“I“We want to move to a new system that people trust and can comply with,” Premier League chief executive Richard Masters said last week, “and move away from perhaps the normalisation of asterisks in league tables or long-standing regulatory cases.”
That is certainly the case. It does not mean a situation of decontrol or a return to the days when spending was unregulated, but any competition is undermined if it becomes standard practice for a committee to remove points won one week the following week. There seems a serious possibility that at least four clubs will lose points this season. When a sport stops being decided on the pitch, it is in trouble.
Leicester are the big motivation for all the clubs that are not superclubs. Their Premier League title in 2015-16 It remains the shining example of what is possible with relatively modest spending. This is the dream that has been sold: if you build a team spectacularly well, if half a dozen players simultaneously have the best seasons of their lives, if enough elite players have slightly shaky seasons, the league can be yours.
But there are no fairy tales in football. Leicester's title came two seasons after they had won the Championship in breach of financial fair play rules, for which they were condemned. fined £3.1m in 2018Since then, his story has been a warning of what can go wrong for clubs living on the edge of their budget.
None of the three players Leicester have spent significant money on in the summer of 2021 have really panned out. Although centre-back Jannik Vestergaard became a regular last season, his first campaign was lacklustre. Striker Patson Daka has shown glimpses but never managed a run of real consistency, while midfielder Boubakary Soumaré has been loaned out to Sevilla.
The feeling was that Leicester, who had finished fifth for two seasons running, were scaling back their presence because the club’s owner, King Power, whose core business is running shops at airports, had suffered a financial crisis during the pandemic. While that may be true, it turns out there were valid concerns about compliance with the Premier League’s profitability and sustainability (PSR) rules.
The following season, Wesley Fofana and Kasper Schmeichel left. Harry Souttar, Wout Faes and Victor Kristiansen arrived, but for the first time in nine years, Leicester spent less on players than they recouped (not that that’s necessarily a bad thing – in that 2013-14 season, they swapped Ben Marshall for Riyad Mahrez and made £550,000). The net transfer profit in 2022-23 was around £22m, but the result was relegation. Worse still, it seems those measures probably weren’t enough to get the club into PSR compliance.
Wages have been the real problem, with the club having the seventh-highest wage bill in the Premier League. The result was losses of £92.5m in 2021-22 and £89.7m in 2022-23. The wage-to-turnover ratio stood at 116%, much higher than the two teams that have been hit with points deductions for PSR breaches, Nottingham Forest (94%) and Everton (92%).
Charges were laid in March and even the club’s own accounts acknowledge they are likely to “breach the profitability and sustainability loss limits for the three-year period ending with the 2023-24 financial year” – an awareness which presumably informed their futile attempt to argue the Premier League had no jurisdiction over them as an EFL club.
Football finance blogger Swiss Ramble estimated that even with a generous reading of the allowable deductions, they are likely to be around £29m above the £105m threshold for losses over three years. There could also be problems next year, with Swiss ramble that stands out Another infringement unless Leicester can somehow make a £12m profit this season.
That suggests they are likely to be hit with a penalty of at least six points this season. These days, survival does not require 40 points – the traditional target for clubs facing relegation – but with a possible deduction, that is the total Leicester will likely need to achieve if they are to avoid relegation. What makes it harder is that the threat of further sanctions next season limits the extent to which they can strengthen the squad.
Right now, with Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall and Kelechi Iheanacho gone; Marc Albrighton and Dennis Praet released; Souttar on loan to Sheffield United; striker Abdul Fatawu, centre-back Caleb Okoli and midfielder Michael Golding signed; Bobby Decordova-Reid signed for free and Facundo Buonanotte on loan from Brighton, their net spend is around £1m.
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Fatawu, who joined on loan from Sporting Lisbon, showed enormous talent at times last season and impressed against Chelsea in the FA Cup, but the only one of those new arrivals with significant Premier League experience is Decordova-Reid. That must be worrying, particularly as a change of manager and problems with PSR have already dampened the euphoria that newly promoted teams usually experience.
Given that Enzo Maresca and his patient possession football were not universally popular with Leicester fans, his departure to Chelsea was perhaps not felt as painfully as it might have been but, as promising as Steve Cooper's work with Swansea and Nottingham Forest is, there is a sense that momentum is being lost.
The Welshman’s more varied tactical approach may be better suited to a fight for survival, but that represents a major disruption. All the usual caveats about pre-season apply, but Leicester’s form has been poor, with 1-0 defeats to Palermo and Augsburg before a 3-0 loss to Lens. Even without the threat of points deductions, this season would look tough.
But this is not confined to Leicester, it is about the structures of modern football. If rules that others have followed have been breached, punishment is imposed accordingly, but Masters is surely right that uncertainty is damaging. A system, as in Spain, that requires balanced budgets to be submitted rather than punishing breaches retrospectively is surely preferable. Leicester’s last three seasons have been undermined by the recognition that the PSR were out to get them.
But worse is the stain this leaves on those fifth-place finishes: the feeling that for a club that is not a superclub to compete, it has to adopt a cavalier attitude to regulations.
