The Premier League has spent three years closing financial loopholes. Each time, the club that used the loophole kept what it gained, and the rule change applied only to everyone who came afterwards. That is not a conspiracy. It is how rule-making works. It is also why the same clubs keep finishing at the top.
Profitability and Sustainability Rules are gone. From this season, Premier League clubs are governed by Squad Cost Ratio, capping spending on wages, transfer fee amortisation, head coach pay and agents' fees at 85 per cent of football revenue, alongside a separate set of liquidity tests. Clubs voted it through in November 2025 by fourteen to six.
It is a good moment to ask an awkward question. Over the PSR era, did the rules apply equally? The evidence suggests something more uncomfortable than favouritism: the loopholes were open to everybody, but they were worth vastly more if you were already big.
The Pattern: Use It, Then Close It, Never Backdate It
Three separate rule changes since 2023 follow an identical shape.
1. Ultra-long contracts and amortisation
When a club buys a player, the fee is spread across the contract in the accounts. Chelsea under Todd Boehly and Clearlake worked out that a longer contract meant a smaller annual charge. Mykhaylo Mudryk arrived on eight and a half years, which turned an £88m fee into roughly £10m a year rather than £17.6m over a standard five. Enzo Fernandez and Moises Caicedo were handed similar deals.
It was not cheating. It was correct accounting under the rules as written, and Chelsea said so at the time. But it allowed more than £1bn of spending to be absorbed without breaching PSR.
UEFA capped amortisation at five years from July 2023. Premier League clubs voted to do the same on 12 December 2023, Chelsea among the fifteen voting in favour. Neither change was backdated. The contracts already signed keep running at the old rate.
2. Selling assets to yourself
PSR allowed clubs to sell fixed assets to related companies and count the proceeds. Chelsea sold two hotels to a sister company in June 2023, valued by the league at £76.5m. In June 2024, two days before the accounting deadline, they transferred Chelsea Women to BlueCo 22 Midco for £198.7m, converting what would have been a substantial loss into a pre-tax profit of £128.4m.
Aston Villa did the same thing a year later, selling ninety per cent of Villa Women to their own parent company and ten per cent to external investors, at a total valuation of £55m.
Premier League clubs declined to close this in June 2025. They closed it in November 2025, as part of the Squad Cost Ratio package, effective this season. Again, not retrospective.
3. Sponsorship valuations
Associated Party Transaction rules exist to stop an owner overpaying for sponsorship through a company they control. Manchester City challenged them. In February 2025 a tribunal declared the 2021 to 2024 APT rules void and unenforceable in their entirety, because unlawful provisions could not be severed from the rest. City settled in September 2025, accepting an amended version, after which the league moved to validate new Etihad and first team partner arrangements.
City remain subject to 115 charges relating to 2009 to 2018, which they deny in full. No verdict has been published, the hearing having concluded in December 2024, and the allegations remain unproven.
What the Same Loophole Was Worth
The related-party asset sale is the clearest illustration, because three clubs faced the same deadline with the same rule available to all of them.
Two hotels at £76.5m in 2023, plus the women's team at £198.7m in 2024.
Women's team, ninety per cent to the parent company, ten per cent externally, June 2025.
No comparable assets to sell. Complied by selling Elliot Anderson and Yankuba Minteh in the final days of June 2024 instead.
Figures as reported in club accounts and Premier League valuations. Compiled by My Football Facts.
Villa used the loophole too, which is the detail that complicates any simple story of victimhood. But they raised a fifth of what Chelsea did, because they owned a fifth as much worth selling. Newcastle raised nothing, because they owned nothing that qualified, and paid for it in players.
That is the whole argument in one panel. The rule was identical for all three. The benefit scaled with what you already had.
Analysis of how Premier League financial regulation has developed.
The Case for the Defence
Three arguments against the unfairness case
Nothing here was against the rules. The Premier League confirmed that every club was PSR compliant for the 2023-24 monitoring period. No charges followed the hotel sale, the women's team sales or the long contracts. Calling legitimate accounting a scandal is a category error.
Retrospective rule changes are close to unworkable. Clubs sign contracts and sell assets on the law as it stands. A league that rewrites the past invites litigation it would probably lose, as the APT case demonstrated in the other direction.
The league did act. Amortisation was capped within about a year of Chelsea's first long contracts. The asset-sale route survived one vote and was closed at the next. That is not obviously slow for a body requiring fourteen votes out of twenty.
There is a fourth point worth making. Newcastle and Aston Villa are not small clubs run on a shoestring. Both are owned by enormously wealthy investors who would happily spend more. The constraint they object to is precisely the one the rules were written to impose: that you cannot buy success faster than you can earn the revenue to fund it.
Which is where the argument gets genuinely difficult. That constraint is not neutral. It protects whoever built their revenue first.
Does Squad Cost Ratio Fix This or Entrench It?
PSR permitted losses of up to £105m across three years, provided an owner covered them. It was a limit on how much you could lose. Squad Cost Ratio is a limit on how much you can spend relative to what you earn.
For a club with £700m of revenue, 85 per cent is an enormous budget. For a club with £250m, it is 85 per cent of £250m. Under PSR, an ambitious owner could at least inject a defined amount of loss-making investment to close the gap. Under SCR, that route is narrower, because the ceiling is set by the revenue you already generate, and revenue is the thing incumbency buys.
Villa have felt this directly, having reportedly agreed a phased plan with UEFA to bring their ratio down over successive years. Newcastle face the same mathematics. Both are being asked to compete with clubs whose commercial income was built during decades of Champions League football, while operating under a rule that indexes ambition to existing size.
Clubs also voted down top-to-bottom anchoring, the proposed hard cap linked to the lowest earner's television income, which would have compressed the range at the top. The measure that would have limited the biggest spenders was rejected. The measure that ties everyone to their own revenue was adopted.
So, Is Football Finance Fair?
Fair in the narrow sense, yes. The rules were applied consistently, compliance was assessed evenly, and the clubs that found room within them did nothing prohibited.
Fair in the sense of producing a competition where a well-run club with an ambitious owner can realistically break into the top four, much less so. Every reform of the past three years has closed a route that a large club had already used, at the point where a smaller one might have needed it. Chelsea kept £275m and their amortisation schedule. Villa kept £55m. Newcastle sold two academy graduates in the last week of June.
The pattern is not corruption. It is something more ordinary and harder to fix: rules written by the clubs they govern, changed by a vote in which the largest clubs are also the most numerous beneficiaries of the status quo. The Squad Cost Ratio era begins now, and the first real test will be whether anyone outside the established group can grow into it.
For the longer history of how football's money arrived in the first place, see our series on The Making of Modern Football, and the all-time Premier League table for the competitive record these rules now govern.
Football Finance FAQs
Here are the answers to the most common questions about Premier League financial rules and how they have changed.
What is PSR and why has it been replaced?
The Profitability and Sustainability Rules capped Premier League club losses at £105m over a rolling three-year period. They were replaced from the 2026-27 season by Squad Cost Ratio and a set of sustainability tests, after clubs voted fourteen to six in November 2025. The main criticisms of PSR were that it measured accumulated losses rather than spending against revenue, and that it was assessed long after the fact.
How did Chelsea use long contracts to comply with PSR?
Transfer fees are spread across the length of a player's contract in a club's accounts, a process called amortisation. By signing players such as Mykhaylo Mudryk and Enzo Fernandez to deals of eight years or more, Chelsea reduced the annual charge against their accounts. UEFA capped amortisation at five years from July 2023 and the Premier League followed in December 2023, but neither change was backdated, so contracts signed before then continue under the old treatment.
Did Chelsea and Aston Villa break the rules by selling their women's teams?
No. Both sales were permitted under PSR as it stood, and the Premier League confirmed that all clubs were compliant for the 2023-24 monitoring period. Chelsea transferred their women's team to a related company for £198.7m in June 2024, and Aston Villa sold ninety per cent of theirs to their parent company in June 2025 at a total valuation of £55m. Premier League clubs voted to exclude such proceeds from spending calculations from the 2026-27 season.
What are Manchester City's 115 charges and has there been a verdict?
The Premier League charged Manchester City in February 2023 with 115 alleged breaches of its financial rules, covering the seasons from 2009-10 to 2017-18 plus alleged failure to cooperate with the investigation. A twelve-week independent commission hearing concluded in December 2024. As of August 2026 no verdict has been published. City deny all the charges and the allegations remain unproven.
What is Squad Cost Ratio?
Squad Cost Ratio limits a Premier League club's spending on wages, amortised transfer fees, head coach pay and agents' fees to 85 per cent of its football-related revenue and net player trading profit. Clubs competing in UEFA competitions are held to a stricter 70 per cent limit. It is assessed during the season rather than retrospectively, with a checkpoint after the January window.
Why do Newcastle United and Aston Villa struggle to comply?
Both have wealthy owners but revenue bases well below the traditional leading clubs, built over far fewer seasons of European football. Because Squad Cost Ratio ties permitted spending to a club's own revenue rather than to an owner's willingness to fund losses, clubs outside the established group have less room to invest their way upwards. Newcastle sold Elliot Anderson and Yankuba Minteh in June 2024 to meet the PSR deadline, having no comparable assets to sell.