“We want to move to a new system that people have confidence in and can comply with,” the Premier League’s chief executive, Richard Masters, said this past week, “and move away perhaps from normalising asterisks against league tables or long-running regulatory cases.”
That is surely right. That doesn’t mean a free-for-all or a return to the days of unregulated spending, but any competition is undermined if it becomes common practice for points won one week to be taken away by a committee the next. There appears a serious possibility of at least four clubs being docked points this season. Once a sport stops being decided on the pitch, it is in trouble.
Leicester are the great motivation for all clubs who are not super-clubs. Their Premier League title in 2015-16 remains the great example of what is possible on relatively modest spending. This is the dream that has been sold: if you construct a squad spectacularly well, if half a dozen players simultaneously have the best seasons of their lives, if enough of the elite have slightly wobbly seasons, the league can be yours.
But there are no fairytales in football. Leicester’s title came two seasons after they had won the Championship while breaching financial fair play regulations, something for which they were fined £3.1m in 2018. Since then, their story has been a warning of what can go wrong for clubs that exist on the limit of their budget.
None of the three players on whom Leicester spent significant money in the summer of 2021 really worked out. Although the centre‑back Jannik Vestergaard became a regular last season, he had an indifferent first campaign. The forward Patson Daka has shown flashes but has never put together a run of any real consistency, while the midfielder Boubakary Soumaré was loaned out to Sevilla.
The feeling then was that Leicester, having finished fifth two seasons running, were scaling back because the club’s owner, King Power, whose main business involves running shops at airports, had suffered a financial downturn 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 rules (PSR).
The next season, Wesley Fofana and Kasper Schmeichel left. Harry Souttar, Wout Faes and Victor Kristiansen came in, but for the first time in nine years Leicester spent less on players than they recouped. (Not that that is 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 about £22m, but the result was relegation. Worse, it seems those measures probably were not enough to make the club compliant with PSR.
Salaries have been the real problem, with the club consistently running 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 wages-to-turnover ratio was running at 116%, far higher than the two teams who have been punished with points deductions for PSR breaches, Nottingham Forest (94%) and Everton (92%).
Charges were brought 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 financial year 2023-24”, an awareness that presumably informed their vain attempt to argue the Premier League had no jurisdiction over them as an EFL club.
The football finance blogger Swiss Ramble estimated that, even with a generous reading of permissible deductions, they are likely to be about £29m over the £105m threshold for losses over three years. There could be problems next year as well, with Swiss Ramble projecting another breach unless Leicester can somehow turn a profit of £12m this season.
That would suggest a penalty of at least six points is likely for this season. Survival these days rarely takes 40 points, the traditional target for clubs feeling the threat of relegation, but with a probable deduction that is the total Leicester are probably going to have to get if they are not to go down. What makes it harder is that the threat of further sanctions next season restricts the extent to which they can strengthen the squad.
At the moment, with Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall and Kelechi Iheanacho departed; Marc Albrighton and Dennis Praet released; Souttar loaned to Sheffield United; the forward Abdul Fatawu, the centre-back Caleb Okoli and the midfielder Michael Golding signed; Bobby Decordova-Reid picked up on a free and Facundo Buonanotte loaned from Brighton, their net spend is about £1m.
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Fatawu, who was on loan from Sporting Lisbon, looked enormously talented 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 a concern, particularly as a change of manager and PSR issues have already dampened the euphoria bump promoted sides often experience.
Given Enzo Maresca and his patient possession football weren’t universally popular among Leicester fans, his departure for Chelsea was perhaps not felt as sorely as it may have been but, however promising Steve Cooper’s work with Swansea and Nottingham Forest, there is a sense of momentum being lost.
The Welshman’s more tactically varied approach may be better suited to a survival fight, but that does represent major disruption. All the usual caveats about pre-season apply, but Leicester’s form has been poor, with 1-0 defeats by Palermo and Augsburg before a 3-0 loss to Lens. Even without the threat of the points deduction, this season would look like struggle.
But this is about more than Leicester. It’s about the structures of modern football. If regulations others have followed have been breached, it’s only right punishment follows, but Masters is surely right that the uncertainty is damaging. A system, as in Spain, that demands the presentation of balanced budgets rather than punishing breaches retroactively is surely preferable. Leicester’s past three seasons have been undermined by the recognition that PSR was coming for them.
Worse, though, is the taint this casts on those fifth-place finishes, the sense that for a non‑super-club to compete at all, they have to take a cavalier attitude to the regulations.