PSR is dead.

PSR was introduced under the guise of financial fairness and to prevent clubs from spending beyond their means and racking up huge losses. When it was introduced in 2015, football was still smarting from Leeds’ financial implosion and Portsmouth’s comical run of dodgy owners, leading to the club’s steep decline, among many other clubs from across the football pyramid going bust.

 

At face value, these regulations appear benevolent, designed to maintain the integrity of the league (and the wider football landscape), protecting 100-year-plus cultural and communal institutions, and ensuring clubs operate responsibly while fostering a level playing field.

However, recent developments and glaring inconsistencies have exposed that benevolence as naked self-interest, shoving PSR’s frailties into the cold, harsh light, leading many to conclude that its effectiveness is not just compromised – it’s dead.

Another Loophole

First, it was hotels, then it was women’s teams, now it’s entities such as ‘Red Football’. Manchester United, whose tax-dodging billionaire part-owner has been sacking regular working people left, right and centre, justifying it by crowing that the club will run out of cash by Christmas, are seemingly navigating PSR with ease – spending £62.5m on Matheus Cunha days after the transfer window opens and are in negotiations to sign Bryan Mbeumo for another £60m+ despite every man and his dog in the football national media claiming the club was up against a PSR wall.

Enter another loophole. According to a clip doing the rounds of Kieran Maguire, PSR applies predominantly to British entities, creating another loophole that can be exploited. Man Utd’s listing on the New York Stock Exchange allows its financial scrutiny to be fragmented. Losses are conveniently distributed across different business arms, with Red Football reportedly showing £100m less in losses compared to Man Utd’s consolidated figures.

This is strategic evasion, exploiting accounting technicalities rather than adhering to the spirit of financial fair play, and it’s also a loophole that the Premier League and footballing authorities could close in a heartbeat, but they don’t (like the hotels and women’s teams) because all they see is self-interest.

From a Newcastle POV, it makes our clubs’ apparent strict adherence to the rules appear grating to some fans and causes ‘the just take the points deduction’ cries to be amplified, fragmenting the fanbase – something else the ‘traditional big clubs’ would love to see.

Disparity in Spending Power

When clubs like Liverpool can spend £150 million on a single player while publicly pleading poverty, it raises serious questions. Yes, the Klopp clip is old now, but his point still stands: there is no glass ceiling for some clubs – it just isn’t Liverpool.

Of course, this isn’t just about Liverpool—it’s emblematic of a broader problem where clubs with significant commercial revenues manipulate accounting practices to maintain a veneer of compliance, whilst trotting out the old line ‘well, it’s based on our history’. And how was that history built? With spending more than anyone else.