Premier League 2023/24

[Colly]

The problem he has is doing big club whinging while at a small club. Should have done an Arteta and pretend "this ref is shit" means something different in Belgian.

[Lineker]

Quote

April 11 (Reuters) - The Premier League will introduce semi-automated offside technology next season after the clubs unanimously agreed on the decision in a shareholders' meeting on Thursday.

"The new system will be used for the first time in the Premier League next season, and it is anticipated the technology will be ready to be introduced after one of the autumn international breaks," the league said in a statement.

 

[Colly]

Better than Christmas. Hope he stays forever.

 

 

[Lineker]

Quote

Premier League clubs have voted unanimously to adopt rules that will cap spending on players, as part of a reform of controversial profitability and sustainability rules (PSR).

The full reform of PSR rules is continuing, with officials hoping it will be completed by the time of the Premier League AGM in June, but cost control ratios will now in principle form the centre of any plans.

Under the proposed controls clubs in European competition would be limited to spending 70% of their revenues on player-related costs, which include transfer fees, agents fees and wages. The other clubs would be able to spend 85%, part of the league’s desire not to limit ambition among challenger teams.

If the league’s timings go to plan, new rules will be tried out in shadow form next season before being implemented in 2025-26. A full set of rules based around the cost control ratio will be drafted over the next two months.

The 70% rule is in line with Uefa’s cost control mechanisms, which will be fully in place by 2025-26. The 85% figure was previously mooted as part of discussions with the English Football League over financial redistribution. In March, the Premier League walked away from those negotiations in favour of reforming PSR first.

It is understood that minor breaches of the new rules could result in financial penalties, but points deductions will remain the chosen sanction for any serious breach.

This season, for the first time, Premier League clubs have been the subject of sporting sanctions after being found in breach of PSR rules. Everton have been handed deductions of six and two points for breaches in separate time periods, and could face a third ruling next season.

Nottingham Forest have been deducted four points while ­Leicester, Chelsea and Manchester City are in the process of having alleged breaches assessed.

 

Quote

Everton has paid about £30m in interest charges to an opaque lender associated with a tax exile, corporate records suggest.

The charges appear to have reached about £438,000 a week, according to the troubled Premier League club’s most recent set of accounts, a figure more than three times the reported wages of the Everton and England goalkeeper Jordan Pickford.

However, most of that cash outflow has now been excluded from Everton’s most recent profit and loss account after a controversial change in accounting policy by the club that has allowed it to report lower losses – and which may give rise to a further points deduction by the Premier League.

The change in how the club accounts for debt interest comes amid intense scrutiny of its finances by the Premier League. On Monday, Everton was deducted points for the second time in the season for breaches of profitability and sustainability (PSR) rules.

The club’s auditors have also said there is “material uncertainty” over future financing “that may cast significant doubt about the group’s ability to continue as a going concern”. Meanwhile, 777 Partners, a prospective buyer of Everton, has spent six months attempting to raise the funds to complete its planned takeover.

Everton, a founder member of the Football League and the Premier League, is now believed to owe more than £500m to third-party lenders. Most of the interest charges reported in its annual report appear to relate to about £225m of debt built up with the club’s largest lender Rights & Media Funding (RMF). About £23m in interest was paid by the club in its last financial year and more than £7m in the two previous years.

RMF is a Cheshire-based company with zero employees that borrows its funds from opaque offshore companies in order to lend to football clubs. In total, about 70% of RMF’s loans have been provided to Everton, according to the most recent available filings to Companies House.

Documents relating to companies in separate offshore jurisdictions suggest the trail of Everton’s RMF debt leads to Michael Tabor, a Monaco- and Barbados-based racehorse owner and leisure entrepreneur.

He started his career as a bookie, building a chain of betting shops that he sold to Coral in 1995 and then made another fortune from an investment in the Next Generation chain of fitness clubs. Last year’s Sunday Times Rich List put his wealth at more than £600m.

Tabor has a series of interests including the LBC owner, Global, the BetVictor gambling brand, plus a string of thoroughbred racehorses.

His estimated wealth is far smaller than that of Everton’s owner, Farhad Moshiri, but Tabor’s money has seemingly played a role in keeping the club afloat financially. Tabor’s links to the companies that have financed Everton are documented in a string of onshore and offshore company records.

UK company filings set out how RMF has most recently been financed by two: Galloway (Cyprus) and Carroch (Bahamas).

Further records seen by the Guardian also lay out how Galloway (Cyprus) is owned via another company, the British Virgin Islands-based Balnom Incorporated, which separate offshore documents identify Tabor as the owner. The businessman did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.

It is not clear from the records who owns Carroch (Bahamas), although Tabor has been associated with historical loans to Everton via a company with a similar name and has also previously been linked to loans made to the club.

Interest charges depress a business’s cashflow and typically do the same to profits, which is a sensitive subject at Goodison Park after the PSR breaches. Under those rules the Premier League penalises any club that loses more than £105m over three years, part of efforts to make the game more sustainable.

Everton’s most recent accounts set out how the club has changed its accounting policies to exclude £19m of the interest charges from its 2023 profit and loss account, as well as restating its 2021 and 2022 accounts to remove a further £6m of interest charges, thereby lowering its reported losses.

The club justified the move in its accounts by claiming the interest related to the construction of the new stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock and therefore should be classed as an investment and excluded from the profit and loss account.

However, Everton has previously repeatedly claimed that the RMF loans have nothing to do with that stadium.

In autumn 2022, when questioned by the Guardian about the interest costs on the RMF loan, a spokesperson for Moshiri said he and the club were funding Bramley-Moore Dock. The spokesperson said: “To date there has been over £300m of equity financing [for the new stadium] provided by the owner and club which includes the land acquisition, approvals, feasibility and land preparation etc.”

The spokesperson later added: “Let’s be clear Everton Stadium Development Ltd has no debt, with over £300m of equity having been injected into EDSL to fund this incredible project to date.”

An Everton spokesperson has also made similar statements to the Guardian and has specifically stated: “There is no stadium funding from RMF.”

All the statements were made during the financial year in which Everton has now removed £19m of interest payments from its losses – July 2022 to June 2023. The RMF debt is understood to be subject to interest charges of 5% on top of the Bank of England’s base rate – implying Everton is paying 10.25% in interest.

Had Everton’s accountants treated the interest charges in the same manner as previous years, the business would have reported losses of more than £100m in its most recent financial year, instead of the £89.1m in the club’s accounts.

Everton declined to comment. RMF did not respond to efforts by the Guardian to contact it.

 

[gunnar hendershow]

As always, I'm mostly curious how the big clubs will continue to find a way to circumvent these rules.

[Colly]

Surely the carnage caused here is as teams fall in and out of the European places and have to massively change their financial structures. Firesales and effective transfers in embargoes?

Sounds fun.

[The Lusophone]

19 minutes ago, gunnar hendershow said:

As always, I'm mostly curious how the big clubs will continue to find a way to circumvent these rules.

They mostly don't have to, given that five of them (and Brighton) make up the 6 teams furthest under the squad cost cap.

Spoiler

 

 

[METALMAN]

I suppose the galling thing for Everton is that they’ve taken out hundreds of millions in payday loans and haven’t even been able to use that money to assemble a good team.

[Colly]

43 minutes ago, FestiveJack said:

They mostly don't have to, given that five of them (and Brighton) make up the 6 teams furthest under the squad cost cap.

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I saw that earlier and couldn't for the life of me work out what columns C, D and E meant, how it was worked out, or why? Is that saying that every PL club has made transfer profit in the last 3 seasons bar Leeds once? I hate finance, my degree is two decades old and useless now, though that spreadsheet is formatted horribly.

[Naitch]

So do those charts mean that Chelsea need to sell £71.5m worth of players to avoid a points reduction and £153m worth of players to play in Europe (even if they managed to qualify)?

[The Lusophone]

2 hours ago, Naitch said:

So do those charts mean that Chelsea need to sell £71.5m worth of players to avoid a points reduction and £153m worth of players to play in Europe (even if they managed to qualify)?

It would mean that, if the rules the Premier League are bringing in were in place for this season, Chelsea would probably need to find £71.5 million (or £153 million) from somewhere to avoid being over the cap and incurring whatever sanctions there would be. These new rules won't be in place until 2025/26, so there's time to sort this.

Kinda mad that being in Europe would more than double Chelsea's cap issue.

[Bobfoc]

Isn't this going to make teams even keener to avoid the Europa Conference League? Imagine being a team outside the top six that wins the League Cup and then effectively gets financially penalised for it.

[Naitch]

Surely the penalty for not complying with the UEFA cap will just be "sorry, you can't come in" and the slot goes to a team that does?

[Gazz]

Gerrit up ye @Lineker

Gerrit up ye @Jimmy

Gerrit up ye @ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster

Gerrit up ye... I've run out of Spurs fans...

[Colly]

I don't know what Angeball is, but it isn't very good.

[Gazz]

Gerrit up ye @Chris2K

[Jimmy]

2 hours ago, Colly said:

I don't know what Angeball is, but it isn't very good.

It wasn't bad when we won the reverse 4-1. 

But we were well beaten today. Newcastle were very good, won it tactically, individually and we completely lost our heads after the first two goals. 

[Colly]

That was only semi snarky, it just feels like there's no plan B. When you're 3-0 down and you're still doing "CB passes to keeper, keeper passes to FB who is running directly at his own goal, FB passes wide to CB who hoofs down the middle" while under pressure over and over again you've got to wonder why. I wouldn't be surprised if Spurs had played more passes in their own area than anywhere else.

[Adam]

Manchester United have surely not been this bad defensively in decades. Bournemouth look like they could score every single time they come forward.

[Jimmy]

1 hour ago, Colly said:

That was only semi snarky, it just feels like there's no plan B. When you're 3-0 down and you're still doing "CB passes to keeper, keeper passes to FB who is running directly at his own goal, FB passes wide to CB who hoofs down the middle" while under pressure over and over again you've got to wonder why. I wouldn't be surprised if Spurs had played more passes in their own area than anywhere else.

The thing that makes all the games like today more palatable is I fully believe that Ange understands the need for us to rebuild. He's already spoken at length about how abandoning Plan A will lead to players losing faith in the way he wants us to play. It's clear, as the season has gone on, where there are obvious positions we need to upgrade in order to pull of his style of football. We're gonna get battered occasionally, at the moment we've been a bit found out, but I do have faith we're going in the right direction and the highs of Ange ball are really high. This feeling fully trumps the last few years of the short-sighted shit played under anti-football weirdo egomaniacs.