With grim inevitability, the Premier League have let it be known they will step in to break up the latest Profitability and Sustainability rules scuffle.
Another week, another off-field row down to PSR, which must rank as the least convincing set of financial controls in sport. This time it’s so-called “mutually beneficial” deals under the microscope after Everton, Aston Villa and Chelsea agreed transfers of academy graduates over the weekend.
Suspicion that fees might have been inflated to aid the PSR conundrums of all three clubs – Newcastle United inevitably have been grouped with them for the crime of being interested in Dominic Calvert-Lewin – have led to conveniently-timed reminders from the league that it’s in the rules to act in good faith on transfers.
How ridiculous those rules now look. They’ve created a financial fair play system that encourages clubs to retain super silks and expensive KCs while waving off homegrown talent at the altar of supposed sustainability.
Because here’s the problem Newcastle and the rest must confront in the final week of the “soft” transfer window that precedes 30 June: they need to sell but, thanks to PSR itself, the market has been dead for six months.
The rules were designed to encourage sustainability but when Everton were charged with breaching PSR in the autumn of 2023 it sent shockwaves through the game. A medium term business plan that might have included player trading suddenly became null and void because every club in the Premier League got spooked.
Now you might argue that this is bad luck for the clubs pushing close to the PSR limit. But that fundamentally misunderstands how the market works.
One transfer executive told i: “Even the clubs with plenty of PSR headroom are now thinking about the next two or three years, and that means the market has become totally deflated.
“All your assumptions basically change, which is fine if you’re a middling club but if you’ve shown a bit of ambition you could be in trouble.
“My club and a few others suggested some creative ways of solving the liquidity problem but no-one was really listening. So what we have is a pretty dead market with some clubs desperate to sell.”
And that has created the sort of problem that is an unintended consequence of PSR rules: clubs scrambling around looking for willing buyers and forced into selling players who face an uncertain future.
Take 20-year-old Gambia international Yankuba Minteh. Good scouting brought him to Newcastle from Danish club Odense, even better work went into his development year at Feyenoord. “World class,” one source at the Dutch club told me of Newcastle’s work making sure he was settled in the Netherlands and developing the way they wanted him to.
The plan was to give him another year in the Netherlands on loan, or maybe send him to a top level Championship club or newly-promoted Premier League club to test him. Then Newcastle – who rolled the dice to spend £5m on him – would reap the rewards of smart work and a structure which takes care of a player who arrived as a diamond ready to be polished.
But by the start of June the club reached an alarming conclusion: with not enough takers for any of their other players, the only way they could hit their PSR goal was to sell Minteh. Where? Whoever pays the most money. No-one, not least Minteh himself, wanted him to go. But financial fair play has created a market that dictates he must go.
The Premier League are said to be monitoring the situation with Villa, Everton and Chelsea striking deals that many feel are unusual. But in a free market – which is what the transfer window is – how do you really dictate what a proper transfer fee is?
Is it really that ridiculous that Tim Iroegbunam, an England U20 international, is worth £9m? Everton signed Youssef Chermiti for more last season because they spied potential and he barely played last season. And Omari Kellyman at £19m? Well Antony, lest we forget, cost Manchester United £85m. If we’re starting to regulate bad transfer deals maybe Erik ten Hag can expect a knock at the door.
Put succinctly: if you create a set of rules that aren’t fit for purpose, you can’t start dictating how compliance works.
Here’s a preseason prediction before any Premier League club is back in training: the PSR farce is only going to get more pronounced this season. Mutually beneficial deals are just an aperitif to the main course – which is a Premier League table with potentially multiple points deductions and the Manchester City verdict looming over it.
It’s not that difficult to imagine a table skewed by City being found guilty and four or five clubs breaching PSR. Bear all that in mind when you’re making your preseason predictions.
