Why the Premier League transfer window is messier than ever

At Premier League HQ, it wasn’t just the summer transfer window that closed on Friday evening. There was also a deadline to apply for two senior positions in the legal department as — to quote from the job spec — “the scope and complexity of the league’s financial regulations continues to evolve”.

That is an understatement.

This is the Premier League’s litigation era. Two of its clubs, Everton and Nottingham Forest, had points deducted last season for breaching spending limits. The league’s case against Manchester City is looming, as is Manchester City’s case against the league’s financial regulations. An investigation continues into historic issues in Chelsea’s accounts. As Newcastle United head coach Eddie Howe remarked wearily in the final hours of a frustrating transfer window for his club, the rulebook weighs heavily these days.

Too heavily, some might say, lamenting what Howe called “the inability to spend” and Newcastle’s “need to comply with rules to prevent a points deduction”.

Manchester United’s new minority investor Sir Jim Ratcliffe made a similar complaint earlier in the summer, complaining that the club have “more accountants than we’ve got sporting people”, and warning, “if you’re not careful, the Premier League will finish spending more time in court than it is thinking about what’s good for the league”.

The number of exports from the Premier League has fuelled the anti-regulation sentiment in some quarters — Crystal Palace’s Michael Olise and Joao Palhinha of Fulham to Bayern Munich, Manchester City’s Julian Alvarez and Conor Gallagher of Chelsea to Atletico Madrid, Aston Villa’s Douglas Luiz to Juventus, Scott McTominay of Manchester United to Napoli, Aston Villa’s Moussa Diaby and Ivan Toney of Brentford to the Saudi Pro League — as has the number of homegrown players sold to ease the challenges of the league’s profit and sustainability regulations (PSR).

Gallagher has moved to Atletico Madrid (Gonzalo Arroyo Moreno/Getty Images)

Others would say the rulebook weighs nothing like heavily enough, pointing to the turmoil caused by unbridled (and mostly misguided) spending at Everton by an ownership regime that racked up huge losses even before UK government sanctions against Uzbek-Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov in 2022 blew an enormous hole in the club’s commercial operation — and long before the Premier League took them to task over a breach of PSR.

What is certain is that the Premier League’s chief executive, Richard Masters, and director of governance and regulation Jamie Herbert have an awful lot on their plate.

Herbert wrote to the 20 member clubs in late June reminding them that the league has the power to investigate “issues of concern” and to request details of correspondence to show transfer deals have been conducted “in good faith” when it comes to transparency and fair market value.

This missive arrived during a frenzy in which five clubs who were at risk of breaching PSR (Villa, Chelsea, Everton, Newcastle and Forest) had their prayers answered by a series of offers made for their players by the very same clubs. A flurry of deals involving Omari Kellyman (Villa to Chelsea), Ian Maatsen (Chelsea to Villa), Lewis Dobbin (Everton to Villa), Tim Iroegbunam (Villa to Everton), Elliot Anderson (Newcastle to Forest) and Odysseas Vlachodimos (Forest to Newcastle) ended with all five clubs confident they had reached PSR-compliance just before the June 30 accounting deadline.

Dobbin moved from Everton to Villa, before joining West Brom on loan for the 2024-25 season (Christian Hofer/Getty Images)

As a matter of course, the Premier League scrutinises all transfer deals — all £1million-plus transactions of any type — for “fair market value”. This is explained in the Premier League handbook as “an assessment of normal market conditions” and “the terms under which comparable transactions carried out by comparable clubs have taken place in comparable circumstances”.

“Market value” has always been a subjective term, though. Deals between Premier League clubs are almost invariably more expensive than those involving imports and exports. There is a premium when buying from clubs who, due to the league’s commercial strength, are often under no pressure to sell.

Looking at the figures on respected data website Transfermarkt, while it does not claim to be a perfect model, four of the five biggest exports by Premier League clubs this summer (Alvarez, Douglas Luiz, Olise and Palhinha) involved transfer fees slightly below “expected market value”.

By contrast, the five biggest moves within the Premier League (Dominic Solanke from Bournemouth to Tottenham Hotspur, Pedro Neto from Wolverhampton Wanderers to Chelsea, Amadou Onana from Everton to Villa, Maximilian Kilman from Wolves to West Ham United, plus the Maatsen deal mentioned above) were all for fees above “expected market value” — more than 50 per cent above in the case of Solanke, though that reflected his return of 21 Premier League goals last season and Bournemouth’s reluctance to sell for much less than the £65million release clause stated in his contract. These appear to be the realities of Premier League economics.

That late-June flurry between clubs with PSR concerns, at a time when very few other deals were being done, might have piqued interest among rival clubs even if the fees involved had been roughly in line with expectations.

Investment in potential always involves an estimation of how the player might develop rather than his value at that precise moment, but, again using Transfermarkt’s data, which takes such factors into account, those six players (Kellyman, Maatsen, Dobbin, Iroegbunam, Anderson and Vlachodimos) were valued at a total of £58.6million at the time they were transferred for a combined total of £130m. Take Maatsen’s close-to-market-value deal out of the equation and it becomes £25m worth of players transferred for a total of £92.5m.

Vlachodimos, who had failed to impress in five Premier League appearances for Forest since a £6.8million move from Benfica last September, was valued by Transfermarkt at £5.9m but got sold to Newcastle for an undisclosed fee that has been reported to be in the region of £20m. The 30-year-old has not been in Newcastle’s squad for any of their first four games of the season, seemingly behind Nick Pope, Martin Dubravka and John Ruddy in the pecking order at his position, and has already been linked with a move away from Tyneside.

Vlachodimos in pre-season for Newcastle (Nigel Roddis/Getty Images)

There is no suggestion of wrongdoing by any of the teams involved, but there is a feeling at many clubs — and articulated recently by Chelsea head coach Enzo Maresca and Manchester United manager Erik ten Hag, among others — that the PSR regulations have fuelled transfer activity of a type that incentivises the sale of homegrown players. Of approximately £150million of sales by Chelsea, around £120m involved players developed by them at academy level (Lewis Hall, Omari Hutchinson, Tino Anjorin, Maatsen and Gallagher).

For accounting purposes, such deals represent pure profit, so, for example, the separate £9million transfers that took Iroegbunam to Everton and Dobbin to Villa eased both clubs’ PSR concerns in a way that an old-fashioned swap deal — or indeed the selling clubs keeping them — would not have done.

At one stage on Friday — the summer window’s transfer deadline day — there were reports from L’Equipe that Chelsea were planning to sell 19-year-old Brazilian forward Deivid Washington to Strasbourg, who are part of their BlueCo multi-ownership group, in a deal that would have been worth in the region of £15million. The move didn’t happen, sparing the Premier League the need to assess whether any agreement between two clubs under the same ownership banner represented fair market value. Chelsea say the only discussions with Strasbourg had been over a loan. Earlier in the summer, Manchester City were required to satisfy the Premier League that their acquisition of Brazilian winger Savinho from Troyes (also part of the City Football Group) had been conducted at fair market value.

City have already taken legal action against the Premier League in a challenge to its financial regulations, specifically those insisting that commercial deals must be independently assessed for “fair market value”. There is a view at various clubs — though by no means all — that a player or a sponsorship deal is worth whatever anyone is willing to pay for it, end of story.

(Malcolm Couzens/Getty Images)

Premier League clubs held a vote in June to determine whether to tighten its financial regulations to close a loophole that had enabled Chelsea to raise £76.5million by selling two hotels to a sister company in order to meet their PSR requirements. To change the regulations would have required a two-thirds majority — ie, 14 of the 20 clubs. Only 11 clubs were in favour of closing the loophole.

The contradiction at the heart of all this is that the more the Premier League has tried to bring order in recent years, the messier things have become.

Again, some would argue that this strengthens the case against regulation: “Do we really want clubs getting docked points? Do we really want clubs having to sell players to satisfy accountants?”

An alternative view is that it shows the need for tighter regulation — not by the league itself, which is effectively run by its member clubs, but by an independent body with the will and the authority to set clear boundaries rather than allow the grey areas and loopholes that have come to characterise so many of these discussions.

The regret — and it is a familiar one in football — is that things were allowed to snowball to such an extent before meaningful regulation was attempted.

Had UEFA, European football’s governing body, introduced its financial fair play regulations in the 1990s, they might have helped retain a competitive balance across the continent. By the late 2000s, those rules served only to reinforce the gross financial inequalities that had emerged during the Champions League era, in which the only threat to a self-serving, self-perpetuating European elite has come from clubs bought by the vice-president of the United Arab Emirates (City) and the sovereign wealth fund of Qatar (Paris Saint-Germain).

Newcastle, bought in 2021 by a consortium led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, hoped to be next to follow City across the great divide, but after significant investment across their first four transfer windows after the takeover, they have been constrained by PSR this time. It took the sales of Anderson and the talented Yankuba Minteh to Brighton & Hove Albion in June to ensure confidence over PSR compliance. Newcastle spent much of the summer pursuing England defender Marc Guehi, but were unable to meet Crystal Palace’s £70million valuation.

Minteh following his move to Brighton from Newcastle (Charlotte Wilson/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)

Former Manchester United and England defender Gary Neville spoke on UK broadcaster Sky Sports on Sunday about the restrictions faced by Newcastle in particular, saying that the regulations need to change to allow more investment by owners. “We can’t just keep a thumb on clubs’ heads and say, ‘You’re not going to invest’,” he said.

Few with football’s interests at heart would want a system where clubs the size of Newcastle and Villa, even after finishing in the top four and achieving Champions League qualification, are left feeling they are still on the wrong side of a huge financial divide.

On the other hand, Newcastle a) are effectively owned by the Saudi state and b) have just spent a big chunk of their transfer budget on a player who appears to be their fourth-choice goalkeeper.

The whole thing is a mess: the loss of competitive balance across Europe; the huge financial inequalities that exist between leagues and within leagues; clubs who want tighter regulation because their owners are only interested in football for the financial opportunities it brings; clubs who want less regulation because their owners are only interested in football for the sportswashing opportunity it brings; English clubs colonising clubs in other leagues; too much regulation in some areas; too little regulation in others — and, significantly, too late anyway to reverse a drift into disorder that went largely unchecked for decades.

That is what has brought the game to this point: where the biggest story in English football this season will not be what happens on the pitch but what happens in the Manchester City case; where the biggest pressure faced by the Premier League is not from rival leagues but from some of its own clubs — and vice-versa.

For leagues and clubs alike, the regulatory challenges continue to mount up, to the point that they might sometimes find themselves the best place to start. Not from here, that is for sure.