FFP Is Dead: How Man City's Legal Victory Sank the Premier League's Financial Fairytale

The Points Deduction Era Is Over — And Nobody Admits It

Everton and Nottingham Forest were canonised as martyrs of financial fair play. Four points here, two there — the Premier League pretended it was policing the sport. The truth is harsher: those clubs were speed bumps on a highway designed for Manchester City’s defence lawyers.

The Legal Precedent That Broke the System

The Premier League’s profitability and sustainability rules (PSR) were always a leaky dam. But when Manchester City challenged the league’s associated party transaction (APT) rules in February 2024 — and won a partial victory — the dam burst. The tribunal ruled that the league’s rules were unlawful. Suddenly, every club with a Qatar-backed sleeve sponsor or a quiet loan from an owner had a get-out-of-jail card.

Compare that to Everton’s double deduction. The Toffees were punished for overspending in a way that clubs with state ownership merely call “commercial optimisation.” Ken Bates, who died this week aged 94, would have laughed. His Chelsea was built on leveraged debt and property deals; today’s Chelsea is built on amortisation loopholes and 20-year contracts. Bates played a different game. But the principle remains: the rich bend rules; the rest break them.

Why The League’s Own Model Collapsed

The Premier League spent years selling the myth that it was both the world’s most competitive league and a financially sustainable ecosystem. Those two goals were always contradictory. The league boasted about broadcasting billions while simultaneously fining clubs for trying to keep up. The result is a regulatory framework that punishes ambition in the middle class while protecting the elite’s spending power.

Everton’s points deduction (10, reduced to 6, then another 2) came for interest payments on a new stadium the club needed to compete — a stadium the league itself approved.
Nottingham Forest’s 4-point penalty was triggered by a player sale (Brennan Johnson) that happened, just one day after the deadline. A bureaucratic failure that cost survival hopes.
Manchester City’s 115 charges have been delayed so many times that the club has already won the argument in the court of public opinion. If the league couldn’t enforce simple APT rules, how can it prove systemic fraud?

The imbalance is stark. While Everton was selling academy graduates to balance books, City spent £52m on Matheus Nunes — a player with barely a handful of starts. The same summer, they signed Mateo Kovacic (£30m) and Jérémy Doku (£55m), all while awaiting a legal verdict that would expose the league’s own rules as unenforceable.

The Counter-Argument: PSR Works for the Many

League officials would argue that without PSR, clubs would spend themselves into oblivion. They point to Portsmouth, to Bury, to Derby County — clubs that nearly died from overdosing on ambition. But those clubs collapsed because of mismanagement, not because they tried to buy a left-back. The real risk today is not bankruptcy; it is the creation of a closed shop where only state-owned or billionaire-backed entities can win.

The rebuttal is simple: the Premier League has allowed one set of rules for the petro-clubs and another for the rest. Tottenham, astutely managed and with a new stadium generating £100m+ matchday revenue, cannot buy a £130m Morgan Rogers from Aston Villa without selling first. Yet Chelsea, under new ownership, spent £1bn in three windows with no PSR punishment — because they exploited amortisation loopholes the league later closed. The rules are a sieve.

What This Means for the Next Five Seasons

The Premier League will not scrap PSR entirely — it needs the appearance of control. But the next iteration will be weaker. Clubs like Newcastle, blocked from signing a Brazilian midfielder (Ederson, Danilo — take your pick) by profit rules that make no sense for a club with sovereign wealth, will push harder for self-certification of deals. The league’s position is indefensible after the APT ruling.

Here is the prediction: by 2026, at least two clubs currently facing PSR charges will have those charges dropped or settled in private arbitration. The era of public points deductions for financial breaches is over. What replaces it will be a system where the only crime is being poor enough to be caught. The Premier League will claim victory. The rest of us will watch the gap widen.