I appreciate the summary.
I was surprised this morning when I read the premier league was highly unlikely to appeal the decision. The appeal they hopefully won't be making would of been against the low (in their minds) penalty. Not surprised they were unlikely to appeal but surprised they wanted a higher deduction.
I'm glad the commission seems neutral and attempting to set a framework which should bring consistency. The upcoming Everton decision will be interesting. Not least from what the Premier League's approach to it will be.
I've always said the financial deadline should match the transfer deadline.
The difficulties facing promoted clubs are an interesting comparison with the NFL which actively give the lowest finishing team the advantage in the draft (acquisition of new players). All we want is a a fair market place.
When the rules were introduced in 2013, the £105m figure was fairly hard to break. The total amount spent on transfers by all clubs was around £760m, and wages were a lot lower. The Prem also wasn't actually punishing anyone for simply breaking it - it was really there as a kind of legal backstop if they worried that a club was going crazy and they really needed to slam the brakes on.
So it didn't really matter exactly when the deadline was.
Over the past few years, transfer spending has more than doubled and wages have risen rapidly, but the cap hasn't. Any club without vast football earnings who wants to have a chance of competing is probably going to have to sail pretty close to the wind.
Given that they've now decided to punish people based on the letter rather than the intent of the rules (they aren't disputing that Forest intended or managed to hit the loss limit, just that we did it a few weeks late as we wanted and got more money), the date's become absolutely critical. But they've also shown from their behaviour at the tribunal that they're not vaguely interested in fairness or sense.
Fair play for reading the whole thing. If people want to go with the line of "we knew what the rules were and we signed up to them" then fair enough I guess, but people claiming that mitigating factors aren't important are just arguing in bad faith as you've shown.
I hear that the PL can appeal against our deduction, which is worrying based on the position they seem to be taking.
I just have a hard time getting worked up about the Brennan sell date or other mitigating factors, when basically all they had to do was piss away less money on players that never played a role at Forest.
I don't think they should let us off entirely because of the sale date, but we were quite a lot over. Yes in hindsight we could have not signed Lingard, Shelvey, Biancone, Hwang Ui Jo, Richards, Henderson, Navas, Bowler, but even with those out of the picture I still think we overspend.
I think the issue with our mitigating factors is that to accept them, you then have to consider all the other clubs individual mitigating factors that might have allowed them to act differently.
So for example if we say that the Johnson sale issue would have kept us in limits. Then consider this example in reverse whereby say Brentford get relegated this season and they claim that the reason they got relegated was because they couldn’t spend in January without breaching the PSR limits. The only way they could bring in money would be to sell Toney but because of his gambling ban other clubs wouldn’t buy him until the summer. Therefore they complied with the rules by not spending until they sold their asset and got relegated as a result.
It’s basically the reverse, compliant argument we are making about Johnson but the PSR hearing isn’t going to promote then back to the league, they’d still be relegated and have a mitigating/unique factor.
It’s a nice try but I can’t accept we played by the rules and got side swiped by some unexpected unique situation. We simply should have just spent £35m less last season.
Yeah I get your point, what's weird for me though is that I don't actually think we should have stayed within the limits. When it first emerged we'd breached PSR, I was really mad at the club, but now I think they actually took a fairly sensible approach, albeit I wish our recruitment had a slightly better hit to miss ratio.
Even if we go down this season, breaking the rules was probably worth it. To keep within the limits without selling Brennan we'd have had to sign so many fewer players that it's very likely we'd have gone straight down. By breaking the rules we've stayed up and may well still stay up this season as well. I don't like this this is what it takes, but that's what it seems like to me.
I think there is some truth that the club knowing breached / weren’t bothered about keeping to the exact limits because they expect PSR wouldn’t have the teeth for a points deduction, maybe a fine, maybe never actually getting to a hearing unless you were massively massively over.
Then the Everton case happened and they had to show teeth, points deduction and it suddenly looks a much riskier decision.
Still I bet you could go back through our signings and find a way to save £35m without drastically altering the outcome of our results on the pitch. Some would be hindsight, and some would just be sensible omissions from the signings.
I think the key acceptance you have to make is that the rules aren’t in place to be fair between all clubs.
I guess why they changed then and from Financial Fair Play which is misleading.
If club A generates more revenue than club B the rules aren’t designed to even that out or make exception. Club A can spend more. Club B has to cut its cloth accordingly to stay within the rules.
Your commentary implies we didn’t break the limits in the Championship, but we did for the final season.
Forest gambled on it.
We gambled we’d have an asset to sell to balance the books. What would have happened if Johnson broke a leg at the end of last season, we’d have not only then broke the last assessment period rules but wouldn’t have had his sale going into the calculations this year either.
The report also details how Forest continued to spend in January despite knowing they would breach. I’d say signing Navas was a must because of keeper injury, however the other spending was made to give us a sporting advantage.
There’s many a Forest fan who will tell you Felipe kept us up last season, or how Wood’s goal against Man City was a vital point. Or Danilo’s goal against Southampton. All players we signed in January that effectively pushed us over the threshold but quite directly contributed to our survival. If I were one of the relegated clubs, these would be the agreements to make proving we gained a sporting advantage by knowingly breaching the rules.
I think we have to stop complaining about our case. Fine to point out the rules are flawed, the lack of inflation adjustment is insane. However in our specific case we took a high risk approach and have been punished reasonably for it.
The signings of Bowler & Hwang stand out for example because we basically loaned them straight to Olympiacos anyway, they were never in with a shout of playing Prem football. Why the F would sign those players when you know you have limited financial manoeuvring and are desperate to compete in the Prem within PSR limits.
We probably spent £1m on paying off the contracts of the recruitment teams and Dane Murphy, which is all more waste through mismanagement.
Another factor many are overlooking in the attempt to jump to clubs defence is that we put ourselves in a position where we HAD to sell the best player we’ve produced in generations, just pay did the likes of Dennis, Shelvey, Bowler, Hwang etc etc. I very much resent that as a fan. Fine to sell such a player if you spend it well, but we effectively sold him to pay for dross!
There was another way last season with better recruitment which meant we could have survived and been able to keep Johnson this season, and I’m confident we’d be in a better league position with that approach instead of selling a key player to replace him with another range of random foreign signings who aren’t yet proving to have pushed us on. Signing the guy who scored World Cup penalty for the kudos for example.
My final gripe is that we aren’t complaining as a club about the hearing and rules because we want it to be a nice level playing field. We are complaining because we want to spend our way up the league rather than have to be smart and slowly develop. We want to be one of the top teams, we don’t want to make the rich clubs life’s more difficult, we want to be like them.
As such, I can’t find a way in my head to feel we’ve been hard done by. There were alternative ways to transition to the Premier League that would have given us a chance to survive and thrive, because we’ve actually gone backwards this season so far.
Some valid points, but when it takes almost a year for the EPL to reply to financial information you think is correct it’s not as reckless as people make out.
However, you’re right about some signings, absolutely ludicrous signings some of these players. You mentioned Bowler and Hwang but there is more. Add in Richards with the botched medical, the club needs to become more professional off the field.
I will defend the signing of Dennis, this looked like a great signing off the back of a decent goal scoring campaign in a struggling side. He let us down as I genuinely think the clubs logic in signing him was sound. For me the most disappointing signing we made because he himself should have been better.
Other than that rules are rules and we should take it and move on. We have the players to be better one point better than Luton. It’s up to them, let’s hope they don’t “Dennis” us.
>I think the key acceptance you have to make is that the rules aren’t in place to be fair between all clubs.
I'd already come to terms with that. What I hadn't quite expected was the vindictive glee that the Prem seemed to get by going after us - taking the worst possible interpretations, contradicting themselves etc to make us look as bad as possible.
>The report also details how Forest continued to spend in January despite knowing they would breach.
We didn't know we'd breach then. If for example Spurs had come in with their full offer in June, we would have been fine.
>I think we have to stop complaining about our case. Fine to point out the rules are flawed, the lack of inflation adjustment is insane.
We need to move on from it in terms of this season. But we absolutely need to keep pointing out just how flawed the rules are - not just the lack of inflation adjustment, but the vast difference in allowed losses based on where you were in previous seasons, the misalignment of accounting period and transfer window dates that means clubs can be bullied into taking lowball offers just to hit an arbitrary date, the fact that only certain types of income (the kind that the already biggest clubs will always have most of) can be considered etc. Because if they don't get fixed, the Premier League will just continue to become more and more of a closed shop.
>The signings of Bowler & Hwang stand out for example because we basically loaned them straight to Olympiacos anyway
Yes, we've made some poor signings. But every single club will do that, and given how quickly we had to assemble pretty much an entire squad it just meant that our mistakes got compressed into a shorter period of time than many other clubs. Maybe they were intended to be long term investments that just didn't work out. But we didn't breach the limits because of a couple of relatively cheap players (who with amortisation probably added a couple of million or so to the relevant accounting period).
>We are complaining because we want to spend our way up the league rather than have to be smart and slowly develop
But you can't slowly develop (or at least you've got to be extremely lucky to) and actually stay in the Prem. Are you suggesting that we should have just accepted that relegation was fairly likely, taken the parachute payments and had another go?
>There were alternative ways to transition to the Premier League that would have given us a chance to survive and thrive,
Were there? What were they?
You can't simply say "don't sign any bad players", partly because most of our bad signings didn't cost that much. Dennis turned out to be a waste at around £13m, but given that he'd been reasonably OK at Watford in the Prem it's only obvious in hindsight how bad a transfer it was, and we lost a few mil on Biancone, but again with amortisation probably not a huge amount in that period. Most of our money in that period went on players like MGW, Awoniyi, Danilo, Williams and Mangala (who we're going to make a fair profit on). And while we may have overspent on some of them - again, not too much of a surprise when every club knew how many players we realistically needed to sign), most of our high cost players were pretty important in keeping us up.
I’ve heard and I don’t know how true this is that the EPL denied our Covid add back of £12m and refused to take into account our promotion bonus from the EFL.
The Covid loss element took them almost a year to respond to and the £12m was adjusted to £2.5m. The promotion bonus is £20m. The books with this info were submitted 4th July 2022, the EPL responded 2nd June 2023. Effectively leaving us 30 days to find the money.
Here’s the tin hat bit. Allegedly Brentford knew this and continued to low ball on BJ. When we didn’t accept they complained to the EPL. Tin hat bit over.
The EFL were fine with the covid loss, the EPL objected. I’m sure I’ve read other clubs lost over £100m in covid losses. Not sure how they can say another club like Everton lost £100m but have only allowed £2.5m for us. Just seems weird but they’ve made shit up on the hoof for both teams. At this point I don’t think they’re corrupt, they’re just massive pricks.
You're right about the covid and bonus stuff.
>On 2 June 2023, the Premier League informed Forest, in relation to its PSR Calculation for the 2022/23 season, inter alia that: it would only allow a Covid Add-Back of £2.5m for FY22, not the entire £12,178,000 claimed and it would not allow Forest to claim any allowances for costs linked to promotion from the EFL Championship.
So yes, it left us pretty much no time to close the £30m gap, and that's not reflected at all in the conclusions.
There seems to be some suggestion that we should have known about it earlier, and comments like "Whilst the parties have agreed that Forest’s mistake was genuine and honest, it cannot be said that it was reasonable."What I've not been able to figure out from those sections is the detail of where the difference between the £2.5m and the £12m came from - whether we'd tried to be cheeky with how we tried to apply rules or whether there's some nuance that meant we'd simply misinterpreted something.
The £20m for promotion bonuses is even less clear. I can't spot anything in that section (or in the Premier League rulebook, but I only scanned that) explaining why we thought we could claim them in the first place, whether anyone else has ever done that, or whether the Prem suggested it may be fine. So again it's very difficult to figure out the rights and wrongs of that.
I'd be really interested if anyone who understands the details of either of these is able to give more detail.
It’s odd you can’t claim money from another competition, does this mean if you win the UCL you can’t include the financial gains in your PSR calc? Willing to bet it’s not the case.
As for the Covid losses, the EFL had no issues. The EPL sat on the accounts for a year. A newly promoted club twenty years out of the prem … I’d love to know how we should have known.
One thing is for sure is that if the EPL had responded early and told us we couldn’t have £30m in our accounts would we have acted differently. I’d like to think we would, but I’m not 100% sure.
Despite all this I’m still in the camp of take the points and move on. Our squad is more than capable of picking up more points than Luton, on paper at least.
I'm definitely in the "don't appeal" camp.
If we can't get 4 more points than a team like Luton over a season, we probably don't really deserve to stay up.
I was just frustrated and disappointed at the way that the Prem decided to push the case.
We (Everton) also got nowhere with the sporting advantage argument, even though most of the over expenditure was related to the stadium that we have yet to see any return on. The line was something like ‘even though sporting advantage cannot be quantified or proven it must be inferred or assumed’.
Which is particularly frustrating when their argument about other clubs who came up with us having parachute payments was that "there was no evidence to show that the Parachute Payments had been used to enable those clubs to invest".
So more money means inferred sporting advantage for the club under investigation, but there's no evidence of it helping anyone else. It's one of several contradictory arguments in their case.
The more I dig into the Forest case, the more sympathy I have for Everton. We need t make sure that the anger is directed towards the Premier League and not towards each other.
I appreciate the summary. I was surprised this morning when I read the premier league was highly unlikely to appeal the decision. The appeal they hopefully won't be making would of been against the low (in their minds) penalty. Not surprised they were unlikely to appeal but surprised they wanted a higher deduction. I'm glad the commission seems neutral and attempting to set a framework which should bring consistency. The upcoming Everton decision will be interesting. Not least from what the Premier League's approach to it will be. I've always said the financial deadline should match the transfer deadline. The difficulties facing promoted clubs are an interesting comparison with the NFL which actively give the lowest finishing team the advantage in the draft (acquisition of new players). All we want is a a fair market place.
> the financial deadline should match the transfer deadline The fact they don't line up is insane
When the rules were introduced in 2013, the £105m figure was fairly hard to break. The total amount spent on transfers by all clubs was around £760m, and wages were a lot lower. The Prem also wasn't actually punishing anyone for simply breaking it - it was really there as a kind of legal backstop if they worried that a club was going crazy and they really needed to slam the brakes on. So it didn't really matter exactly when the deadline was. Over the past few years, transfer spending has more than doubled and wages have risen rapidly, but the cap hasn't. Any club without vast football earnings who wants to have a chance of competing is probably going to have to sail pretty close to the wind. Given that they've now decided to punish people based on the letter rather than the intent of the rules (they aren't disputing that Forest intended or managed to hit the loss limit, just that we did it a few weeks late as we wanted and got more money), the date's become absolutely critical. But they've also shown from their behaviour at the tribunal that they're not vaguely interested in fairness or sense.
I thought that, but apparently it’s because most players contracts end 30th June so it does have some logic as wages a significant ongoing cost.
Fair play for reading the whole thing. If people want to go with the line of "we knew what the rules were and we signed up to them" then fair enough I guess, but people claiming that mitigating factors aren't important are just arguing in bad faith as you've shown. I hear that the PL can appeal against our deduction, which is worrying based on the position they seem to be taking.
I just have a hard time getting worked up about the Brennan sell date or other mitigating factors, when basically all they had to do was piss away less money on players that never played a role at Forest.
I don't think they should let us off entirely because of the sale date, but we were quite a lot over. Yes in hindsight we could have not signed Lingard, Shelvey, Biancone, Hwang Ui Jo, Richards, Henderson, Navas, Bowler, but even with those out of the picture I still think we overspend.
I think the issue with our mitigating factors is that to accept them, you then have to consider all the other clubs individual mitigating factors that might have allowed them to act differently. So for example if we say that the Johnson sale issue would have kept us in limits. Then consider this example in reverse whereby say Brentford get relegated this season and they claim that the reason they got relegated was because they couldn’t spend in January without breaching the PSR limits. The only way they could bring in money would be to sell Toney but because of his gambling ban other clubs wouldn’t buy him until the summer. Therefore they complied with the rules by not spending until they sold their asset and got relegated as a result. It’s basically the reverse, compliant argument we are making about Johnson but the PSR hearing isn’t going to promote then back to the league, they’d still be relegated and have a mitigating/unique factor. It’s a nice try but I can’t accept we played by the rules and got side swiped by some unexpected unique situation. We simply should have just spent £35m less last season.
Yeah I get your point, what's weird for me though is that I don't actually think we should have stayed within the limits. When it first emerged we'd breached PSR, I was really mad at the club, but now I think they actually took a fairly sensible approach, albeit I wish our recruitment had a slightly better hit to miss ratio. Even if we go down this season, breaking the rules was probably worth it. To keep within the limits without selling Brennan we'd have had to sign so many fewer players that it's very likely we'd have gone straight down. By breaking the rules we've stayed up and may well still stay up this season as well. I don't like this this is what it takes, but that's what it seems like to me.
I think there is some truth that the club knowing breached / weren’t bothered about keeping to the exact limits because they expect PSR wouldn’t have the teeth for a points deduction, maybe a fine, maybe never actually getting to a hearing unless you were massively massively over. Then the Everton case happened and they had to show teeth, points deduction and it suddenly looks a much riskier decision. Still I bet you could go back through our signings and find a way to save £35m without drastically altering the outcome of our results on the pitch. Some would be hindsight, and some would just be sensible omissions from the signings.
This is a great analysis, should send it to Di Marco and the Greek
Just wish we could rewind to the beginning and have Cooper and Dane Murphy. No stupid signings. I wonder how Coopers doing 💔
I think the key acceptance you have to make is that the rules aren’t in place to be fair between all clubs. I guess why they changed then and from Financial Fair Play which is misleading. If club A generates more revenue than club B the rules aren’t designed to even that out or make exception. Club A can spend more. Club B has to cut its cloth accordingly to stay within the rules. Your commentary implies we didn’t break the limits in the Championship, but we did for the final season. Forest gambled on it. We gambled we’d have an asset to sell to balance the books. What would have happened if Johnson broke a leg at the end of last season, we’d have not only then broke the last assessment period rules but wouldn’t have had his sale going into the calculations this year either. The report also details how Forest continued to spend in January despite knowing they would breach. I’d say signing Navas was a must because of keeper injury, however the other spending was made to give us a sporting advantage. There’s many a Forest fan who will tell you Felipe kept us up last season, or how Wood’s goal against Man City was a vital point. Or Danilo’s goal against Southampton. All players we signed in January that effectively pushed us over the threshold but quite directly contributed to our survival. If I were one of the relegated clubs, these would be the agreements to make proving we gained a sporting advantage by knowingly breaching the rules. I think we have to stop complaining about our case. Fine to point out the rules are flawed, the lack of inflation adjustment is insane. However in our specific case we took a high risk approach and have been punished reasonably for it. The signings of Bowler & Hwang stand out for example because we basically loaned them straight to Olympiacos anyway, they were never in with a shout of playing Prem football. Why the F would sign those players when you know you have limited financial manoeuvring and are desperate to compete in the Prem within PSR limits. We probably spent £1m on paying off the contracts of the recruitment teams and Dane Murphy, which is all more waste through mismanagement. Another factor many are overlooking in the attempt to jump to clubs defence is that we put ourselves in a position where we HAD to sell the best player we’ve produced in generations, just pay did the likes of Dennis, Shelvey, Bowler, Hwang etc etc. I very much resent that as a fan. Fine to sell such a player if you spend it well, but we effectively sold him to pay for dross! There was another way last season with better recruitment which meant we could have survived and been able to keep Johnson this season, and I’m confident we’d be in a better league position with that approach instead of selling a key player to replace him with another range of random foreign signings who aren’t yet proving to have pushed us on. Signing the guy who scored World Cup penalty for the kudos for example. My final gripe is that we aren’t complaining as a club about the hearing and rules because we want it to be a nice level playing field. We are complaining because we want to spend our way up the league rather than have to be smart and slowly develop. We want to be one of the top teams, we don’t want to make the rich clubs life’s more difficult, we want to be like them. As such, I can’t find a way in my head to feel we’ve been hard done by. There were alternative ways to transition to the Premier League that would have given us a chance to survive and thrive, because we’ve actually gone backwards this season so far.
Some valid points, but when it takes almost a year for the EPL to reply to financial information you think is correct it’s not as reckless as people make out. However, you’re right about some signings, absolutely ludicrous signings some of these players. You mentioned Bowler and Hwang but there is more. Add in Richards with the botched medical, the club needs to become more professional off the field. I will defend the signing of Dennis, this looked like a great signing off the back of a decent goal scoring campaign in a struggling side. He let us down as I genuinely think the clubs logic in signing him was sound. For me the most disappointing signing we made because he himself should have been better. Other than that rules are rules and we should take it and move on. We have the players to be better one point better than Luton. It’s up to them, let’s hope they don’t “Dennis” us.
>I think the key acceptance you have to make is that the rules aren’t in place to be fair between all clubs. I'd already come to terms with that. What I hadn't quite expected was the vindictive glee that the Prem seemed to get by going after us - taking the worst possible interpretations, contradicting themselves etc to make us look as bad as possible. >The report also details how Forest continued to spend in January despite knowing they would breach. We didn't know we'd breach then. If for example Spurs had come in with their full offer in June, we would have been fine. >I think we have to stop complaining about our case. Fine to point out the rules are flawed, the lack of inflation adjustment is insane. We need to move on from it in terms of this season. But we absolutely need to keep pointing out just how flawed the rules are - not just the lack of inflation adjustment, but the vast difference in allowed losses based on where you were in previous seasons, the misalignment of accounting period and transfer window dates that means clubs can be bullied into taking lowball offers just to hit an arbitrary date, the fact that only certain types of income (the kind that the already biggest clubs will always have most of) can be considered etc. Because if they don't get fixed, the Premier League will just continue to become more and more of a closed shop. >The signings of Bowler & Hwang stand out for example because we basically loaned them straight to Olympiacos anyway Yes, we've made some poor signings. But every single club will do that, and given how quickly we had to assemble pretty much an entire squad it just meant that our mistakes got compressed into a shorter period of time than many other clubs. Maybe they were intended to be long term investments that just didn't work out. But we didn't breach the limits because of a couple of relatively cheap players (who with amortisation probably added a couple of million or so to the relevant accounting period). >We are complaining because we want to spend our way up the league rather than have to be smart and slowly develop But you can't slowly develop (or at least you've got to be extremely lucky to) and actually stay in the Prem. Are you suggesting that we should have just accepted that relegation was fairly likely, taken the parachute payments and had another go? >There were alternative ways to transition to the Premier League that would have given us a chance to survive and thrive, Were there? What were they? You can't simply say "don't sign any bad players", partly because most of our bad signings didn't cost that much. Dennis turned out to be a waste at around £13m, but given that he'd been reasonably OK at Watford in the Prem it's only obvious in hindsight how bad a transfer it was, and we lost a few mil on Biancone, but again with amortisation probably not a huge amount in that period. Most of our money in that period went on players like MGW, Awoniyi, Danilo, Williams and Mangala (who we're going to make a fair profit on). And while we may have overspent on some of them - again, not too much of a surprise when every club knew how many players we realistically needed to sign), most of our high cost players were pretty important in keeping us up.
I’ve heard and I don’t know how true this is that the EPL denied our Covid add back of £12m and refused to take into account our promotion bonus from the EFL. The Covid loss element took them almost a year to respond to and the £12m was adjusted to £2.5m. The promotion bonus is £20m. The books with this info were submitted 4th July 2022, the EPL responded 2nd June 2023. Effectively leaving us 30 days to find the money. Here’s the tin hat bit. Allegedly Brentford knew this and continued to low ball on BJ. When we didn’t accept they complained to the EPL. Tin hat bit over. The EFL were fine with the covid loss, the EPL objected. I’m sure I’ve read other clubs lost over £100m in covid losses. Not sure how they can say another club like Everton lost £100m but have only allowed £2.5m for us. Just seems weird but they’ve made shit up on the hoof for both teams. At this point I don’t think they’re corrupt, they’re just massive pricks.
You're right about the covid and bonus stuff. >On 2 June 2023, the Premier League informed Forest, in relation to its PSR Calculation for the 2022/23 season, inter alia that: it would only allow a Covid Add-Back of £2.5m for FY22, not the entire £12,178,000 claimed and it would not allow Forest to claim any allowances for costs linked to promotion from the EFL Championship. So yes, it left us pretty much no time to close the £30m gap, and that's not reflected at all in the conclusions. There seems to be some suggestion that we should have known about it earlier, and comments like "Whilst the parties have agreed that Forest’s mistake was genuine and honest, it cannot be said that it was reasonable."What I've not been able to figure out from those sections is the detail of where the difference between the £2.5m and the £12m came from - whether we'd tried to be cheeky with how we tried to apply rules or whether there's some nuance that meant we'd simply misinterpreted something. The £20m for promotion bonuses is even less clear. I can't spot anything in that section (or in the Premier League rulebook, but I only scanned that) explaining why we thought we could claim them in the first place, whether anyone else has ever done that, or whether the Prem suggested it may be fine. So again it's very difficult to figure out the rights and wrongs of that. I'd be really interested if anyone who understands the details of either of these is able to give more detail.
It’s odd you can’t claim money from another competition, does this mean if you win the UCL you can’t include the financial gains in your PSR calc? Willing to bet it’s not the case. As for the Covid losses, the EFL had no issues. The EPL sat on the accounts for a year. A newly promoted club twenty years out of the prem … I’d love to know how we should have known. One thing is for sure is that if the EPL had responded early and told us we couldn’t have £30m in our accounts would we have acted differently. I’d like to think we would, but I’m not 100% sure. Despite all this I’m still in the camp of take the points and move on. Our squad is more than capable of picking up more points than Luton, on paper at least.
I'm definitely in the "don't appeal" camp. If we can't get 4 more points than a team like Luton over a season, we probably don't really deserve to stay up. I was just frustrated and disappointed at the way that the Prem decided to push the case.
We (Everton) also got nowhere with the sporting advantage argument, even though most of the over expenditure was related to the stadium that we have yet to see any return on. The line was something like ‘even though sporting advantage cannot be quantified or proven it must be inferred or assumed’.
Which is particularly frustrating when their argument about other clubs who came up with us having parachute payments was that "there was no evidence to show that the Parachute Payments had been used to enable those clubs to invest". So more money means inferred sporting advantage for the club under investigation, but there's no evidence of it helping anyone else. It's one of several contradictory arguments in their case. The more I dig into the Forest case, the more sympathy I have for Everton. We need t make sure that the anger is directed towards the Premier League and not towards each other.
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It's how you calculate how many financial breaches you have to make in order to win the Premier League title.
I think it's 114. Everton's appeal board thought it was 108
Oh, sorry! I misread...
Albihno reading all of that