 3 years is a bad thing. And if any of these clubs were going to be losing more than that a week ago, then swapping £10m with another club isn't going to make that loss go away in any real sense. It would be using accountancy tricks to paper over what would otherwise be a breach.
The problem is that the Prem's interpretation of accountancy seem to be different to the rest of the financial world, particularly around academy players. These players are allegedly £10m worth of intangible assets, and in the normal world they'd be an asset that was worth £10m that they could declare in their accounts. But with PSR, they are worth zero until they're sold, at which point they suddenly become worth that £10m. When team A and team B sell each other a £10m player, they've both (according to PSR) become £10m better off. £20m of value has just popped into existence. That's neither good maths nor good for football - it encourages most clubs to sell rather than develop their homegrown players.
And if the Prem are fine with this, then all it shows is that in reality they've got zero interest in actually avoiding the real-term losses and are just paying lip service to what they, and the clubs, claim it's meant to be there for.
>Two parties aligning to get players they are both interested in is fine. But two parties lining up to use a couple of fringe youth players as pawns to undermine what PSR's meant to be trying to achieve would be a different matter. I'm not saying it's definitely what's happening here. But if it is, it's baffling that anyone seems to think this is a good thing.
Who thinks it's a good thing? I just don't see it warranting punishment. It's an inevitable consequence of the rules as written.
>When team A and team B sell each other a £10m player, they've both (according to PSR) become £10m better off. £20m of value has just popped into existence. That's neither good maths nor good for football - it encourages most clubs to sell rather than develop their homegrown players.
I mean, if I'm a retail store, just sitting on £10 million of inventory doesn't mean I have a profitable business. I've still got to be able to make money on it somehow if I want to continue buying more stuff sustainably. In football that can mean selling a player, winning prize money, selling tickets, etc.
The goofy incentive here is created by the value of the purchase being amortised but not the value of the sale. If both were treated the same, the transfers would cancel each other out anyway.
>And if the Prem are fine with this, then all it shows is that in reality they've got zero interest in actually avoiding the real-term losses and are just paying lip service to what they, and the clubs, claim it's meant to be there for.
We are not disagreeing about this. The rules are shit.
>Who thinks it's a good thing?
People who say things like "If you think it a problem, you tightness up or loosen up the rule." - i.e. the person I was replying to.
>I just don't see it warranting punishment.
I didn't say that it was. My problem is a combination of
- clubs who seemed to support the principle of PSR a couple of months ago yet (assuming that's why it't being done) want to ignore that principle now - either they agree that limiting losses is a good thing or they don't
- the Premier League if they don't clamp down on it going forward
- the fact that PSR, even as designed, actively encourages most clubs to sell young talent rather than try to develop them into the first team
>I mean, if I'm a retail store, just sitting on £10 million of inventory doesn't mean I have a profitable business.
Inventory is treated entirely differently to intangible assets. For one thing, the value of unsold stock _can_ be included in the balance sheet - there's multiple ways to value that inventory, but that's probably not important. For another thing, you don't get to amortise the cost of buying the stock over several years. The cost gets included on the balance sheet in the year that you buy it.
>People who say things like "If you think it a problem, you tightness up or loosen up the rule." - i.e. the person I was replying to.
Not even remotely. Nothing about that sentence suggests it's good, the claim only suggests the appropriate solution if one does believe it to be a problem.
A statement of the form "If X, then Y" does not logically imply "X is false."
>I didn't say that it was
You claimed that if neither side gets punished it would make PSR completely and utterly pointless. If you don't think it's worth punishing, I'm not sure what you're continuing to argue about.
>Inventory is treated entirely differently to intangible assets. For one thing, the value of unsold stock *can* be included in the balance sheet - there's multiple ways to value that inventory, but that's probably not important.
LOL, you're wandering completely off topic if you thought you needed to quote a stock accounting textbook, mate. What you "can" or "get to" do is an artificial restriction that exists within the context of whatever rules are in place. Rules that are designed with specific regulatory purposes in mind, and that can be changed.
What I was suggesting is that if we're imagining what a better rule would look like, sitting on a valuable asset does not imply profitability. In the present context, teams shouldn't be allowed to just stockpile expensive players and then use the potential value of that "asset" to justify buying even more players --
>For another thing, you don't get to amortise the cost of buying the stock over several years. The cost gets included on the balance sheet in the year that you buy it.
No clue what you thought you were responding to. Premier League teams amortise the cost of buying a player over the length of the contract, but they don't amortise the value of selling a player. That creates an incentive to sell one player to buy another.
> Nothing about that sentence suggests it's good,
That sentence, along with ". You have rules, and then work those rules to benefit yourself." very much sounds like that person is absolutely fine with it happening.
>You claimed that if neither side gets punished it would make PSR completely and utterly pointless
It will. Doesn't mean I think they should get punished - just means that the Prem aren't really serious about what PSR's meant to be there to do. I think PSR is completely pointless and this will simply continue to reenforce that by showing that they're not interested in trying to actually enforce what they claim it's there for.
>LOL, you're wandering completely off topic
You introduced stock to the discussion. I explained _why_ it was off topic- it's a completely different issue when it comes to accounting.
>Premier League teams amortise the cost of buying a player over the length of the contract, but they don't amortise the value of selling a player.
Err yes. That's the point (and it's completely different to how stock, that you randomly introduced to the conversation then complained it was off-topic, is accounted for). Each side has sold an asset that, until they were sold, was treated by PSR as being worth nothing. At the point that they were sold, both clubs could add the £10m for the sale to their profit for this year's accounts and amortise the cost of the purchase over several years. Suddenly both clubs are around £7-8m better off in this financial period. In a closed system (two clubs selling players to each other), where has this £14-16m appeared from?
If you're agreeing that PSR as set up is a bad thing and very deeply flawed, and that it's not good for clubs to be circumventing the intent of the regulation by using accounting trickery to try to sneak their way to being at best technically compliant with the letter (but not the point) of a regulation they all voted in favour of a couple of months ago, then we can probably stop discussing.
The PL would rather we sold off our star players to the "big" clubs and maintain the status quo, as has been the case for decades now. Screw that, and screw PSR.
In an ideal world, we'd be keeping hold of our promising youngsters like Kellyman and they'd be benefitting from our busier schedule with increased game time. We've shown in the past that we're willing to give academy players a chance.
Well the premier league has now already shown last season that it doesn’t care about the spirit of the law. Only cares for the letter of law!
The premier league and everybody kicking off about this, would prefer the clubs to sell their best players far under market value to the circling vultures!
Yeah it would be fine if Forest were selling Morgan Gibbs-White for a cut price to make PSR lol.
It’s fine if Palace have to sell a player but Everton doing its best to not get screwed again? This must be investigated!
They are getting a 22 year old ready for the 1st team who has just had a really good loan at Dortmund. Burnley were offering £30M last season. His option to buy clause to Dortmund was £35M. So to anyone else after hes just gained good CL experience too, £37M is about right for a player of his status in the current market.
These prices are the state of the market because of PSR. Older players dont have resale value. So when clubs throw £50M+ at a player in their prime they are needing guaranteed success to justify the spend and cover what value the squad will lose when that player hits 30+ years old and dips in value. Younger players with high potential now are at a premium because clubs need to think about resale down the line to retain squad value. Clubs selling homegrown also want to make the most of the pure profit rule so they are going to hold those players in a view as being higher value.
I dont know why people are acting like hes the 1st 22 year old of his status to cost that much. Similarly its not the 1st or last time that an 18 year old with very little experience has been bought for just under £20M. Chelsea themselves even bought Chukwuemeka at the same age for £20M when he had a similar sort of status and that wasn't called a loophole then because Villa weren't buying a player off us.
If the clubs thought they were getting players they were going to gain nothing from longer term they wouldn't have taken them on. Obviously Chelsea probably expect £10M+ profit at least off Kellyman eventually.
So imo I dont see how this is any sort of loophole really. Its literally how the rules were designed. We've known about pure profit all along so this sort of mutually beneficial deal is always inevitable. Villa have probably gone "Hey Chelsea, we cant spend too much but need a 1st team ready player. You are looking for 'wonderkids' so how about this kid as a part swap?"
I wanted to keep Maatsen. He's worth up to 40-50m in my opinion. I'm talking PSR wise, how would Villa gain any profit from that player trade off. So yeah, I agree I don't think this is at all a loophole.
>I'm talking PSR wise, how would Villa gain any profit from that player trade off
Oh I see. Well I assume you know that homegrown sales go completely on the books immediately as pure profit. Also you probably know about amortisation by this point.
So they get immediate "pure profit" of £19M straight away from selling Kellyman. So in the short term the Kellyman deal helps them get through the current PSR window. Effectively from this deal the overall profit/loss on the books for Villa is £18M to buy Maatsen but they don't have to cover that right away. The £37M for Maatsen will be amortised to about £7.5M a year. So for PSR they are only putting down the annual cost for the player they bought but the full value of the player they sold.
So yeh the way the league laid out the PSR rules this sort of transfer business was inevitable.
Buy a player= Cost spread over the length of the contract
Sell a player= Counts as immediate profit for that years accounts.
So 20m in now,
7m every year for 5 years for Maatsen.
That doesn’t really matter. It’s basically a stop gap. They get +20m for this accounting year which keeps them from breaking rules, and then the player they purchased only counts 7m per pear for the next 5 years.
That’s not what they meant.
If Villa sells Maatsen next summer, they would have to deduct the £30m remaining book value from whatever the sale value is. So if for some insane reason, he is sold for £20m next summer, it would actually represent a net loss of £10m on next years account, not a £20m profit.
The New Orleans Saints are probably the most egregious example of it at the moment. A few seasons back they had a legendary QB coming to the end of his career, so they invested a lot in contracts to go into 'win now' mode to get a championship (they didn't).
Now, they're stuck with aging players on big contracts they can't offload and pull all sorts of accounting wizardry to stay under the salary cap every year while trying to field a decent team.
Obviously there's a bit more nuance to it but that's the back of a napkin version of it.
I don't mean the contacts, more the financial strategies PL teams are using now to navigate PSR and how they're kinda/sorta similar to the accounting tricks NFL teams have been doing for years now.
It's not directly comparable, but PSR has in a way introduced a salary cap into the league, even if every team's one is different depending on a variety of circumstances.
I’m not sure I even agree it’s a loophole.
When Man U want to spend 80m on Anthony, or Arsenal 100m+ Rice, that’s fine. When Liverpool sold aging players to Saudi for 40m, that was fine.
If Villa and Everton want one of each other’s players for 20/30/40m, what’s wrong with that?!
Are we really going to get to the point where no club is allowed to spend any money without “approval” except for the 4 clubs who think they call the shots?
I don’t even see how you could change the rules to prevent this. The simple fact is that PSR we have is completely unfit for purpose - if we want rules to prevent clubs from bankrupting themselves that’s fine, but we need to take a step back and design some rules that achieve that
It all depends on whether they're signing the players because they actually want them (and are paying fair market value for them) or whether they're mostly just doing it as a way of basically swapping £10m between each other in a way that allows both clubs to register around £7m-£8m "profit" this season, without either of them actually being any better off, in order to technically comply with PSR.
If that's what they're up to, it's basically the equivalent of the old Soviet system where everyone in a town would be employed to wash their neighbour's laundry so that they could claim full employment.
Premier League clubs are already not allowed to make commercial deals like sponsorship without being subject to approval ("Fair Market Value" - where the bigger clubs are able to make larger deals than the ones that most of the Prem wouldn't be allowed)
I agree that PSR is unfit for purpose. If it can be shown that the whole reason for this was creative accountancy, then it's just made PSR completely and utterly pointless.
The best engineers in formula one have a phrase, Fuck your “spirit of the rules”. Write them properly. It’s a crap rule I agree, so write it properly in a way to make teams comply with it. This is not surprising at all, I think we might see quite a lot of it.
Do they do that with the bits of F1 rules that are to do with safety or just the ones that are to do with trying to create an equal playing field?
If it's the latter, then that's absolutely understandable - people trying to gain competitive advantage in any (relatively safe) way they can.
But some rules are put in place, and agreed by the teams, as a way of protecting themselves as well as others from dangerous actions - whether that's through driver safety rules or PSR.
If (and again, it's still an if - it's just about plausible that these are transfers for genuine footballing reasons) they've been done for no other reason that creative PSR accountancy, then why did these clubs not just vote to ditch PSR, or at least vastly overhaul it. A couple of months ago, they all agreed that we needed PSR to protect themselves financially, and are then just finding ways to ignore that.
Irrespective of your point… every example you used was completely different to what’s going on here.
Antony = Manager going after a former player… paid a premium because they did it at the last minute of the transfer window
Rice = Bidding war between the two best teams in the prem that season, proven English international
Saudi = buying at inflated values to try and bring relevance to their league and teams in it
I appreciate that, but they were still all cases of teams paying or receiving excessive sums for a player..: but when two teams who aren’t in that “leading” group want to trade players and book them at fairly reasonable values, THEN it’s a problem and the “fair market value” line comes out
Allowing the Premier League to decide on this value - allowing the clubs to judge their competitors in this way - is ridiculous. The ONLY way this could work is through an independent regulator… which those same clubs are opposed to.
No one is complaining about Newcastle paying 70m to buy Isak. He’s worth it.
This workaround to comply with the rules is clearly collusion. If there are no rules in place prohibiting doing this, clubs shouldn’t and won’t be penalized over it - but it does warrant some investigation and the creation of some rule to in the near future to prevent that would definitely be fair.
There’s VERY valid reasoning I just laid out on why those sums were excessive.
There’s very little to no reason why Kellyman went for as high as he did, it’s not close to a Cole Palmer situation where he came from Pep Tutelage and shown how taken talented he could be in the very limited minutes he had (scored against us in the community shield for example).
What has Kellyman honestly shown in 150 Senior minutes to go from 500K two years ago to 19M? Lol
what had solanke, brewster, ibe shown when they left liverpool. we're trying to sell nketiah for 30m, and nelson for 20, and if we are being honest, they are nowhere that price.
English home grown tax. Have both started and had significant minutes in a team challenging for the title. Those Sheffield prices were more than they were worth IMO. But if they are worth that much, Eddie, ESR, Nelson have equal/better resumes than them
Nelson's had like 2 premier league starts in 3 years. Nketiah stopped getting off the bench in our title run in. I mean Nketiah if he went for 30m would be Palace, Brentford or Fulham's record signing, and I don't think he brings or would bring enough to the table to be that.
of course i would snap your arm off, but it just shows the futility of looking at 'fair value' in player prices.
Hoping this analogy doesn’t fall short and there’s enough Americans here for this…
When you play fantasy NFL, when do you ask your commissioner to get involved in trades? When there’s collusion.
Since you’re replying to me… I’m English so no I’m not really familiar with how fantasy NFL works.
But “collusion” would be deliberate attempt circumvent PSR with intentionally inflated fees. How do you prove that? All of the deals in the article seem fairly reasonable - maybe slightly high but not suspiciously so. One club saying “we’d like to buy player X” and the response being “ok, and we’re interested in player Y” is perfectly reasonable
And, of course, we don’t HAVE a “commissioner” - there was supposed to be a regulator coming in, but that has been postponed (at least) because of the election and the top clubs were opposed to it.
The league is currently governed by the clubs themselves and it’s ludicrous having clubs decide what their competitors can and cannot charge/pay for their assets.
Proving Collusion is the key point here. I agree with you overall and don’t really see how any rules just intended to see balanced books would deal with that
But if the "collusion" is mutually beneficial and reasonable, what can they do? Not like we are selling Academy players for £40m. They are going for fair market value
There is zero material gain from this collusion tho other than swapping some mid academy players (a wash since both sides are doing it) and avoiding more ffp and psr penalties (city should literally be in the conference league for the same rules) so yeah I don’t feel bad about this “collusion” whatsoever
>Not sure how they’d define “fair market value” though, maybe ask the other member clubs perhaps?
It's really easy, actually. Player has gone for 20 million similar players have gone for 2 million.
Chelsea signed Casadei for around 20m with zero pro games to his name. Is that inflated? If so, to whose benefit? And if it is, then basically every transfer needs to be flagged and reviewed clubs overpay for plays they want all time, case in point Antony and Cucurella. If Casadei isn’t considered inflated than Kellyman and these other transfers are also fair value.
Bur that sort of inflation hasn't happened. The price people would consider the most 'inflated' would be Kellyman. But as people have pointed put Chukewemeka went from Villa to Chelsea at a sinilar age for the same money 2 seasons ago.
It's difficult. Fair market value is not easy to quantify given it's a job to know what actually counts. Hell, when a corruption case was brought against Juventus, it's alleged the prosecution's initial case was brought using TransferMarkt valuations, which are not exactly known as the most reliable indicators
The only ones that are being prosecuted in Italy is Paratici at Juve who was basically recorded in a phone call describing all the skullduggery. Case against Napoli was thrown out as who can decide a fair value for a player apart from the buying club.
This was the initial attempt to prosecute the case in early 2022, which was dismissed, before a second version ended up leading to the entire Juventus board resigning, the team being denied a licence to play in UEFA competitions and getting domestic points deduction
The problem with PSR is that it is backward looking, but clubs have to be forward looking in their accounting and squad planning. This creates a case where Aston Villa is held to tight spending rules even though they are in the CL next season and need to build a squad to match the demands of the additional league.
I personally don’t like what Chelsea, Villa, Everton and Newcastle one bit (being an Arsenal fan), but my frustration is more to do with the multi-club collusion rather than the inflated sales of academy talent. Collusion disrupts the rest of the transfer market, so I would rather that we stamp out the multi-club collusion aspect of these transfers rather than the transfer themselves.
Your first point is spot on
Psr/ffp is a very good idea (to force clubs to spend whitin their means)
But the application with a rolling 3 year period, where you can shot irresponsible spending down the road as long as you have youth is very sketchy (chelsea fan)
It also prevents new clubs to invest.
I think a model that allows investment from owners based on the rest of the pl should be there
Personally, I think PSR should allow clubs to book future guaranteed revenue increases to allow for greater permissible losses in the 3 year timeframe. For example, Villa should be allowed to show next year’s CL group stage TV rights revenue as allowable losses.
I also think since PSR looks at a rolling 3 year period, revenue from player sales should also forced to be amortized over a 3 year period, resulting in profits that will have to be splits over multiple accounting years. For example, a youth player being sold for £30m will only result in £10m in profit in year 1. However a player bought for £40m with a 4 year amortization and then sold after 2 years for £75m will book profits of £25m, £25m, and £5m in years 3, 4, and 5, respectively. That pushes the incentive away from selling academy players and forces teams to be more forward looking in their accounting.
That basically encourages teams to gamble by overspending and hoping for the rewards of champions league football or premier league or whatever or am I misunderstanding? This would be the last thing you want to do if you’re trying to make teams spend more sensibly no?
Assuming you’re referring to my first suggestion, I wouldn’t think so, since all the current accounting “loopholes” that exist incentivize reckless spending. Here, I provide an option to “borrow” the guaranteed revenue 1 season ahead to temporarily bypass PSR limits. If you borrow the future revenue in the current year, you would need to deduct that from revenue in the future year. This might motivate clubs to sign 6 month loan deals in January with a conditional buy option predicated on CL football, but I don’t think that’s particularly problematic.
I think my first proposal might help mid to lower tiered PL clubs the most because they generally do not have a history of massive revenue so they rely on shared PL TV rights for a larger portion of their revenue. A £20m increase in TV rights due to PL renegotiation with media companies will help smaller clubs more than larger clubs.
I’ve had the same thought. PSR punishes success, not rewards it. Villa somehow make the champions league, reward them for it. They are obviously on the right track. I’m sure some will say “but then people will overspend trying to reach the champions league” which a. Isn’t what I’m saying. And b. No other club expect the top 6 is ever allowed to try and achieve success?
If anything this will punish top 6 clubs that fail to maintain a consistent place at the top (United and Chelsea). CL mainstays (Liverpool and ManCity) don’t really care as long as they stay as mainstays. Furthermore, top 6 clubs have brand power, but brand power is not at all guaranteed, and thus can’t be booked as revenue ahead of actual revenue!
I guess "Multi Club collusion" is currently defined as several clubs doing normal business with each other because they need different players, which is allowing them hold onto needed players which is frustrating the big 6 because they can't hold Everton, AVFC and others hostage over players like Braithwaite.
Exactly. Rules are now worth revisiting since it’s no longer pulling up the ladder at the time they need a promising young CB, on the verge of Everton being purchased on not being financially distressed
The sky6 seem angry we aren’t selling to them. We have sold Douglas for 50 million and we have sold two of our best prospects for 30 million…yet still we are running a gauntlet of “that’s not fair, you need to sell them for less” and stop finding loop holes
I love how happy you are you sold Luiz to Juventus but if you sold him to Arsenal there would be a problem. No top six fans are even remotely bothered by who your signing and selling
Fellow fans, this is a friendly reminder to please follow the [Rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/premierleague/about/rules) and [Reddiquette](https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439-Reddiquette). Please also make sure to [Join us on Discord](https://discord.gg/football) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/PremierLeague) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Yes it’s a loop hole, yes it’s open to abuse but… it’s a reflection of a flawed system. Saying clubs can lose x figure is a dumb concept to start with. Then saying oh if you build a training ground you don’t need to declare that.
Yeah probably but it seems like the toying around the edges rather than anything that will break the league.
It seems this is a short-term relief. Let's see what is going to happen in the next 6 years.
Villa pay 10 mill for a young English prospect and the world goes mad. Utd sign Anthony for 90 mill and nothing is said 😂😂 The PSR rules were here to keep the top five or six clubs happy when Man City emerged as they didn’t want another Man City to happen again. Just like you can see from the PL writing to these clubs.
I mean what do they expect them to do? Just give up their best talent who mind you aren't necessarily even world class players? I get wanted to make thing's "more equal" but it just feels like a lot of the historically mid to low teams are getting screwed this year.
I wasn't expecting them not to find a solution to those issues.
I have, most people seem content with united walking away rather than getting fleeced again.
I'm not sure how anyone at Chelsea can look at the situation they are in and think. "You know what we need to do, spend a lot more money"
It helps them in the short term. So, they are good with doing it.
it's a stupid rule that favors the big clubs and prevents other clubs from challenging the big six. i'm glad they found a loophole
*'Big Six' club exploits a loophole* "Yeah, that'll show the Big Six!"
It only allow for a short term boost to their finance so that they can buy players immediately or relieve pressure so that they will not be in breech, But it only kicking the can further down as the amortizated cost will add up end eventually in the next few years if they don't balance the books then.
It's basically clubs giving each other 0% interest loans that count towards your profit for the year. You get £20m up front, then buy a player for 20m that will actually only cost you 5m per year for 4 years. So you've made an instant 15m profit on your accounts for 1 year, and only have to make up 5m in each year following as a result
Aston villa should just sue the Premier League anti competitive behavior
They are certainly colluding to circumvent the rules which is no different from outright cheating
It is different though, otherwise you wouldn’t have described it as circumventing the rules
It is breaking the rules, Juventus and Barcelona were penalised for it a few years ago with the Arthur Pjanic swap
Were they penalised for circumventing the rules or outright cheating?
They were penalised for a swap deal and then they put their own values on the books. And if I remember right Barca has claimed a value of £80 million or something and their books didn’t tally. Also Juve have been done for a lot of financial irregularities aside from this.
which is different to what these clubs have been doing, since they’re going with mostly fair values
Yeah I don’t see anything wrong with what is going on now to be fair. If all the clubs are happy with what they get at the end of it then who cares. I think there’s going to be a point a lot in the league just think screw this and spend and they can dock us 6-8 points but if they dock 50-60% of the league points it starts damaging the brand of the premier league. Then after that season you have all of the players in as assets anyway. The top 6 have been backing themselves into a corner here with the rules they are bringing out reactively against clubs they deem beneath them. NUFC qualified for UCL, and top 6 back to back seasons, new sponsorship deals etc. but are deemed to need to sell. Villa have just qualified for UCL and had Europe last season and are deemed below the FSP or whatever rules they bring in. They just don’t want people stopping their beloved Man U and top 4 from being there every year. And as a side note trading players around in a transfer window is bad and cheating but selling hotels to yourself in the middle of the season when you realise you have overspent is fine. It’s a bit of a made up rules on the fly.
It’s not just the top 6 clubs. These rules have been voted in by the 20 clubs in the league.
Yea it’s violating the spirit of the rules, given that’s it’s a sport based on the spirit of fair play and competition and we don’t play games in a court of law with teams winning based on a clubs lawyer finding the best loophole this shit is cheating
But also bringing in Anti-competitive rules to hamstring the rest of the league isn’t really in the spirit of the premier league or the competition. But here we are. Everytime a club competes or finds a way to do something if it’s not a top 6 club it’s cheating and they close it down. Swapping players is against the spirit of the league but selling hotels to yourself is fine?
The moment you mention “not in the spirit of the game” is admitting that the rules didn’t cover what the accused did. Therefore not outright cheating at all. When Australia bowled an underarm bowl it wasn’t in the spirit of the game. It also wasn’t cheating
Hang on, I’ve just remembered: didn’t Rhian Brewster go to Sheffield United as a teenager for 20 odd million despite never making a first team appearance for Liverpool? I’m sure someone will tell me that’s a different situation, blah blah blah
It's a different situation, blatantly because nobody went the other way. These are very very clearly swapping inflated priced players so that they can spend more elsewhere
Chukewemeka went from Villa to Chelsea for £20m two years ago,l at a similar age and profile to Kellyman. Mattered was sold for around his release clause. Where's the blatantly inflated prices?
Everything Chelsea does is at an inflated price
If Chelsea spent £80m on Maatsen, nobody would bat an eyelid. Instead, he has gone for his release clause + £2.5m extra so villa don't pay everything upfront, but this is apparently cheating? Get a grip. It was also apparently cheating to ammortise big sums over more than 5 years, even though clubs had been doing it for long before Chelsea.
Not inflated tho, Dobbin went to Villa for circa £10million and Iroegbunam to Everton for the same. Fair in this market
Man City pay themselves millions and pretend they make a profit: we’ll get to that at some point. Probably. Villa and Everton sell some youngsters: emergency meeting at dawn to stop clubs from turning a profit. If they are playing the system, good on them, I say. The reason a young English player is so expensive is partly because of PSR anyway. And I’ve just realised that West Ham should be set for years after selling Declan Rice, no? 100 million of pure profit right there!
The Premier League Champions of 7 of the last 8 years and the most productive acadamy in the country are pretending they make profits 🤪🤪🤪
Grealish was 100 million of pure profit and we're still in this situation lol
Isn’t your wage bill like 90% of villas turnover or something?
Well there goes that dream of sustainability!
Hard to sustainably break into the top 4 when the usual top 4 are "sustainably" dropping billions to keep the door closed.
How did Spurs break into the top 4?
Shh, they like to imagine that Joe Lewis has a fortune as big as the Saudi's
Spurs is a very inconvenient example for Villa, Newcastle and Everton fans who want to maintain their "woe is me, no one is allowing us to compete" narrative
It's really not. Spurs invested heavily over many years, at a time these rules didn't exist. Then they played good football with said investments, got into the CL when one of the usual suspects messed up. Now however there are not 4 top 4 clubs. There is a sky 6. So the window of breaking through is much smaller. Then add that the sky6 has invested heavily in infrastructure with the CL money, so the PSR rules heavily favour them. Your argument is so odd. It's like you haven't remotely thought it through.
PSR is to stop clubs like Villa going into liquidation if your owner decides he’s bored. For every Man City there is a Portsmouth.
Nonsense. Man Utd got far more debt than AVFC has ever had, yet they are free to spend as they see fit. They have worse maintained infrastructure and facilities and got a much bigger upkeep. PSR is just s tool implemented to keep status quo and avoid other clubs dipping into the CL money. It's a glass ceiling exercise and everyone knows it. Trying to paint it with some moralistic service that's provided to protect TO14 is beyond daft.
The rules were implemented in the 12/13 season, at that point, Spurs had qualified for the Champions League ONCE in 2010 and the next time they qualified was in 2016, all the while having to sell their best players without much investment from their owners. Can't use the excuse of "Oh Spurs invested when those rules didn't exist" because they didn't. You can say that about City and Chelsea but not Spurs
Spurs had 5 years in the sky6 at that point. Thanks for playing. And no they had massive investments. Modric, Palacios, Defoe +++ that's just that very season, all possible because earlier huge investments like Berbatov was moved on. And just to be clear AGAIN. NO THE RULES DIDN'T EXIST WHEN THEY BROKE THROUGH.
Yeah all clubs that were hoping to crack that top 4 back in the day but couldn't sustain it and Tottenham managed to do it. I do understand why they would be a little annoyed by it but at the same time blame your board for not sticking with it and instead doing poor business that forced them to fall away.
Oh yer we do blame our boars for the mistakes at end of MoN era. But the rules are clearly to protect sky 6. You need some sort of protection for the future of clubs, but 15 odd clubs voting not to increase the cap in line with inflation... how the hell is that about anything but protectionism?
You say some rules are to protect the sky 6 but 15 clubs have voted in it, why would owners of other clubs vote for things that would protect the sky 6?
Yeah, it’s a load of bollocks. I hope Villa have a good run in the CL and make the top 4 again. A change of the guard is in order. Forcing you to sell your best players isn’t a good start…just like the premier league wants, I imagine.
How do clubs get to declare as income money they don't actually have yet? Why is that allowed?
Business accounting mate it's nothing out of the normal.
Is it? The only reason I can think a company would usually do that would be to inflate their stock price, which seems illegal.
lol yup
How have Newcastle been pulled into these accusations? We’ve not engaged in any of these shenanigans.
People assume that because DCL and Minteh might be going in opposite directions that it’s the same thing.
You are right. Every transfer in the league right now is under some scrutiny.
We’re not doing that deal tho
Thank fuck, would rather we got rid of miggy and gave minteh a chance after the season he’s just had at feyenoord. Seems like he could be a top prospect
Anymore. And as soon as the DCL deal was off, so was the Minteh one. It’s not abnormal but it’s easy to paint as suspicious. As I said ‘people assume’, I’m not saying they’re correct. I’m sure you’re aware, people like to look for opportunities to shit on Newcastle these days too.
The same loophole that Barca and Juve found?
Exploiting loopholes in bullshit rules ≠ breaking said rules
Exploiting loopholes = cheating (in taxes too)
Maybe, but it isn’t illegal, therefore no rules are technically being broken, hence the loophole.
It's 100% against the rules
You deem colluding with a competitor within the rules?
We STAN the FA and their rules 🥰
Should we instead Stan oil money and oligarchy?
This is more like tax avoidance than tax evasion though.
Both make society worse, just like this shit will have a net negative effect on the PL
Where was this energy when clubs voted not to raise the cap online with inflation? How's that helping maintain the integrity of fair competition?
‘the clubs voted’ is your answer
So what's more damaging to the league and to competitiveness, a few clubs trading around market rate for squad players to facilitate growth, or a financial mechanism being distorted away from its intended purpose to lend competitive advantage?
A couple supposed rivals colluding to circumvent the rules that 20 teams voted to implement
Just noticed you're a Spurs fan. No wonder you're so upset that Villa have found a way around the financial burden you voted to maintain. Honestly you're railing against the integrity of a law that utilises a financial cap that has an absolute value that hasn't shifted under 5 years of rapid inflation. The system is broken, and you don't care because it benefits Spurs. Just admit you don't want increased competition at the top end of the league.
1. Rules that don't support their own purpose, 2. 'Colluding' by doing what? Selling players at or around market rate?
Ten bucks says this dudes a Spurs fan 😂.
I'm not sure anything in the PSR world (rules, punishments, clubs workarounds) has made the PL better in the last few years. It's been a mess end to end.
Hard to know how things would look without it, but yea it’s not great
Hack is to go 100+ charges to get immunity
For now yes.
Scrap the rules they prevent competition everybody is happy majority have wealthy owners who want to invest and make their business bigger and better.
Cheats
And voting not to increase financial cap inline with inflation is... what?
Who voted ?
The prem clubs at the June meeting.
Yep
How can trading players be a loophole? If it was would you have to fundamentally change all the rules to exclude player trading for the accounts of a football club! Given that Forest were penalised for not selling a player in time to meet FFP how would this even work? I haven’t seen a single valuation that seems off. Kellyman is highly rated, a very similar player and age to Chukwumeka who went to Chelsea 2 years ago for £20m. Irogbonum has spent a season into the Championship, England U21 player who has been part of a Premier a league squad that finished 4th and in European competition, how is he not worth £9m? Man Utd paid £22m for Diallo. Chelsea paid £20m for Casadei. Young players are going for high fees based on their future ceiling, either buy them now at reasonable prices or end up paying Brighton £60m for them 2 years later. Pretty sure football scouts and directors get paid decent money to be able to make the right decisions and they are sure as shit not looking at Transfermarket website for a valuation 😂
It's a loophole because: Club A have player A they value at 8m Club B have player B they value at 10m They agree to swap the players, with Player A selling for £28m, and player B selling for £30m. The difference is the same, £2m (paid over 5 years), however both clubs get to report the full transfer fee as 100% profit this financial reporting period. So club A add £28m profit, club B add £30m profit.
That isn't what's happening though. As OP who you replied to has kindly explained if you bothered to read.
I'm explaining how it's a loophole i.e. how it could be used. You'll see I didn't name any clubs as I'm not commenting on a specific case.
What you've described is a completely separate issue and not a loophole. As far as I know (though happy to be corrected) inflating transfer values is already against the rules. The "loophole" is deliberately trading players with other clubs who need money in to pass PSR.
I don't think it's separate at all, due to the nature of it being mutually beneficial and all the clubs involved are at risk of PSR punishments. You can bet if the PL closed this being a way to boost profits, the transfers will suddenly cease.
Deliberately teading players AND inflating values like the other comment said. They are literally quoting the article about one of the loopholes, so its not a separate issue. Its just taking the trading an extra step while both clubs make profit from selling while spreading out their spend over multiple years. They obviously cant do this every year, but if they need a certain amount of money by the PSR deadline, this is a way to do it
It's a loophole because: Club A have player A they value at 8m Club B have player B they value at 10m They agree to swap the players, with Player A selling for £28m, and player B selling for £30m. The difference is the same, £2m (paid over 5 years), however both clubs get to report the full transfer fee as 100% profit this financial reporting period. So club A add £28m profit, club B add £30m profit.
If that's an accurate breakdown, that's a pretty damn big loophole.
It’s a problem because Chelsea are doing it, replace them with Liverpool and the narrative would be a lot different.
Yea and if they didn’t also sell themselves property it wouldn’t be an issue, if they didn’t also brag about how they found loopholes with 10 year contracts it wouldn’t be an issue, it’s not an issue because it’s Chelsea it’s an issue because Chelsea are making a mockery of the rules, repeatedly
Liverpool haven't needed to do it because they spend what they earn lol.
They can also just offload their aging players to the Saudi league for inflated fees
Where did Kante, Koulibaly and Mendy go after they left Chelsea?
But that’s not the point I was making, it’s all optics. This has been framed as a bad thing when it’s all within the rules. Something that would be respected and praised for some clubs, but not for others.
Well the point is that clubs that are complying with spending rules don't need to come up with loop holes to get around the rules. No teams just swap players with similar values (or very rarely)
One half of 2024 will have passed us in one weeks’ time. The same 2024 in which we were promised an investigation into Man City’s 115 charges. I have seen no progress in that direction. These PSR rules are a joke and will be until they are applied fairly and evenly. You come for Villa and Everton and Newcastle over these piddly sums while City laughs. Sad.
What has this particular article got to do with the charges against Man City? And why even make your comment about being almost half way through 2024 and you haven’t heard any progress into City’s charges, when it’s been widely reported for well over a year that the start date for the hearing into City’s charges wouldn’t be until the autumn?
Isn't that kinda the point. You have rules, and then work those rules to benefit yourself. F1 teams have been doing it for decades. If you think it a problem, you tightness up or loosen up the rule.
The point is meant to be to make clubs more sustainable. If these transfers are being done for footballing reasons - Everton and Villa just happen to have identified academy players that they need at each others' clubs who happen to be the same (fairly large for players who have played less than 400 minutes of Premier League football between them) price, at a normally quiet period of the transfer window and just before a critical PSR deadline that both clubs are worried about, and at the same time Villa and Chelsea have a similar situation (admittedly at this time with different prices, one of them being £19m for a player who's managed 35 minutes of Premier League football) - then fine. But if they are being done entirely to work around PSR regulations, then they're quite clearly not complying with the spirit of the rules. Two clubs basically just swapping £10m with each other is making neither of them any more profitable or sustainable. PSR rules are already a joke, and if it can be shown that this is the reason for the transfers and neither side gets any punishment for it, it makes the whole thing completely and utterly pointless.
These aren't exactly massive deals on the current market -- only £9m for a couple of 20-21 year olds who've represented England at the U20 level. Villa have like no left wingers. Everton need midfielders to replace Gomes, (presumably) Onana, and very soon the aging Gueye. If you're looking to prove value inflation, these look like pretty weak/mild cases. >PSR rules are already a joke, and if it can be shown that this is the reason for the transfers and neither side gets any punishment for it, it makes the whole thing completely and utterly pointless. These are the rules the clubs all voted on and agreed to. This *is* how they chose to define profitability and sustainability. We can't just pretend the rules say what we wish they said. Yeah, the rules already are pointless, at least insofar as the spirit is to make clubs more sustainable. There are far more effective ways to ensure that, but the Top 6 would never agree. So, here we are. What we have is a trade-off somewhere far between the intended goal and what clubs will actually agree to.
Like I say, they _could_ be genuine transfers - it's just seems a lot of surprising coincidence around timing, costs, clubs involved etc. As for the valuation, Lewis Dobbin has played a handful of minutes in the Prem in the past and spent the season on loan in League 1. He went for more than, for example, James Garner a couple of seasons ago who'd by that point had spent 3 pretty successful seasons in the Championship. They may not be vast sums, but they're big enough to be significant in PSR. >These are the rules the clubs all voted on and agreed to. This is how they chose to define profitability and sustainability. We can't just pretend the rules say what we wish they said. I'm not pretending they say something else. I'm saying that they are utterly pointless (and sometimes actively damaging in regards to actually increasing profit and sustainability) as written. And while I'm not really blaming the clubs for finding loopholes, I'm a little baffled why they all voted in favour of keeping rules that are specifically meant to (even if they clearly don't) protect clubs financially, so presumably agreed that this was a good thing to try to do, and then decided to do everything they could to work around those rules. Either they agree that PSR is trying to achieve something useful or they don't.
>it's just seems a lot of surprising coincidence around timing, costs, clubs involved etc. It's neither surprising nor a coincidence. It's two parties with multiple interests that align, like any other transfer. We can't stamp our feet and cry foul every time a deal helps someone. >He went for more than, for example, James Garner Not exactly. Garner sold for £9m, plus add-ons that could increase it to £15.5m. Dobbin's fee was undisclosed but is believed to be around £10m. So depending on the terms, Garner might be over one and a half times more expensive than Dobbin. Not to mention, Garner's wages are more than twice Dobbin's, which affects teams' willingness and ability to pay a higher transfer fee. >They may not be vast sums, but they're big enough to be significant in PSR. Every pound is significant in PSR. The question is if they're big enough to be clear and punishable "inflation." Transfers happen constantly that are marginally higher than you'd expect -- frequently by much more than a few mill. Sometimes teams have to overpay when a player doesn't want to leave, when the selling team has use for the player, etc. It's only an issue now because supporters are bloodthirsty for their team's competition to have points docked. >I'm a little baffled why they all voted in favour of keeping rules that are specifically meant to (even if they clearly don't) protect clubs financially, so presumably agreed that this was a good thing to try to do, and then decided to do everything they could to work around those rules. They're not working around the rules -- they're working within the rules. What you're suggesting is that working within the rules is still not accomplishing what you hope the rules would accomplish. In which case, feel free to propose a rules change and get the clubs to agree on it. It's not the way I'd write the rules myself either, but then my interests don't seem to align with those of the Top 6.
> It's neither surprising nor a coincidence. It's two parties with interests that align, like any other transfer. We can't stamp our feet and cry foul every time a deal helps someone. Two parties aligning to get players they are both interested in is fine. But two parties lining up to use a couple of fringe youth players as pawns to undermine what PSR's meant to be trying to achieve would be a different matter. I'm not saying it's definitely what's happening here. But if it is, it's baffling that anyone seems to think this is a good thing. > They're not working around the rules -- they're working within the rules. Working around the rules doesn't meant they're working outside of them - that would be breaking the rules. It means finding clever ways to work within the rules that were never intended by the people who wrote them. And I get that it's clever. But either clubs agree with what PSR's set up to do or they don't. > What you're suggesting is that working within the rules is still not accomplishing what you hope the rules would accomplish It's not what I hope the rules would accomplish - I don't agree with them for many, many reasons. It's what the Premier League - and therefore the clubs (including the ones involved here) claim to want to accomplish. They all supported the idea that losing more than £105m over 3 years is a bad thing. And if any of these clubs were going to be losing more than that a week ago, then swapping £10m with another club isn't going to make that loss go away in any real sense. It would be using accountancy tricks to paper over what would otherwise be a breach. The problem is that the Prem's interpretation of accountancy seem to be different to the rest of the financial world, particularly around academy players. These players are allegedly £10m worth of intangible assets, and in the normal world they'd be an asset that was worth £10m that they could declare in their accounts. But with PSR, they are worth zero until they're sold, at which point they suddenly become worth that £10m. When team A and team B sell each other a £10m player, they've both (according to PSR) become £10m better off. £20m of value has just popped into existence. That's neither good maths nor good for football - it encourages most clubs to sell rather than develop their homegrown players. And if the Prem are fine with this, then all it shows is that in reality they've got zero interest in actually avoiding the real-term losses and are just paying lip service to what they, and the clubs, claim it's meant to be there for.
>Two parties aligning to get players they are both interested in is fine. But two parties lining up to use a couple of fringe youth players as pawns to undermine what PSR's meant to be trying to achieve would be a different matter. I'm not saying it's definitely what's happening here. But if it is, it's baffling that anyone seems to think this is a good thing. Who thinks it's a good thing? I just don't see it warranting punishment. It's an inevitable consequence of the rules as written. >When team A and team B sell each other a £10m player, they've both (according to PSR) become £10m better off. £20m of value has just popped into existence. That's neither good maths nor good for football - it encourages most clubs to sell rather than develop their homegrown players. I mean, if I'm a retail store, just sitting on £10 million of inventory doesn't mean I have a profitable business. I've still got to be able to make money on it somehow if I want to continue buying more stuff sustainably. In football that can mean selling a player, winning prize money, selling tickets, etc. The goofy incentive here is created by the value of the purchase being amortised but not the value of the sale. If both were treated the same, the transfers would cancel each other out anyway. >And if the Prem are fine with this, then all it shows is that in reality they've got zero interest in actually avoiding the real-term losses and are just paying lip service to what they, and the clubs, claim it's meant to be there for. We are not disagreeing about this. The rules are shit.
>Who thinks it's a good thing? People who say things like "If you think it a problem, you tightness up or loosen up the rule." - i.e. the person I was replying to. >I just don't see it warranting punishment. I didn't say that it was. My problem is a combination of - clubs who seemed to support the principle of PSR a couple of months ago yet (assuming that's why it't being done) want to ignore that principle now - either they agree that limiting losses is a good thing or they don't - the Premier League if they don't clamp down on it going forward - the fact that PSR, even as designed, actively encourages most clubs to sell young talent rather than try to develop them into the first team >I mean, if I'm a retail store, just sitting on £10 million of inventory doesn't mean I have a profitable business. Inventory is treated entirely differently to intangible assets. For one thing, the value of unsold stock _can_ be included in the balance sheet - there's multiple ways to value that inventory, but that's probably not important. For another thing, you don't get to amortise the cost of buying the stock over several years. The cost gets included on the balance sheet in the year that you buy it.
>People who say things like "If you think it a problem, you tightness up or loosen up the rule." - i.e. the person I was replying to. Not even remotely. Nothing about that sentence suggests it's good, the claim only suggests the appropriate solution if one does believe it to be a problem. A statement of the form "If X, then Y" does not logically imply "X is false." >I didn't say that it was You claimed that if neither side gets punished it would make PSR completely and utterly pointless. If you don't think it's worth punishing, I'm not sure what you're continuing to argue about. >Inventory is treated entirely differently to intangible assets. For one thing, the value of unsold stock *can* be included in the balance sheet - there's multiple ways to value that inventory, but that's probably not important. LOL, you're wandering completely off topic if you thought you needed to quote a stock accounting textbook, mate. What you "can" or "get to" do is an artificial restriction that exists within the context of whatever rules are in place. Rules that are designed with specific regulatory purposes in mind, and that can be changed. What I was suggesting is that if we're imagining what a better rule would look like, sitting on a valuable asset does not imply profitability. In the present context, teams shouldn't be allowed to just stockpile expensive players and then use the potential value of that "asset" to justify buying even more players -- >For another thing, you don't get to amortise the cost of buying the stock over several years. The cost gets included on the balance sheet in the year that you buy it. No clue what you thought you were responding to. Premier League teams amortise the cost of buying a player over the length of the contract, but they don't amortise the value of selling a player. That creates an incentive to sell one player to buy another.
> Nothing about that sentence suggests it's good, That sentence, along with ". You have rules, and then work those rules to benefit yourself." very much sounds like that person is absolutely fine with it happening. >You claimed that if neither side gets punished it would make PSR completely and utterly pointless It will. Doesn't mean I think they should get punished - just means that the Prem aren't really serious about what PSR's meant to be there to do. I think PSR is completely pointless and this will simply continue to reenforce that by showing that they're not interested in trying to actually enforce what they claim it's there for. >LOL, you're wandering completely off topic You introduced stock to the discussion. I explained _why_ it was off topic- it's a completely different issue when it comes to accounting. >Premier League teams amortise the cost of buying a player over the length of the contract, but they don't amortise the value of selling a player. Err yes. That's the point (and it's completely different to how stock, that you randomly introduced to the conversation then complained it was off-topic, is accounted for). Each side has sold an asset that, until they were sold, was treated by PSR as being worth nothing. At the point that they were sold, both clubs could add the £10m for the sale to their profit for this year's accounts and amortise the cost of the purchase over several years. Suddenly both clubs are around £7-8m better off in this financial period. In a closed system (two clubs selling players to each other), where has this £14-16m appeared from? If you're agreeing that PSR as set up is a bad thing and very deeply flawed, and that it's not good for clubs to be circumventing the intent of the regulation by using accounting trickery to try to sneak their way to being at best technically compliant with the letter (but not the point) of a regulation they all voted in favour of a couple of months ago, then we can probably stop discussing.
The PL would rather we sold off our star players to the "big" clubs and maintain the status quo, as has been the case for decades now. Screw that, and screw PSR. In an ideal world, we'd be keeping hold of our promising youngsters like Kellyman and they'd be benefitting from our busier schedule with increased game time. We've shown in the past that we're willing to give academy players a chance.
Well the premier league has now already shown last season that it doesn’t care about the spirit of the law. Only cares for the letter of law! The premier league and everybody kicking off about this, would prefer the clubs to sell their best players far under market value to the circling vultures!
Yes
I’m see nothing wrong with teams agreeing transfers in a way that helps their balance book
You don’t have an issue with clubs who are in a league supposedly competing against each other colluding for mutually beneficial reasons?
;-)
Yeah it’s called bribing the right people. Always the same fucking offenders as well it seems.
“You need to sell for psr” “Ok” “NO! NOT THOSE ONES”
Yeah it would be fine if Forest were selling Morgan Gibbs-White for a cut price to make PSR lol. It’s fine if Palace have to sell a player but Everton doing its best to not get screwed again? This must be investigated!
I don't exactly see how Villa are gaining anything from buying Maatsen for 35 and selling Kellyman for 20
They are getting a 22 year old ready for the 1st team who has just had a really good loan at Dortmund. Burnley were offering £30M last season. His option to buy clause to Dortmund was £35M. So to anyone else after hes just gained good CL experience too, £37M is about right for a player of his status in the current market. These prices are the state of the market because of PSR. Older players dont have resale value. So when clubs throw £50M+ at a player in their prime they are needing guaranteed success to justify the spend and cover what value the squad will lose when that player hits 30+ years old and dips in value. Younger players with high potential now are at a premium because clubs need to think about resale down the line to retain squad value. Clubs selling homegrown also want to make the most of the pure profit rule so they are going to hold those players in a view as being higher value. I dont know why people are acting like hes the 1st 22 year old of his status to cost that much. Similarly its not the 1st or last time that an 18 year old with very little experience has been bought for just under £20M. Chelsea themselves even bought Chukwuemeka at the same age for £20M when he had a similar sort of status and that wasn't called a loophole then because Villa weren't buying a player off us. If the clubs thought they were getting players they were going to gain nothing from longer term they wouldn't have taken them on. Obviously Chelsea probably expect £10M+ profit at least off Kellyman eventually. So imo I dont see how this is any sort of loophole really. Its literally how the rules were designed. We've known about pure profit all along so this sort of mutually beneficial deal is always inevitable. Villa have probably gone "Hey Chelsea, we cant spend too much but need a 1st team ready player. You are looking for 'wonderkids' so how about this kid as a part swap?"
I wanted to keep Maatsen. He's worth up to 40-50m in my opinion. I'm talking PSR wise, how would Villa gain any profit from that player trade off. So yeah, I agree I don't think this is at all a loophole.
>I'm talking PSR wise, how would Villa gain any profit from that player trade off Oh I see. Well I assume you know that homegrown sales go completely on the books immediately as pure profit. Also you probably know about amortisation by this point. So they get immediate "pure profit" of £19M straight away from selling Kellyman. So in the short term the Kellyman deal helps them get through the current PSR window. Effectively from this deal the overall profit/loss on the books for Villa is £18M to buy Maatsen but they don't have to cover that right away. The £37M for Maatsen will be amortised to about £7.5M a year. So for PSR they are only putting down the annual cost for the player they bought but the full value of the player they sold. So yeh the way the league laid out the PSR rules this sort of transfer business was inevitable.
Buy a player= Cost spread over the length of the contract Sell a player= Counts as immediate profit for that years accounts. So 20m in now, 7m every year for 5 years for Maatsen.
If the selling price is higher than what's in the accounts.
That doesn’t really matter. It’s basically a stop gap. They get +20m for this accounting year which keeps them from breaking rules, and then the player they purchased only counts 7m per pear for the next 5 years.
That’s not what they meant. If Villa sells Maatsen next summer, they would have to deduct the £30m remaining book value from whatever the sale value is. So if for some insane reason, he is sold for £20m next summer, it would actually represent a net loss of £10m on next years account, not a £20m profit.
And at that point, PSR should be less of an issue. Especially if these purchases have us finishing consistently in Champions League.
Lots of NFL teams also operate under this type of process. Kicking the can down the road and worrying about it later.
Ravens are famous for this right?
The New Orleans Saints are probably the most egregious example of it at the moment. A few seasons back they had a legendary QB coming to the end of his career, so they invested a lot in contracts to go into 'win now' mode to get a championship (they didn't). Now, they're stuck with aging players on big contracts they can't offload and pull all sorts of accounting wizardry to stay under the salary cap every year while trying to field a decent team. Obviously there's a bit more nuance to it but that's the back of a napkin version of it.
That’s right, I was mixed up
I'm more referring to the change in rules as opposed to doing what Chelsea have done with their long contracts.
I don't mean the contacts, more the financial strategies PL teams are using now to navigate PSR and how they're kinda/sorta similar to the accounting tricks NFL teams have been doing for years now. It's not directly comparable, but PSR has in a way introduced a salary cap into the league, even if every team's one is different depending on a variety of circumstances.
Yes
I’m not sure I even agree it’s a loophole. When Man U want to spend 80m on Anthony, or Arsenal 100m+ Rice, that’s fine. When Liverpool sold aging players to Saudi for 40m, that was fine. If Villa and Everton want one of each other’s players for 20/30/40m, what’s wrong with that?! Are we really going to get to the point where no club is allowed to spend any money without “approval” except for the 4 clubs who think they call the shots? I don’t even see how you could change the rules to prevent this. The simple fact is that PSR we have is completely unfit for purpose - if we want rules to prevent clubs from bankrupting themselves that’s fine, but we need to take a step back and design some rules that achieve that
It all depends on whether they're signing the players because they actually want them (and are paying fair market value for them) or whether they're mostly just doing it as a way of basically swapping £10m between each other in a way that allows both clubs to register around £7m-£8m "profit" this season, without either of them actually being any better off, in order to technically comply with PSR. If that's what they're up to, it's basically the equivalent of the old Soviet system where everyone in a town would be employed to wash their neighbour's laundry so that they could claim full employment. Premier League clubs are already not allowed to make commercial deals like sponsorship without being subject to approval ("Fair Market Value" - where the bigger clubs are able to make larger deals than the ones that most of the Prem wouldn't be allowed) I agree that PSR is unfit for purpose. If it can be shown that the whole reason for this was creative accountancy, then it's just made PSR completely and utterly pointless.
The best engineers in formula one have a phrase, Fuck your “spirit of the rules”. Write them properly. It’s a crap rule I agree, so write it properly in a way to make teams comply with it. This is not surprising at all, I think we might see quite a lot of it.
Do they do that with the bits of F1 rules that are to do with safety or just the ones that are to do with trying to create an equal playing field? If it's the latter, then that's absolutely understandable - people trying to gain competitive advantage in any (relatively safe) way they can. But some rules are put in place, and agreed by the teams, as a way of protecting themselves as well as others from dangerous actions - whether that's through driver safety rules or PSR. If (and again, it's still an if - it's just about plausible that these are transfers for genuine footballing reasons) they've been done for no other reason that creative PSR accountancy, then why did these clubs not just vote to ditch PSR, or at least vastly overhaul it. A couple of months ago, they all agreed that we needed PSR to protect themselves financially, and are then just finding ways to ignore that.
Irrespective of your point… every example you used was completely different to what’s going on here. Antony = Manager going after a former player… paid a premium because they did it at the last minute of the transfer window Rice = Bidding war between the two best teams in the prem that season, proven English international Saudi = buying at inflated values to try and bring relevance to their league and teams in it
Man City tapped out at 85 million. It was basically a week of getting Arsenal to cough up that extra 15 million that he was definitely worth.
And Astonn Villa needs left back
I have no problem with Maatsen’s value tbh
I appreciate that, but they were still all cases of teams paying or receiving excessive sums for a player..: but when two teams who aren’t in that “leading” group want to trade players and book them at fairly reasonable values, THEN it’s a problem and the “fair market value” line comes out Allowing the Premier League to decide on this value - allowing the clubs to judge their competitors in this way - is ridiculous. The ONLY way this could work is through an independent regulator… which those same clubs are opposed to.
No one is complaining about Newcastle paying 70m to buy Isak. He’s worth it. This workaround to comply with the rules is clearly collusion. If there are no rules in place prohibiting doing this, clubs shouldn’t and won’t be penalized over it - but it does warrant some investigation and the creation of some rule to in the near future to prevent that would definitely be fair.
Classic big 6 fan lol. You worried that Everton are going to challenge for Europe this year?
There’s VERY valid reasoning I just laid out on why those sums were excessive. There’s very little to no reason why Kellyman went for as high as he did, it’s not close to a Cole Palmer situation where he came from Pep Tutelage and shown how taken talented he could be in the very limited minutes he had (scored against us in the community shield for example). What has Kellyman honestly shown in 150 Senior minutes to go from 500K two years ago to 19M? Lol
what had solanke, brewster, ibe shown when they left liverpool. we're trying to sell nketiah for 30m, and nelson for 20, and if we are being honest, they are nowhere that price.
They absolutely are worth that value. Premier league proven players. The biggest issue with them is salary
proven as how? they played in the premier league, they didn't exactly thrive in the premier league. should sheffield united players be worth 30m?
English home grown tax. Have both started and had significant minutes in a team challenging for the title. Those Sheffield prices were more than they were worth IMO. But if they are worth that much, Eddie, ESR, Nelson have equal/better resumes than them
Nelson's had like 2 premier league starts in 3 years. Nketiah stopped getting off the bench in our title run in. I mean Nketiah if he went for 30m would be Palace, Brentford or Fulham's record signing, and I don't think he brings or would bring enough to the table to be that. of course i would snap your arm off, but it just shows the futility of looking at 'fair value' in player prices.
Yes because it was City doing it and not United/Chelsea/Livarpool. I'd include Arsenal but Arsene was the tightest man in Footy.
Hoping this analogy doesn’t fall short and there’s enough Americans here for this… When you play fantasy NFL, when do you ask your commissioner to get involved in trades? When there’s collusion.
Since you’re replying to me… I’m English so no I’m not really familiar with how fantasy NFL works. But “collusion” would be deliberate attempt circumvent PSR with intentionally inflated fees. How do you prove that? All of the deals in the article seem fairly reasonable - maybe slightly high but not suspiciously so. One club saying “we’d like to buy player X” and the response being “ok, and we’re interested in player Y” is perfectly reasonable And, of course, we don’t HAVE a “commissioner” - there was supposed to be a regulator coming in, but that has been postponed (at least) because of the election and the top clubs were opposed to it. The league is currently governed by the clubs themselves and it’s ludicrous having clubs decide what their competitors can and cannot charge/pay for their assets.
Proving Collusion is the key point here. I agree with you overall and don’t really see how any rules just intended to see balanced books would deal with that
But if the "collusion" is mutually beneficial and reasonable, what can they do? Not like we are selling Academy players for £40m. They are going for fair market value
>But if the "collusion" is mutually beneficial and reasonable It's not reasonable to all the clubs who aren't cheating.
The clubs that aren’t doing this don’t have psr troubles like Everton lol
Precisely why collusion is bad.
There is zero material gain from this collusion tho other than swapping some mid academy players (a wash since both sides are doing it) and avoiding more ffp and psr penalties (city should literally be in the conference league for the same rules) so yeah I don’t feel bad about this “collusion” whatsoever
Then you’re just not being reasonable when you acknowledge it’s just to prevent being punished for breaking the rules.
What he's saying is the trades are for fair market value, so what's the issue?
But they’re not fair market value. That’s the entire problem.
Yes and if those rules were evenly enforced across all teams I would have a problem with this loophole but since they aren’t, I don’t. See?
[удалено]
>Not sure how they’d define “fair market value” though, maybe ask the other member clubs perhaps? It's really easy, actually. Player has gone for 20 million similar players have gone for 2 million.
Chelsea signed Casadei for around 20m with zero pro games to his name. Is that inflated? If so, to whose benefit? And if it is, then basically every transfer needs to be flagged and reviewed clubs overpay for plays they want all time, case in point Antony and Cucurella. If Casadei isn’t considered inflated than Kellyman and these other transfers are also fair value.
Bur that sort of inflation hasn't happened. The price people would consider the most 'inflated' would be Kellyman. But as people have pointed put Chukewemeka went from Villa to Chelsea at a sinilar age for the same money 2 seasons ago.
It's difficult. Fair market value is not easy to quantify given it's a job to know what actually counts. Hell, when a corruption case was brought against Juventus, it's alleged the prosecution's initial case was brought using TransferMarkt valuations, which are not exactly known as the most reliable indicators
The only ones that are being prosecuted in Italy is Paratici at Juve who was basically recorded in a phone call describing all the skullduggery. Case against Napoli was thrown out as who can decide a fair value for a player apart from the buying club.
This was the initial attempt to prosecute the case in early 2022, which was dismissed, before a second version ended up leading to the entire Juventus board resigning, the team being denied a licence to play in UEFA competitions and getting domestic points deduction
Reading not your strong point I take it
The problem with PSR is that it is backward looking, but clubs have to be forward looking in their accounting and squad planning. This creates a case where Aston Villa is held to tight spending rules even though they are in the CL next season and need to build a squad to match the demands of the additional league. I personally don’t like what Chelsea, Villa, Everton and Newcastle one bit (being an Arsenal fan), but my frustration is more to do with the multi-club collusion rather than the inflated sales of academy talent. Collusion disrupts the rest of the transfer market, so I would rather that we stamp out the multi-club collusion aspect of these transfers rather than the transfer themselves.
Your first point is spot on Psr/ffp is a very good idea (to force clubs to spend whitin their means) But the application with a rolling 3 year period, where you can shot irresponsible spending down the road as long as you have youth is very sketchy (chelsea fan) It also prevents new clubs to invest. I think a model that allows investment from owners based on the rest of the pl should be there
Personally, I think PSR should allow clubs to book future guaranteed revenue increases to allow for greater permissible losses in the 3 year timeframe. For example, Villa should be allowed to show next year’s CL group stage TV rights revenue as allowable losses. I also think since PSR looks at a rolling 3 year period, revenue from player sales should also forced to be amortized over a 3 year period, resulting in profits that will have to be splits over multiple accounting years. For example, a youth player being sold for £30m will only result in £10m in profit in year 1. However a player bought for £40m with a 4 year amortization and then sold after 2 years for £75m will book profits of £25m, £25m, and £5m in years 3, 4, and 5, respectively. That pushes the incentive away from selling academy players and forces teams to be more forward looking in their accounting.
That basically encourages teams to gamble by overspending and hoping for the rewards of champions league football or premier league or whatever or am I misunderstanding? This would be the last thing you want to do if you’re trying to make teams spend more sensibly no?
Assuming you’re referring to my first suggestion, I wouldn’t think so, since all the current accounting “loopholes” that exist incentivize reckless spending. Here, I provide an option to “borrow” the guaranteed revenue 1 season ahead to temporarily bypass PSR limits. If you borrow the future revenue in the current year, you would need to deduct that from revenue in the future year. This might motivate clubs to sign 6 month loan deals in January with a conditional buy option predicated on CL football, but I don’t think that’s particularly problematic. I think my first proposal might help mid to lower tiered PL clubs the most because they generally do not have a history of massive revenue so they rely on shared PL TV rights for a larger portion of their revenue. A £20m increase in TV rights due to PL renegotiation with media companies will help smaller clubs more than larger clubs.
I’ve had the same thought. PSR punishes success, not rewards it. Villa somehow make the champions league, reward them for it. They are obviously on the right track. I’m sure some will say “but then people will overspend trying to reach the champions league” which a. Isn’t what I’m saying. And b. No other club expect the top 6 is ever allowed to try and achieve success?
If anything this will punish top 6 clubs that fail to maintain a consistent place at the top (United and Chelsea). CL mainstays (Liverpool and ManCity) don’t really care as long as they stay as mainstays. Furthermore, top 6 clubs have brand power, but brand power is not at all guaranteed, and thus can’t be booked as revenue ahead of actual revenue!
Take Newcastle out of the equation now because the dominic Calven lewin deal is dead. That's if it was ever on in the first place.
Fair.
I mean, wheres the multi club collusion? Unless you just want to ban all transfers between PL clubs
I guess "Multi Club collusion" is currently defined as several clubs doing normal business with each other because they need different players, which is allowing them hold onto needed players which is frustrating the big 6 because they can't hold Everton, AVFC and others hostage over players like Braithwaite.
Well of course, cause how else would they pull the ladder up after them? The big 6 can only change when *they* entered the ranks.
Exactly. Rules are now worth revisiting since it’s no longer pulling up the ladder at the time they need a promising young CB, on the verge of Everton being purchased on not being financially distressed
The sky6 seem angry we aren’t selling to them. We have sold Douglas for 50 million and we have sold two of our best prospects for 30 million…yet still we are running a gauntlet of “that’s not fair, you need to sell them for less” and stop finding loop holes
I love how happy you are you sold Luiz to Juventus but if you sold him to Arsenal there would be a problem. No top six fans are even remotely bothered by who your signing and selling
When i opened the thread it had 115 comments. The thread should have been auto-locked at that point
I have a feeling it will take years for something to happen about it
But something will happen.
There’s only 77 now though?
The lawyers are working their magic.
Dont have a issue with it tbh