Leicester and PSR for 23/24

[TornadoShaunUK]

Cases like that take years to go through the courts, not going to be of any benefit to the club for at least five years, if ever.

This is true. It's been 6 and a half years since the incident and will no doubt take a few more years before any result comes of their claim, if they're even successful at all.

 

[Robin127]

This is true. It's been 6 and a half years since the incident and will no doubt take a few more years before any result comes of their claim, if they're even successful at all.

The inquest into the deaths hasn't even been held yet.

 

[M17TT C]

The new loophole!...

 

[Feidlimid]

The law is an arse, said someone. Badly drafted regs are a field day and a lawyer has a thesaurus in court with them, to aid their search for other definitions.

I get it. Big business (and Prem football is) will wiggle and search and exploit. We all would. Give the judge something to decide. Makes perfect sense. We'll have to wait and see what Monday brings. Until then, anyone for T?

 

[Brown Nose]

By Matt Slater
1h ago
2

---

It could have been because it spanned a long weekend, or maybe it was the blur of Fantasy Football deadlines, but the period between Christmas and New Year’s Eve was particularly confusing this time around.

Psychiatrists call this temporal disintegration and it can happen to all of us, as the Premier League may be about to discover.

Do you remember last year’s thought experiment about what division Leicester City played in during the 2022-23 season? That was when they appeared to get relegated from the Premier League, only for it to emerge that they were actually operating in a twilight zone between the top flight and the Championship.

Leicester’s limbo-like existence was not confirmed until last September, when a panel ruled the Premier League could not sanction them for breaching its Profitability and Sustainability Rules (PSR) because they were no longer under its jurisdiction when the financial year ended. However, this did not mean Leicester were completely under the English Football League’s jurisdiction, as a different panel had already told the EFL it did not have the right to prosecute, either.

The Premier League’s case against Leicester hinged on the importance of words. If the rules say Leicester were no longer a Premier League club at the crucial moment, it does not matter if everyone knows what the rule-maker meant.

Now, having suffered an episode of temporal disintegration that embarrassing, you might think the Premier League would have a plan to keep better track of these things.

Well, we should find out early next week if Leicester are going to be charged with breaching PSR for the 2023-24 season, the campaign that saw them return to the Premier League at the earliest opportunity.

Leicester have said nothing about their financial situation, a position they reiterated when contacted by The Athletic earlier this week. But the consensus view in the industry is that once you strip out all the “good” expenditure clubs are allowed to make on community programmes, youth development and so on, they lost about £95million for the rolling three-year period that ended on June 30, 2024.

According to the league’s understanding of its rulebook, clubs are assessed annually on the basis of their audited accounts, with the most recent season referred to as “T”, the season before “T-1” and the one before that “T-2”.

After the delayed-justice controversy surrounding Everton’s breach of the rules in 2021-22, the league has been determined to apply sanctions in the season immediately after the confirmed breach.

So, it requests clubs to provide forecasts of their accounts in March and then asks for the audited accounts by the end of the year in order to make final decisions on whether the clubs have spent too much or not.

Therefore, T, for this set of assessments, is 2023-24. Premier League clubs are allowed to lose £35m a year, after the usual add-backs, but the EFL has a lower limit of £13m. The maximum three-year loss a club can make, then, is £105m but this is reduced by £22m for each season spent in the EFL. For example, when Nottingham Forest were docked four points for breaching PSR last year, their upper limit was only £61m, as two of their three seasons were in the EFL.

Still with me? Good, because we are about to re-enter the festive fog and get confused again.

If you actually look at rule E.54, it says the loss threshold “shall be reduced by £22m for each season covered by T-1 and T-2 in which the club was in membership of the (English) Football League”. It does not say anything about a reduction for season T, which is when Leicester were in the EFL.

We do not need to imagine what Leicester lawyer Nick De Marco KC — whose radar for loopholes is legendary — might do with legalese as loose as this. If there is no EFL discount for T, it could be argued that Leicester’s threshold is the full £105million. Over to you, my learned friend.

And if that does not work, he could try A.1.247 in the “definitions and interpretation” section that says T means the club’s accounting period ending in the year in which the league’s assessment “takes place”, which sounds like T should be 2024-25 for Leicester.

That would knock the club’s loss threshold back to £83m — as T-1 would be last season’s Championship-winning campaign — but it would mean a return to the Upside Down world of 2022-23 when Leicester were being assessed on incomplete numbers. It would also mean that Nottingham Forest and Everton, twice, were prosecuted for the wrong seasons.

You are probably thinking it is obvious the rules intend for T to be 2023-24 and that the league is basing its decisions on final, audited accounts, retrospectively, and not the March estimates. But the use of T in financial fair play rules started with UEFA a decade ago and it says it is the set of audited accounts for the calendar year in which the current season starts. So, an assessment in 2024-25, would look at the 2023-24 accounts. Simple and clear.

And this confusion in the Premier League rulebook was picked up by the panel in the first Leicester case when it noted it “would be odd” if clubs were prosecuted for “an estimate that could be falsified by actual audited accounts”.

Odd, indeed. I wonder if De Marco spotted it?

 

[pork pie fox]

"The argument about whether Leicester are entitled to lose £105 million or £83 million could be crucial, perhaps dependent on how legislation is worded in the Premier League’s rules."

Are we going to be playing more games here

By Matt Slater
1h ago
2

---

It could have been because it spanned a long weekend, or maybe it was the blur of Fantasy Football deadlines, but the period between Christmas and New Year’s Eve was particularly confusing this time around.

Psychiatrists call this temporal disintegration and it can happen to all of us, as the Premier League may be about to discover.

Do you remember last year’s thought experiment about what division Leicester City played in during the 2022-23 season? That was when they appeared to get relegated from the Premier League, only for it to emerge that they were actually operating in a twilight zone between the top flight and the Championship.

Leicester’s limbo-like existence was not confirmed until last September, when a panel ruled the Premier League could not sanction them for breaching its Profitability and Sustainability Rules (PSR) because they were no longer under its jurisdiction when the financial year ended. However, this did not mean Leicester were completely under the English Football League’s jurisdiction, as a different panel had already told the EFL it did not have the right to prosecute, either.

The Premier League’s case against Leicester hinged on the importance of words. If the rules say Leicester were no longer a Premier League club at the crucial moment, it does not matter if everyone knows what the rule-maker meant.

Now, having suffered an episode of temporal disintegration that embarrassing, you might think the Premier League would have a plan to keep better track of these things.

Well, we should find out early next week if Leicester are going to be charged with breaching PSR for the 2023-24 season, the campaign that saw them return to the Premier League at the earliest opportunity.

Leicester have said nothing about their financial situation, a position they reiterated when contacted by The Athletic earlier this week. But the consensus view in the industry is that once you strip out all the “good” expenditure clubs are allowed to make on community programmes, youth development and so on, they lost about £95million for the rolling three-year period that ended on June 30, 2024.

According to the league’s understanding of its rulebook, clubs are assessed annually on the basis of their audited accounts, with the most recent season referred to as “T”, the season before “T-1” and the one before that “T-2”.

After the delayed-justice controversy surrounding Everton’s breach of the rules in 2021-22, the league has been determined to apply sanctions in the season immediately after the confirmed breach.

So, it requests clubs to provide forecasts of their accounts in March and then asks for the audited accounts by the end of the year in order to make final decisions on whether the clubs have spent too much or not.

Therefore, T, for this set of assessments, is 2023-24. Premier League clubs are allowed to lose £35m a year, after the usual add-backs, but the EFL has a lower limit of £13m. The maximum three-year loss a club can make, then, is £105m but this is reduced by £22m for each season spent in the EFL. For example, when Nottingham Forest were docked four points for breaching PSR last year, their upper limit was only £61m, as two of their three seasons were in the EFL.

Still with me? Good, because we are about to re-enter the festive fog and get confused again.

If you actually look at rule E.54, it says the loss threshold “shall be reduced by £22m for each season covered by T-1 and T-2 in which the club was in membership of the (English) Football League”. It does not say anything about a reduction for season T, which is when Leicester were in the EFL.

We do not need to imagine what Leicester lawyer Nick De Marco KC — whose radar for loopholes is legendary — might do with legalese as loose as this. If there is no EFL discount for T, it could be argued that Leicester’s threshold is the full £105million. Over to you, my learned friend.

And if that does not work, he could try A.1.247 in the “definitions and interpretation” section that says T means the club’s accounting period ending in the year in which the league’s assessment “takes place”, which sounds like T should be 2024-25 for Leicester.

That would knock the club’s loss threshold back to £83m — as T-1 would be last season’s Championship-winning campaign — but it would mean a return to the Upside Down world of 2022-23 when Leicester were being assessed on incomplete numbers. It would also mean that Nottingham Forest and Everton, twice, were prosecuted for the wrong seasons.

You are probably thinking it is obvious the rules intend for T to be 2023-24 and that the league is basing its decisions on final, audited accounts, retrospectively, and not the March estimates. But the use of T in financial fair play rules started with UEFA a decade ago and it says it is the set of audited accounts for the calendar year in which the current season starts. So, an assessment in 2024-25, would look at the 2023-24 accounts. Simple and clear.

And this confusion in the Premier League rulebook was picked up by the panel in the first Leicester case when it noted it “would be odd” if clubs were prosecuted for “an estimate that could be falsified by actual audited accounts”.

Odd, indeed. I wonder if De Marco spotted it?

 

[homer]

Now I’m no lawyer, but I reckon even I could have a fair crack at destroying those rules

Who have they got drafting these things - ****ing GCSE Law students?

Not fit to govern imo

 

[Feidlimid]

If the club manage to successfully navigate this T junction, I'll be simultaneously impressed and incredulous. They'll make the EPL look chumps (if the cap fits) but also emboss the crosshairs that are probably already trained on them. They'll have found wiggle room within wiggle room. They couldn't could they? Could they??

If they do, my god will they have to be squeaky clean in the future. The EPL will be indicating their preferred outcomes to both PGMOL and VAR.

 

[Payne74]

Sounds like the Minority report, you get prosecuted and convicted on things that have yet to happen.

 

[camberwell fox]

I would wager my cock in Homers mouth that we have an extremely good and watertight defence to this.

 

[Feidlimid]

I would wager my cock in Homers mouth that we have an extremely good and watertight defence to this.

unlike Homer's defence?

 

[camberwell fox]

unlike Homer's defence?

Welcome to the forum.

I am enjoying reading your posts Feidlimid
.
Where does your avatar name derive from?

 

[homer]

unlike Homer's defence?

My defence is the same as it has always been

“I was completely shitfaced, M’lud”

 

[SJN-Fox]

 

[Feidlimid]

Where does your avatar name derive from?

Celtic royalty. No personal significance nor affinity.

 

[Joe_Fox]

One would assume the club are confident that we'll be able to once again get off the hook by confusing the EPL with our weird situation, and that the precedent set through the previous hook-off-getting (legal term that, right @SilverFox ?) will see us smear more egg on the faces of the Premier League's (so called) lawyers should they come for us, and perhaps that's our play - a rather high stakes game of once bitten, twice shy, perhaps.

Personally, I couldn't give a ****. And that's not because I don't care for my beloved Leicester City. Far from it. I just couldn't give an ants fart what happens with all this PSR wank.

If we weasel out of things (again), then OK, sort of, although meh, just papers over cracks and lowers our reputation. If the book is thrown at us, then OK, fair cop, at least that might be the catalyst for wholesale change in our clearly useless management team.

The most important thing is that the club survives. If that's a lower league club then fine by me. Of course I'd rather us be the best team in the land, but remember, we already are that (or at least were) so let's not all shit the sheets if we get a decade or so in the wilderness. We'll all still supporrt LCFC, right?

 

[Feidlimid]

I think if we go down (points deduction or no) and then the EFL have their pound of flesh then, yes, it could take many years to rebuild/recover. I have accepted that possibility and am surprisingly ok with it. Part of me would embrace, if not welcome, it.

 

[glyn]

I think if we go down (points deduction or no) and then the EFL have their pound of flesh then, yes, it could take many years to rebuild/recover. I have accepted that possibility and am surprisingly ok with it. Part of me would embrace, if not welcome, it.

I expect many who are saying this will find it hard to maintain such patience when we are languishing in 18th in the championship and desperate for our third manager of the season

 

[Feidlimid]

Our badly charred pheonix will rise once again!

 

[OldGit]

I expect many who are saying this will find it hard to maintain such patience when we are languishing in 18th in the championship and desperate for our third manager of the season

Well I would be delighted for another decade at any level. Does it come as a guaranteed minimum?