BURNLEY, ENGLAND - MAY 04: Alexander Isak of Newcastle United celebrates scoring his team's fourth goal with teammates Sean Longstaff, Jacob Murphy and Anthony Gordon during the Premier League match between Burnley FC and Newcastle United at Turf Moor on May 04, 2024 in Burnley, England. (Photo by Stu Forster/Getty Images)
The Premier League is to scrutinise a number of transfers that were made as the 30 June 2024 PSR deadline approached.
This was the final day for most clubs of their 2023/24 season accounting period.
It was also the final day of the latest three-year PSR accounting period (1 July 2021 to 30 June 2024) when a Premier League club can’t have lost more than £105m (though not all club expenditure counts towards PSR losses).
The last four days of June 2024 saw around a quarter of a billion spent on Premier League players.
Much/most of that money was spent on players from clubs that were speculated to be in danger of breaking PSR.
A number of these deals seeing deals back and forth between these clubs claimed to be in PSR danger.
The six clubs regularly speculated about with regards to the latest PSR deadline were Aston Villa, Chelsea, Leicester, Newcastle United, Everton, and Nottingham Forest.
The Guardian broke the story and commenting on what the Premier League is looking at:
There is no suggestion any of the clubs involved have breached any rules, although Maheta Molango, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, has described the loophole as “nonsensical”.
“The clubs have been very clever to say that these are not swaps, they are just individual deals signed off pretty soon after one another,” said the football finance expert Kieran Maguire. “Generally speaking there’s nothing to stop them saying, ‘I’ve got a player who you want and vice versa. We think that your player is worth £5m more than mine, so we could agree that the prices are £10m and £15m or we could agree that they are £25m and £30m’. Either way, you get that extra £5m.
“That appears to be a driving force in relation to these transfers. And there is no such thing as a genuine price: Brighton have paid £32m for Yankuba Minteh from Newcastle and they have got no PSR issues. So if that’s the price for a 19-year-old, it could be argued that some the other deals don’t look overstated. But he has just had a spectacular season with Feyenoord.”
“Any transaction for more than £1m is potentially subject to a fair market value review,” said Maguire. “But the people trying to agree what a fair price for a player have got an almost impossible job. There’s no list prices for them because they are all unique – it’s not like buying an iPad.”
Nonetheless, the Premier League’s director of governance is expected to investigate some of the recent transfers having warned that clubs may be “requested to provide information and evidence to assist determination of whether the transaction should be considered as being conducted at arm’s length”. If not, “a fair market value assessment of the transfer to determine the value the transaction can be approved at will take place”.’
