The Premier League’s latest innovation: the relegation battle in court. Two certainties after deducting four points from Cheap Replica Nottingham Forest soccer jersey for violating financial rules. This saga is far from over.
Prepare yourself for excellent material on legal wrangling in 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 that will shift and change with each new court hearing and special circumstances appeal.
And second, as supporters on all sides sift through the question of blame, in a sport increasingly vulnerable to conspiracy theories and disinformation, it seems certain that there will be many people looking for someone to blame; while ignoring the most obvious candidates.
At this point, it is worth redefining some basic concepts. Clubs may dislike the rules they have signed. They may legitimately object to the size of the sanction. But this process cannot be corrupt or unfair if a league’s rules are transparent and unchanging and you are warned every time you come close to breaking them.
It cannot be a conspiracy if you are one of the 20 parties who sign for those rules every year. In fact, this is the opposite of a conspiracy. It is due process in action. And while the feelings of incompetence and duplicity that some Forest fans will have are perfectly justified, it would make much more sense if those feelings were directed against the ownership of their own club.
Who is really guilty here? The rules? Or an executive of the club who thought it was a good idea to overspend on 29 new players while being steered through these treacherous waters, if the iconography is to be believed, by the owner’s then 23-year-old son? Hmm. Difficult. Whatever the case, £6 million in salary for Jesse Lingard was certainly money well spent.
It’s worth running through again how this happened. Forest and Everton were accused of breaking the rules on the same day, Jan. 15, and Everton will hear the results of their (second) hearing sometime in April.
Under the rules, Premier League clubs are allowed a maximum loss over a three-year period. Forest are deemed to be in violation. They can now appeal the penalty with a reserve date for a decision five days after the end of the season.
A further appeal (in “exceptional circumstances”) could make the whole process last until June 8, with a final decision on who actually gets relegated possibly postponed until then.
There are two main objections to Forest’s punishment. Neither relates to whether the club actually broke the rules, but has to do with not liking the rules. Most credible is the argument that it is unfair that years in the English Football League are subject to EFL spending caps, when they could instead be adjusted with much more attractive spending caps at Premier League level.
Because two of the years in question were spent in the Championship, Forest get only £61 million to play with, not the full £105 million. Had they received the full whack of the Premier League, despite not playing in the Championship, they would have been within the limits.
It clearly has benefits as an adjustment to the system, a way to help promoted clubs compete. One argument against is that the rules are intended to discourage clubs from gambling on jam tomorrow. This could well have the opposite effect. Right now, and in Forest’s case, rules are not fungible things. EFL rules for that period should be retroactively abandoned. This is an unreliable path. Others followed the rules. You don’t get to propose 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 does everyone get one?
The second issue relates to the timing of the sale of Brennan Johnson, which the club says had to be delayed to maximize the player’s compensation, thus falling outside the relevant accounting period. Forest says the purpose of the rules is to maximize our revenue.
But this is deliberately missing the point. Solving a persistent overspend by selling a player is the kind of nonsense the rules are supposed to discourage.
It involves buying 29 players in one year, spending more than every year of your entire club history combined, more than Barcelona, Goedkoop Replica Real Madrid voetbalshirt and Paris Saint-Germain. Failing to make the emergency stop because you are racing down the mountainside is actually getting off the mountainside. Soccer follows the market. If Johnson had been more valuable to more clubs, he might have been sold in time for the right amount. He wasn’t. So pay up.
It will still be hard to digest Forest being punished while the charges of Manchester City Cheap Football Shirt remain unanswered and Chelsea somehow spent a cool billion seemingly without sanction. City is subject to 115 charges, all of which are denied and many of which involve complex issues of good faith and disclosure. This is the soccer of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Chelsea took advantage of a loophole. The man may yet recover.
And none of this means that the rules can’t use a refresh. More details are needed. What are the actual rules for clubs like Everton to be penalized twice in the same season? No idea. Let’s see. The level of (semi-)allowed debt has been set at £105 million since 2013. Taking “soccer inflation” into account, this could now be £200 million. There is a good argument for raising it.
Meanwhile, there are also those who want to do away with regulation altogether, a line that often coincides with a tribal interest in a club with bottomless pockets, often supported by talk of some sort of ruling overclass conspiracy to crush the little (extremely rich) man. But most industries are regulated. Spending what you earn is hardly a revolutionary idea. As for freedom and the laissez-faire economy, overspending on behalf of a propaganda project or to satisfy your own oligarch-showman egomania is hardly an example of a functioning market.
For now, the moral of this story is clear enough. 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 especially because he has brought success. But the fact remains that this is a case of taking your medicine.
After a splashy year, Forest brought away 33 players and hired Nuno Espírito Santo as the 7th manager. The blame lies with the director’s box throne.
The Premier League is now in the midst of a dramatic relegation battle, sparked by a points deduction from Nottingham Forest for violating financial rules. As events unfolded, responsibility shifted between the club’s management and the league’s regulators. Forest’s excessive spending, epitomized by their contracting frenzy and questionable sales tactics, showed the result of financial mismanagement. Some people now believe there are objections to these rules and that circumventing them will indeed undermine fair competition. Comparisons with the spending practices of other clubs such as Manchester City and Chelsea raise questions about consistency of implementation. Here remains the call for updated rules and the debate over the role of discovery in soccer. Forest and their owner Evangelos Marinakis thus face the consequences of their actions, which serves as a warning to clubs dealing with the complexities of financial governance in modern soccer.
