Premier League Profit and Sustainability Rules: 8 Points Deducted, 115 Charges, and the Question Nobody Wants to Answer

On the night of November 17, 2026, I sat in my small apartment in Shanghai, holding a cup of tea that had long gone cold, my eyes fixed on the ticker: Everton had been deducted 10 points for breaching the Premier League's Profit and Sustainability Rules. Outside my window the city was still lit, cars still moving, nobody here cared that a football club in Liverpool had just lost ten points. But I sat there for a long time. When the whole commentary room said Everton deserved it, I heard the faint whisper of a different question.

That question was not "did Everton do wrong." The question was: if this law was created to protect fairness, why are the ones being punished the clubs trying to climb, while the club at the summit sees its case drag on year after year without ever closing?

I am not writing this to defend Everton. I am writing because I spent fourteen months re-reading the entire case file, cross-checking every number, and what I found kept me awake. My contrarian view today is simple: Profit and Sustainability Rules do not create competitive balance. They protect those who are already rich, and punish those who are trying to become rich. If that sounds shocking, let me show you the evidence before you cross my name off.

Context: A law born from fear

Before we talk about Everton, Nottingham Forest, or Manchester City, I need to tell this story from the beginning, because I know many people who follow English football without truly understanding how the law operates. This is the part I always have to explain at length in my tactical lectures for academies, and I am not afraid to say it plainly: even the professional coaches I have taught had gaps in their knowledge of financial rules. Nobody taught them this when they were players.

Profit and Sustainability Rules, or PSR, are the Premier League's domestic version of the financial rulebook UEFA once called Financial Fair Play, or FFP. UEFA launched FFP in 2026, at a moment when a wave of European clubs were struggling because they spent beyond their means. England's Portsmouth went into administration. Leeds United went into freefall. Malaga, Rangers, many other clubs nearly vanished. The greatest fear then was that European football would face a debt crisis, and billionaire owners would pump in unlimited money to win trophies before abandoning clubs to sink.

UEFA chose to require clubs to spend within their own revenue, forbidding losses beyond a certain threshold over a certain period. The Premier League then chose a similar mechanism under a different name. The PSR we are discussing allows Premier League clubs to lose a maximum of 105 million pounds over three years, the equivalent of 35 million pounds per season. That 105 million figure sounds large, but it carries significant permitted deductions: spending on infrastructure, academies, women's football, and community projects is excluded from the calculation.

What very few notice is that the 105 million threshold only applies to clubs that have been in the Premier League for all three calculation years. If you have just been promoted, you face a much lower threshold, because the time you spent in the Championship carries a far lower ceiling. This is the single most important technical detail, and it is also the detail most media reports glide past. It is the key to explaining why Nottingham Forest were deducted points despite a loss figure far smaller than Everton's.

Alongside PSR, UEFA in 2026 replaced FFP with the Financial Sustainability Regulations, or FSR, which include a Squad Cost Rule: clubs in European competition may spend a maximum of 70 percent of revenue on player wages, transfer fees, and agent fees. This is a different mechanism, harsher in ratio but applied more flexibly in punishment. I mention this so you see the bigger picture: Europe is building a web of overlapping regulations, and each layer behaves differently.

The difference lies in punishment. UEFA can ban clubs from European competition, fine them, limit squad registration. The Premier League holds a heavier weapon: points deductions. And when a law carries the power to deduct points, the question of fairness is no longer academic. It is a question about a club's life.

The Everton file: When numbers say more than the verdict

I reopened my notes from November 2026. Everton were charged with breaching PSR for the period ending in the 2026-2026 season, with losses exceeding the permitted threshold by 124.5 million pounds against a 105 million pound ceiling, an overrun of roughly 19.5 million. An independent commission handed down a 10-point deduction, the heaviest sanction in Premier League history at that point.

The story did not end there. Everton appealed and won partially: the deduction was reduced from 10 to 6 points on February 26, 2026. But then a second case appeared, covering the next calculation period, and Everton were deducted a further 2 points on April 8, 2026. In total, the Merseyside club lost 8 points in a single season for two separate breaches.

What made me stop and think was not the number 8. What made me stop was the context of the 124.5 million figure. For years, Everton lived inside a deadly paradox. They spent like a club chasing the top six while their revenue was that of a mid-table club. The new Bramley-Moore Dock stadium swallowed hundreds of millions. They signed high-wage contracts for quality players, changed managers repeatedly, and every managerial change meant burning money on compensation and buying players to suit the new man.

But let me ask a question I have never seen asked in the media. If Everton were punished for trying to compete with richer clubs, what exactly about their conduct was ethically wrong? They spent more than they earned, true. They gambled on climbing the table in order to earn more, true. But betting on the future is the nature of every football club that wants to grow. Manchester United borrowed hundreds of millions to buy players. Chelsea spent over a billion pounds in two transfer windows under new ownership, signing long contracts to spread costs across years. Real Madrid, Barcelona, Manchester City, all bet on the future.

The difference lies in the ability to absorb losses. When your commercial revenue is 700 million pounds like Manchester City or Manchester United, a 35 million pound annual loss is trivial. When your revenue is only 200 million, that loss is a fatal wound. Everton were punished not because they were more wicked than others. They were punished because they were poorer, and because they dared to behave as if they were not poor.

The Nottingham Forest file: The two-tier ceiling and the promotion trap

Nottingham Forest were deducted 4 points on March 18, 2026. Their loss in the breach period was 34.5 million pounds, exceeding the permitted 61 million pound threshold. That sounds far less than Everton's 19.5 million overrun, but look closely at the 61 million figure. That is the ceiling for a club that spent only two of the three calculation years in the Premier League. Had Forest been in the Premier League for all three years, their ceiling would have been 105 million.

This is the point I want every Vietnamese football fan to understand clearly, because a similar mechanism is gradually appearing in Asian football and may soon affect clubs in the region. When you are newly promoted, you need to buy players to survive, but you are held to a lower spending threshold. You are forced to spend to compete, while the law forbids you from spending as much as competition requires. That is a structural trap, not an individual mistake.

I spent an evening recounting Forest's signings in the summer they were promoted. The number reached over twenty players in a single window. Many will look at that and say Forest brought it on themselves. I do not dispute that view. But I want to set beside it another fact: to survive in the Premier League, a newly promoted side is almost forced to rebuild its entire squad, because Championship-quality players are not enough to stay up. You cannot come up with one squad and stay up with that same squad. You have to spend, and you have to spend now.

How much does PSR understand this? It understands enough to set a lower threshold for promoted clubs, meaning it acknowledges a structural problem, yet it chooses to tighten the screws. To me, that is the expression of a perverse governance philosophy: the weak are required to be more disciplined than the strong.

Manchester City and 115 charges: A long shadow

This is the part I must say slowly and clearly, because it is the heart of the argument I am making today.

On February 6, 2026, the Premier League referred 115 charges against Manchester City to an independent commission, concerning breaches of financial regulations spanning roughly 2026 to 2026. The 115 charges cover various categories: failing to provide accurate financial information, failing to comply with rules on manager remuneration, failing to cooperate fully with the investigation, and breaching profit and sustainability rules. This is the largest case in Premier League history.

I followed this case the way I follow a match that lasts years. And what I saw was a paradox of time. Everton were investigated, charged, docked 10 points, appealed down to 6, then docked 2 more, all within less than five months. Nottingham Forest were investigated and docked points within months. Manchester City had 115 charges referred in February 2026, and as I write these lines, the hearing and final ruling have still not concluded.

I am not saying Manchester City are guilty or innocent. That is not my job, nor my concern in this piece. What concerns me is speed. The speed of justice in football is not evenly distributed. Small clubs with thin legal teams are tried quickly, docked immediately, pushed into a relegation battle before they even fully understand the charges. Big clubs with top lawyers, with the ability to prolong proceedings, with the financial resources to litigate for years, get time.

Time, in football, is money. And in law, time is leverage. When you can stretch a case, you can drain its topicality, tire the public, discourage the parties involved. That is not a conspiracy. It is simply how a system operates when power is unevenly distributed.

The blind spot the whole commentary room misses

Let me tell a personal story, because I promise you it connects directly to what I am saying.

In 2026, when the pandemic halted every league, I sat in Shanghai with a pile of old tapes and crushing boredom. I started counting set-piece goals for mid-table teams in the Chinese top flight. The result stunned me: 68 percent of mid-table goals came from set pieces. But what I remember most is not the number. What I remember most is the feeling when I realized I had watched hundreds of matches without seeing the obvious thing right in front of me.

The old tapes lay there, and I put on my glasses, and I saw the future.

That experience taught me something about reading football media. When everyone is looking in one direction, chances are they are missing something in the opposite direction. With the PSR story, the whole commentary room is looking at Everton and Nottingham Forest. They are debating whether the deductions are fair, whether they are too harsh, whether they should be reduced further. All those debates are reasonable, but they all sit inside the same frame: accepting that this law is a fair law, and arguing only about how it is applied.

The blind spot lies elsewhere. The blind spot is the question of whether a law limiting spending based on revenue can create fairness in a league where revenue was already distributed extremely unequally from the start.

Think about this in numbers. The commercial revenue of top Premier League clubs differs from that of mid-table clubs by a multiple. Broadcast money is distributed in tiers, with the champion earning significantly more than the bottom club, plus merit payments by position. When you build a spending threshold tied to revenue, you turn the existing revenue gap into a legally enshrined spending gap. You do not narrow the gap. You freeze it.

Numbers do not lie, but numbers do not tell the whole story either

I am not someone who believes everything can be reduced to data. But I am someone who believes that when a claim about fairness is made, it must be proven with numbers.

So look at the results of fifteen years of European financial regulation. Has the number of English clubs going into administration fallen? Yes. Have clubs falling into severe financial crisis fallen? Yes, at least at the top tier. Has the number of small clubs able to climb and stay in the upper group risen? The honest answer is not clearly, and if anything, barely.

Look at the list of Premier League champions over the past two decades. You will see a very narrow band of clubs repeating. Look at the list of Champions League participants over the past decade. You will see a very narrow band. If PSR truly created competitive balance, we would see diversification at the top. We do not. We see concentration.

Of course, I know my opponent will say: "But without PSR things would be worse." That is a reasonable argument, and I will answer it later, when I challenge myself. But before we get there, I want you to hold one question. If a law fails to achieve the goal it proclaims, yet achieves another goal it does not proclaim, by which goal should we judge it?

The points deduction mechanism and the problem of an irreversible punishment

There is a technical aspect of the points deduction mechanism that I consider more important than the size of the penalty. It is its irreversibility.

When a club is fined, it loses money. That can be offset by future revenue, by selling players, by cutting costs. When a club is banned from European competition, it loses an opportunity, but that opportunity can return next season.

When a club is docked points, it loses part of a season. And a season does not come back. If those 8 points relegate Everton, the damage will last years, possibly decades, because relegation from the Premier League means losing tens of millions of pounds in broadcast money each season, losing the ability to attract players, losing commercial value. That is a potentially devastating punishment.

I understand the logic of points deductions. The Premier League needs a penalty painful enough to deter. Fines are not painful enough for big clubs. Transfer bans can be neutralized by signing players before or after the ban. Points deductions are the only tool that touches what every club cares about most: position in the table.

But precisely because it is powerful, it must be applied consistently and transparently. And this is the point I cannot skip. When Everton were docked 10 points, then reduced to 6, then docked 2 more, fans could not understand the logic behind the numbers. Why did 10 become 6? Why was 2 added in another file instead of handled together? The independent commissions have their reasons, but those reasons are not communicated clearly enough to the public.

And when the public does not understand, trust erodes. Without trust, no governance system can function.

Managers trapped between two millstones

I want to talk about a group rarely mentioned in this story: the managers.

I have had the chance to speak with a few managers in Asia and Europe over the years, and what I hear is always the same. Managers working at financially constrained clubs live inside an unsolvable paradox. They are tasked with getting results, judged by league position, sacked if they lose. But they are not given the resources to compete at the required level. They must produce results beyond their squad's ability, and they must do it while the board is busy dealing with financial investigations.

Imagine you are Everton's manager in the 2026-2026 season. You lose 10 points, get 4 back, then lose 2 more. You do not know where you stand. You do not know how many points you need to survive, because that number changes with each decision of a commission you have no seat on. You must prepare for the next match while your mind is occupied by a legal case.

That is not an environment for work. That is an environment for mistakes.

The Shanghai derby shock did not teach me how to win; it taught me how to look again. When I made that video attacking a player's finishing in the 2026 derby, I learned that behind every disappointing statistic lies a human story the number does not tell. You cannot judge a player by missed chances alone, and you cannot judge a club by points deducted alone.

The contrarian view: What if I am wrong?

This is the part I must always write, and I write it seriously, not as a formality. If I make a controversial point without stating where I might be wrong, I am deceiving you.

So let me state clearly where I might be wrong.

First, I may be underestimating the value of preventing chaos. The strongest argument for PSR is that without it, clubs would spend recklessly until they collapsed, and the ultimate victims would be fans and local communities. Portsmouth nearly vanished. Bury vanished. Derby County nearly vanished. If PSR prevented one more Portsmouth, it has done something more important than any injustice I have listed above. I must acknowledge this, because it is true.

Second, I may be confusing correlation with causation. The concentration at the top of the Premier League may not be caused by PSR, but by the globalization of football, by brand power, by broadcast revenue structure, by macroeconomic factors entirely outside the scope of one financial law. If big clubs always dominated even before FFP, blaming FFP is unfair.

Third, I may be offering a worse solution than the problem. If PSR is abolished, what replaces it? A league without financial rules is a league where billionaire owners spend freely, and that does not guarantee more fairness. It only changes the kind of unfairness: from unfairness based on history to unfairness based on an owner's wallet. Both are unfair.

I say these things not to retract my view. I say them because I believe a view has value only when it withstands the pressure of its own rebuttal. And my view withstands that pressure, because I am not demanding PSR be abolished. I am demanding it be changed.

What actually needs to change

If PSR does not create fairness, and abolishing it does not create fairness either, the path must be a third mechanism.

The first thing to change is the basis for calculating the spending threshold. Instead of tying the threshold entirely to a club's own revenue, the system should have a fixed common component for all clubs, plus a component tied to revenue. That fixed common component would ensure a mid-table club can spend at a basic competitive level, while the revenue-tied component still rewards commercial efficiency. This does not solve the problem entirely, but it reduces the codification of the existing gap.

The second thing to change is the points deduction mechanism. If points deductions are necessary to deter, they must be applied with a transparent and predictable formula. For example, the number of points deducted should be calculated by the percentage of the overrun, not by the commission's discretionary decision. If you exceed by 5 percent, you lose X points. If you exceed by 20 percent, you lose Y points. A clear formula will make the debate meaningful, because people will argue about an equation, not a verdict.

The third thing to change is the speed of processing. There is no reason a case with 115 alleged breaches can stretch over years without a clear timeline. If a small club faces a ruling within months, a big club with hundreds of charges should face a clear schedule too. Slow justice is not only justice denied. In football, slow justice is justice bought with lawyers' money.

The fourth, and perhaps most important, is transparency. Financial investigations need to be publicly disclosed to a greater degree than now. I understand there are reasons of commercial confidentiality and legal process. But fans pay to watch football, and they have the right to know how the rules are being applied. Without transparency, every ruling is suspect, whether it is right or wrong.

Lessons for Asian football

I want to devote this section to something closer to us, because I know most of my readers are in Vietnam and China.

Asian football is in the process of professionalizing and commercializing. Leagues in the region are increasingly concerned with controlling spending, preventing owners who pour money in and then abandon ship. That concern is legitimate, because we have seen too many Asian clubs live on one individual's sponsorship, then vanish when that individual stops funding them.

When applying Western financial governance models, we must remember one thing. Those models were born in the context of European football, where broadcast revenue is enormous, where commercial markets are mature, where youth systems are centuries old. Transplanting that model wholesale into a league with an entirely different revenue structure is a fatal mistake.

This club does not need more money; it needs someone willing to think backwards.

Asian football needs a financial governance system designed for its own reality. A system that understands most clubs' revenue in the region comes from a main sponsor, not broadcast money or fans. A system that understands a sudden spending ban can strip a club of its ability to compete on the continental stage. A system that understands fairness does not come from limiting everyone to the same level, but from creating opportunity for everyone to grow.

What I take away after fourteen months

I began this piece with a sense of grievance. I end it with a far more complex feeling.

Did Everton do wrong? Yes. They spent more than they earned, and they knew the rules. Did Nottingham Forest do wrong? Yes. They exceeded the ceiling, though that ceiling is flawed in design. Manchester City have 115 charges pending, and until a final ruling, they are entitled to the presumption of innocence. I do not dispute any of that.

What I dispute is the bigger story. A law designed to protect clubs' financial sustainability is inadvertently creating a two-tier system in which the strong have more time, more lawyers, and more options than the weak. In that system, compliance becomes a competitive advantage only the richest clubs can afford.

At 55, I still believe in what you call delusion, and then it comes true. I believe a league can be both financially sustainable and competitively fair. I believe that not because I am naive, but because I have seen systems redesigned to work better. I have seen leagues without billions still produce beautiful football, academies without modern facilities still produce world-class players, small clubs still standing after decades thanks to community.

PSR is not the enemy. PSR is a tool designed incorrectly, and tools can be fixed.

Everton fans deserve to know exactly how many points their club will lose, when, and why. Nottingham Forest fans deserve to know why their ceiling is lower, and whether that is reasonable. Football fans everywhere deserve to know the law is applied equally to everyone, from champions to bottom clubs.

And if the law is not applied equally to everyone, then the problem is not Everton. The problem is the law itself.

What comes next

I will keep following the Manchester City case, because the final ruling will shape how PSR is understood for years to come. If City are treated leniently, or if the case drags on indefinitely, trust in the Premier League's governance will be seriously damaged. If City are punished heavily, the next question will be whether other clubs face a similar standard.

I will also follow next season's promoted clubs. Every promoted club is a living test of the question: does PSR allow a small club to build and grow, or does it only allow a small club to exist within limits set by others?

And I will keep asking the question I asked on that November night in Shanghai. If a law does not create fairness, should we keep calling it a fairness law?

That is my contrarian view today. I may be wrong. But hear my reasons before you deliver your verdict, because that is the only way this debate becomes a real debate, not a contest where winning matters less than understanding each other better.