W.Welcome to the Premier League's latest sensational product innovation: the dramatic relegation court battle. Two things seem certain after the decision of move within four points of Nottingham Forest due to non-compliance with profitability and sustainability standards. First, this is by no means over.
Buckle up for some truly excellent legal dispute content over the coming months as Forest, Everton and at least four other clubs cling like Indiana Jones on a collapsing rope bridge to a league table set for shuffling and readjusting with each new court hearing and appeal for special circumstances. .
And secondly, as fans on all sides consider questions of blame and blame, in a sport increasingly vulnerable to conspiracy theories and misinformation, it seems certain that there will be plenty of people looking for someone to blame. ; all the while ignoring the most obvious candidates.
At that point it is worth redefining some basic terms. Clubs may not like the rules they signed. They may legitimately oppose the scope of the sanction. But this process cannot be corrupt or unfair if the rules of a competition are transparent, do not change, and are subject to warnings every time you are about to break them.
It can't be a conspiracy if you're one of the 20 parties that pass those rules every year. In fact, this is the opposite of a conspiracy. It is due process in action. And while the sense of incompetence and double-dealing that some Forest fans will feel is entirely justified, it would make a lot more sense if those feelings were directed towards the ownership of their own club.
Who is really to blame here? The rules? Or a club executive who thought it was a good idea to overspend on 29 new players while being co-managed through these treacherous waters, if the iconography is to be believed, by the owner's then-23-year-old son? Hmm. A difficult one. Whatever it was, £6 million in wages for Jesse Lingard was definitely good content.
It is worth remembering once again how this happened. Forest and Everton were accused of breaching the rules on the same day, January 15, with Everton due to get the results of their (second) hearing in April.
The rules state that Premier League clubs are allowed a maximum loss over a three-year period. The forest has been deemed to have defaulted. They can now appeal against the punishment with a deadline for making a decision five days after the end of the season.
A new appeal (in “exceptional circumstances”) could take the entire process until June 8, and the final decision on who is actually relegated could be delayed until then.
There are two main objections to Forest's punishment. Neither is referring to whether the club actually broke the rules, but instead is referring to not liking the rules. Most credible is the argument that it is unfair for years in the English Football League to be subject to EFL spending caps, when they could instead be modernized with much more attractive spending caps at Premier League level.
Because two of the years in question were spent in the Championship, Forest only received £61m to play with, not the full £105m. If they had been allowed the full blow of the Premier League, despite not having been in it, they would have stayed within the limits.
It has some obvious merit as a tweak to the system, a way to help promoted clubs compete. A counterargument is that the rules are intended to discourage clubs from betting on jam tomorrow. This could have the opposite effect. At this point, and in Forest's current case, rules are not fungible things. The EFL rules for that period would have to be abandoned retrospectively. This is an unstable path down. Others stuck to the rules. You can't suggest an alternative version just because you knew what was right and decided to do what was wrong. Why reward overspending with a get-out-of-jail-free card? And everyone gets one?
The second point refers to the moment of The sale of Brennan Johnson, which according to the club should be delayed to maximize the fee for the player, thus removing him from the corresponding accounting period. Surely, says Forest, the goal of the rules is to maximize our income.
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But this is deliberately missing the point. Fixing sustained overspending with a player's fire sale is the kind of thing the rules are there to discourage.
The point is to buy 29 players in a single year, spending more than every year in the club's entire history combined, more than Barcelona, Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain. Not doing the emergency stop because you're coming off the mountainside is really a problem with coming off the mountainside in the first place. Football follows the market. If Johnson were more valuable to more clubs, he could have been sold in time for the right amount. He wasn't. So he pays.
It will still seem difficult to digest the fact that Forest are being punished while Manchester City's accusations remain unanswered and Chelsea have somehow squandered billions seemingly without sanction. The city is subject to 115 charges, all denied, many of which concern complex issues of good faith and disclosure. This is the Jarndyce and Jarndyce of football. Chelsea took advantage of a loophole. The man may still be recovering.
And none of this means the rules couldn't use an update. There needs to be more details. What are the actual rules for clubs like Everton being banned twice in the same season? Don't know. We'll see. The level of (semi) permitted debt has been set at £105m since 2013. Taking into account “football inflation” this could rise to £200m by now. There is a strong argument for increasing it.
Meanwhile, there are also those who would abolish regulation altogether, a line that tends to coincide with a tribal interest in a club with bottomless pockets, often backed with talk of some kind of ruling class plot to crush the little man ( extremely rich). But most industries have regulations. Spending what you earn is not a revolutionary idea. As for freedom and laissez-faire economics, spending too much in aid of a propaganda project or to satiate one's own oligarch-showman egomania is not an example of a properly functioning market.
By now, the moral of this story is pretty obvious. Forest fans love Evangelos Marinakis because he is decisive and charismatic, because he acts and looks like the imperial commander of the intergalactic pirate fleet and, above all, because he has achieved success. But the fact is that it is still about taking the medicine from him.
A year after their mega splurge, a period in which signings were tallied every few days on Marinakis Jr's Instagram reel, Forest released 33 players and hired Nuno Espírito Santo, the seventh manager of the current era. Anyone looking for blame here, obvious flaws, wrong turns along the way, should probably look at the custom-made padded throne in the directors' box.
