PSR Loopholes

There was absolutely nothing Chelsea could have done to keep Musiala.

Read the context. The poster mentioned the low value they received for him. I said that’s why Chelsea missed out as he was far more valuable than what he was sold for.

At no point did I state there was grounds to keep him which they missed.
 
I’m glad you’re around to point this stuff out because I’ve said it so much now I just let it slide unchallenged :lol:
I have given up arguing against some stuff ("De Ligt lost his starting spot to Dier." "Rabiot is a cancer to the locker room." etc.) but not this one.
 
Just remove full profit benefits for home grown players under 23 or less than 50 EPL appearances. Would remove all this rubbish.

There basically trading players like cattle with no real reasoning on how this is good for player development.

Will chairman Mao come back from the grave to bless this plan?

If they don’t make profit… why do you think they would bother to train, support, and develop so many players at all?

Profit is the mechanism that makes everything you eventually enjoy on match days possible. Believing otherwise is ignorance.
 
Read the context. The poster mentioned the low value they received for him. I said that’s why Chelsea missed out as he was far more valuable than what he was sold for.

At no point did I state there was grounds to keep him which they missed.
What do you talk about? Chelsea did not sell Musiala.
 
Will chairman Mao come back from the grave to bless this plan?

If they don’t make profit… why do you think they would bother to train, support, and develop so many players at all?

Profit is the mechanism that makes everything you eventually enjoy on match days possible. Believing otherwise is ignorance.
I think the other poster is referring to the accounting treatment of transfers for PSR purposes. In other words, excluding youth-related profits and losses from the calculation.
 
Will chairman Mao come back from the grave to bless this plan?

If they don’t make profit… why do you think they would bother to train, support, and develop so many players at all?

Profit is the mechanism that makes everything you eventually enjoy on match days possible. Believing otherwise is ignorance.

You can’t stop profit mate. If you sell a player you get the money. However there’s a nice rule where if you sell an academy player they don’t have any book value. So it’s classed as full profit. That is what they should be looking into to ensure clubs do right by these kids. Hence why I suggest some sort of rule.
 
You can’t stop profit mate. If you sell a player you get the money. However there’s a nice rule where if you sell an academy player they don’t have any book value. So it’s classed as full profit. That is what they should be looking into to ensure clubs do right by these kids. Hence why I suggest some sort of rule.
Spead the profit made from academy players over 5 years.
You can argue how you go about doing it but its probably useful to just say its an adverse consequence of current rules and should be changed. I get that its complicated and you can make a mess of it and do more damage to academies but it should be changed.
 
It’s quite mad that a business like the Premier League don’t seem to bother analysing risks when bringing in rule changes. Literally always on the back foot trying to close loopholes.
 
It looks like the whole concept wasn't really thought through completely. It was always clear that such swap deals could take place at the end of June.
Wouldn't the obvious solution be to follow the rest of Europe's lead and make it so the registration window opens July 1 instead of mid-June?
 
It's funny to see the little band of City followers all doing this, and you can just see the battle coming over all of this stuff.
 
If clubs don’t like it then they’ll be shown the door? The rules are the rules. The loopholes need closing.
but the problem is that specific thing is not in the rules currently. The article says they will use the FMV rules with associated party transactions, and these are not associated party transactions. I'd also imagine there's a fairly low chance that the league will be able to pass any rules that close the "loophole" with the number of clubs who are using it.
 
but the problem is that specific thing is not in the rules currently. The article says they will use the FMV rules with associated party transactions, and these are not associated party transactions. I'd also imagine there's a fairly low chance that the league will be able to pass any rules that close the "loophole" with the number of clubs who are using it.
If they can get 14 clubs to vote for PSR rules you'd expect they'll get 14 to vote to maintain it. Being willing to exploit a loophole isn't the same as supporting its existence.
 
but the problem is that specific thing is not in the rules currently. The article says they will use the FMV rules with associated party transactions, and these are not associated party transactions. I'd also imagine there's a fairly low chance that the league will be able to pass any rules that close the "loophole" with the number of clubs who are using it.

It's very unlikely that they would need to pass any new rules to punish clubs for fraudulently inflating transfer fees.

It's not really a loophole, it's just hard to prove unless it's egregious.
 
If clubs don’t like it then they’ll be shown the door? The rules are the rules. The loopholes need closing.

Nobody has broken rules. Also how can you trust the PL to set fair values? They're not trustworthy either.
 
Nobody has broken rules. Also how can you trust the PL to set fair values? They're not trustworthy either.

I would be very surprised if they haven't broken any rules, if the allegations are true. There are basically two ways situations like this can happen:

  1. Two clubs are genuinly interested in players from the other club, come to an agreement both ways, and then inflate the fees.
  2. Two clubs conspire to find some players to exchange so that they can inflate fees.
In both scenarios, there needs to be a "real" valuation at the bottom of it, which would be the transfer fees they'd agree on without any tricks. This is pretty obvious, because the difference in valuation between the two players decides the difference between the fake fees as well (it can be more that two players, of course, like the Oshimen deal for cash + 3 overvalued players). So, if two clubs exchange players they agree are worth 5m and 7m, then when they inflate the fees they can go e.g. 10m and 12m, 15m and 17m, or - theoretically - 105m and 107m. Or, if it's just one of the clubs that really needs this, while the other isn't that bothered, then they can do it skewed as compensation. Like, for instance, 15m and 19m. 10m inflation, and then 2m on top for agreeing to participate. Whichever way you slice it, you need to have an idea of what you actually value the players at to arrive at an inflated price that makes sense. Overvaluing assets like this, because it benefits you in some way, is fraud. I would be astounded if the PL doesn't already have rules against fraud. It's also likely criminal, because these inflated fees don't just go in a PSR report. They go in the accounts you have to give to the government.
 
I would be very surprised if they haven't broken any rules, if the allegations are true. There are basically two ways situations like this can happen:

  1. Two clubs are genuinly interested in players from the other club, come to an agreement both ways, and then inflate the fees.
  2. Two clubs conspire to find some players to exchange so that they can inflate fees.
In both scenarios, there needs to be a "real" valuation at the bottom of it, which would be the transfer fees they'd agree on without any tricks. This is pretty obvious, because the difference in valuation between the two players decides the difference between the fake fees as well (it can be more that two players, of course, like the Oshimen deal for cash + 3 overvalued players). So, if two clubs exchange players they agree are worth 5m and 7m, then when they inflate the fees they can go e.g. 10m and 12m, 15m and 17m, or - theoretically - 105m and 107m. Or, if it's just one of the clubs that really needs this, while the other isn't that bothered, then they can do it skewed as compensation. Like, for instance, 15m and 19m. 10m inflation, and then 2m on top for agreeing to participate. Whichever way you slice it, you need to have an idea of what you actually value the players at to arrive at an inflated price that makes sense. Overvaluing assets like this, because it benefits you in some way, is fraud. I would be astounded if the PL doesn't already have rules against fraud. It's also likely criminal, because these inflated fees don't just go in a PSR report. They go in the accounts you have to give to the government.

No asset has been wildly overpriced thus far though, at least not to an extent that other transfers in the past have before.
 
No asset has been wildly overpriced thus far though, at least not to an extent that other transfers in the past have before.

I'm not familiar with the players, so I can't really comment on that, but several fans in this thread seem to think that their own clubs are doing it.

It's a hard thing to prove, in any case. I mentioned Oshimen to Napoli, which is an example I think is pretty obvious, and they got away with that. Catching clubs for playing with transfer fees is harder than with sponsors, which already is pretty tricky, but that doesn't mean it isn't against the rules.
 
Just makes you laugh how the authorities clearly didn't think about loopholes, wait for teams to exploit them and then start saying they're going to clamp down on everything. Why aren't they vetoing these deals? It's not as if it doesn't look dodgy, surely they should be investigating the deals at the time, not allowing them and then telling everyone else they can't do it. It just makes the whole thing more ridiculous.
 
I'm not familiar with the players, so I can't really comment on that, but several fans in this thread seem to think that their own clubs are doing it.

It's a hard thing to prove, in any case. I mentioned Oshimen to Napoli, which is an example I think is pretty obvious, and they got away with that. Catching clubs for playing with transfer fees is harder than with sponsors, which already is pretty tricky, but that doesn't mean it isn't against the rules.

Even though it's common sense that they're heavily inflated, you'd struggle to get an honest opinion from fans of clubs that are doing it and they're counter argument will just be 'prove it'
They know in their own minds it's just one big way to cheat the system. Would probably complain at other clubs doing it if theirs were not.

Just a bunch of teams who managed their money badly and running round trying to fix it
 
I'm not familiar with the players, so I can't really comment on that, but several fans in this thread seem to think that their own clubs are doing it.

It's a hard thing to prove, in any case. I mentioned Oshimen to Napoli, which is an example I think is pretty obvious, and they got away with that. Catching clubs for playing with transfer fees is harder than with sponsors, which already is pretty tricky, but that doesn't mean it isn't against the rules.

I'm kind of coming at it from two angles. I think the Timmy and Dobbin transfer from Everton / Villa perspective was to help PSR but it also helps in terms of the club and type of player they desire too. Our midfield is very thin so to get a prospect that had a good Championship loan for QPR and 15 appearances for Villa last season for c. 9 million isn't that overpriced for me. I think anywhere between 5 and 10m is about right. Same for Dobbin who had a similar number of appearance for us last season after a good League 1 loan with Derby. If the fees were 30m+ I agree it would be very ridiculous.

I dislike that clubs are doing or trying to do this as part of a workaround but also I think the rules in their current form aren't great anyway and are very restrictive to clubs outside of the top 6 trying to compete and catch up or overtake. It makes it near to impossible to do so without using these types of workarounds.

Also if you're going to start scrutinizing the value of these types of deals so much you need to start scrutinizing every deal because transfer value is subjective. Everyone in the game will have different views on how valuable a certain player is.
 
I'm kind of coming at it from two angles. I think the Timmy and Dobbin transfer from Everton / Villa perspective was to help PSR but it also helps in terms of the club and type of player they desire too. Our midfield is very thin so to get a prospect that had a good Championship loan for QPR and 15 appearances for Villa last season for c. 9 million isn't that overpriced for me. I think anywhere between 5 and 10m is about right. Same for Dobbin who had a similar number of appearance for us last season after a good League 1 loan with Derby. If the fees were 30m+ I agree it would be very ridiculous.

I dislike that clubs are doing or trying to do this as part of a workaround but also I think the rules in their current form aren't great anyway and are very restrictive to clubs outside of the top 6 trying to compete and catch up or overtake. It makes it near to impossible to do so without using these types of workarounds.

Also if you're going to start scrutinizing the value of these types of deals so much you need to start scrutinizing every deal because transfer value is subjective. Everyone in the game will have different views on how valuable a certain player is.

Regarding Dobbin and Timmy deal. I don't know the prices, but if both players are being sold for similar prices, way not just do a straight swap with no money involved?
 
I'm kind of coming at it from two angles. I think the Timmy and Dobbin transfer from Everton / Villa perspective was to help PSR but it also helps in terms of the club and type of player they desire too. Our midfield is very thin so to get a prospect that had a good Championship loan for QPR and 15 appearances for Villa last season for c. 9 million isn't that overpriced for me. I think anywhere between 5 and 10m is about right. Same for Dobbin who had a similar number of appearance for us last season after a good League 1 loan with Derby. If the fees were 30m+ I agree it would be very ridiculous.

I dislike that clubs are doing or trying to do this as part of a workaround but also I think the rules in their current form aren't great anyway and are very restrictive to clubs outside of the top 6 trying to compete and catch up or overtake. It makes it near to impossible to do so without using these types of workarounds.

Also if you're going to start scrutinizing the value of these types of deals so much you need to start scrutinizing every deal because transfer value is subjective. Everyone in the game will have different views on how valuable a certain player is.

Sure, doing deals partly because it helps your PSR situation is completely normal. It's not a loophole, there's nothing strange about it. It's no difference than selling a player not just because you got a decent offer, but because you really need money. It happens all the time. I'm specifically talking about these "swap" deals, where players go in both directions, and where sometimes the fees are fraudulently inflated. Like what Juventus got done for.

You don't need to scrutinize every deal, because in most transfers there's no incentive to cheat. Take the Gordon sale from Everton to Newcastle. What was it, £40m? Say someone claims this was too high, he's only worth £30m. Ok, so what's the story here, Everton and Newcastle agree on 30m, but Newcastle then donates 10m on top just to be nice? It doesn't make any sense. In these swap deals, however, you can inflate fees without impacting the amount of actual money changing hands.

It's similar with sponsors. Everton got that gambling stuff on their shirts, right? Say that they negotiated a really good deal. Why would that be suspicious? Stake is a shady company, sure, but they have nothing to gain by donating to Everton. For City, however, you have a company owned by a state buying ad space from a company owned by the same state. It's essentially moving money from one account to another, with some loss because Abu Dhabi only owns 81 % of City. There will naturally be a lower threshold for scrutinizing a deal like that.
 
Regarding Dobbin and Timmy deal. I don't know the prices, but if both players are being sold for similar prices, way not just do a straight swap with no money involved?

Why would you? The rules allow you to bank a full profit on this years books and then spread the purchase out over the length of their contracts.

They are the rules the PL created. Nobody has broken any rules and the PL don't have a legal leg to stand on. They can cry and threaten all they want it means nothing.
 
Sure, doing deals partly because it helps your PSR situation is completely normal. It's not a loophole, there's nothing strange about it. It's no difference than selling a player not just because you got a decent offer, but because you really need money. It happens all the time. I'm specifically talking about these "swap" deals, where players go in both directions, and where sometimes the fees are fraudulently inflated. Like what Juventus got done for.

You don't need to scrutinize every deal, because in most transfers there's no incentive to cheat. Take the Gordon sale from Everton to Newcastle. What was it, £40m? Say someone claims this was too high, he's only worth £30m. Ok, so what's the story here, Everton and Newcastle agree on 30m, but Newcastle then donates 10m on top just to be nice? It doesn't make any sense. In these swap deals, however, you can inflate fees without impacting the amount of actual money changing hands.

It's similar with sponsors. Everton got that gambling stuff on their shirts, right? Say that they negotiated a really good deal. Why would that be suspicious? Stake is a shady company, sure, but they have nothing to gain by donating to Everton. For City, however, you have a company owned by a state buying ad space from a company owned by the same state. It's essentially moving money from one account to another, with some loss because Abu Dhabi only owns 81 % of City. There will naturally be a lower threshold for scrutinizing a deal like that.

At the end of the day, how do you know that? You don't. It's just guess work. Everything is guess work which is why it's going to be incredibly difficult to enforce any type of tangible rule to close this unless they just rejig PSR entirely.
 
At the end of the day, how do you know that? You don't. It's just guess work. Everything is guess work which is why it's going to be incredibly difficult to enforce any type of tangible rule to close this unless they just rejig PSR entirely.

How do I know what, that Gordon's value was too high (I'm not actually saying that it was, if that was unclear), or that cheating doesn't make sense in that situation?

Sure, proving fraud is often hard, and proving fraud when it comes to the value of football players is harder than most forms of fraud. It's not impossible, Juventus got docked 10 points and thrown out of European competition because of exactly this. The investigation took years.
 
At the end of the day, how do you know that? You don't. It's just guess work. Everything is guess work which is why it's going to be incredibly difficult to enforce any type of tangible rule to close this unless they just rejig PSR entirely.

I agree that it's going to be difficult to enforce any sort of "fair value" rules regardless, but in the case of Gordon, no one went the other way, so it's clearly not a fiddle on PSR.

You can basically limit any sort of investigation to clubs trading players in the same accounting period, and probably even just limit it to transfers made in June, so it's not an impossible task.
 
The current financial regulations stink and are just there to protect the status quo as much as possible.

The transfer values are definately dodgy. I loved Tim at QPR, but he is nowhere near a 9 million pound player. 3-4 million would have been fair
 
In Chelsea's case though, they could also not buy 10 players a year and actually use the ones they've bought. Like they're getting around the rules so they can get the next big talent from Brazil in Estevao for £50m, it's like someone that can't pay their mortgage getting a new Audi because they need to keep up with their neighbours.

It’s nothing like that .

The situation you describe is when someone doesn’t have the money whereas Chelsea and indeed most clubs with a PSR issues it isn’t about having funds it’s about the neighbours saying I have a Audi but I don’t want you having one.
 
Read the context. The poster mentioned the low value they received for him. I said that’s why Chelsea missed out as he was far more valuable than what he was sold for.

At no point did I state there was grounds to keep him which they missed.

Far more valuable yes but due to FIFA rules re training and compensation the club , Chelsea , agreed end less than the stipulated compensation in so doing it was a formal transfer with a nominal fee but with a significant sum payable if BM sell him for a sum north of the original fee. That % is suggested to be around 25-30%.
 
It's very unlikely that they would need to pass any new rules to punish clubs for fraudulently inflating transfer fees.

It's not really a loophole, it's just hard to prove unless it's egregious.
That opens a whole can of worms for the league though tbh. Who decides what transfer fees are inflated ? Antony for 85m? Is it only between PL clubs that they can decide?
Just makes you laugh how the authorities clearly didn't think about loopholes, wait for teams to exploit them and then start saying they're going to clamp down on everything. Why aren't they vetoing these deals? It's not as if it doesn't look dodgy, surely they should be investigating the deals at the time, not allowing them and then telling everyone else they can't do it. It just makes the whole thing more ridiculous.
has the PL vetoed a transfer before?

I'm kind of coming at it from two angles. I think the Timmy and Dobbin transfer from Everton / Villa perspective was to help PSR but it also helps in terms of the club and type of player they desire too. Our midfield is very thin so to get a prospect that had a good Championship loan for QPR and 15 appearances for Villa last season for c. 9 million isn't that overpriced for me. I think anywhere between 5 and 10m is about right. Same for Dobbin who had a similar number of appearance for us last season after a good League 1 loan with Derby. If the fees were 30m+ I agree it would be very ridiculous.

I dislike that clubs are doing or trying to do this as part of a workaround but also I think the rules in their current form aren't great anyway and are very restrictive to clubs outside of the top 6 trying to compete and catch up or overtake. It makes it near to impossible to do so without using these types of workarounds.

Also if you're going to start scrutinizing the value of these types of deals so much you need to start scrutinizing every deal because transfer value is subjective. Everyone in the game will have different views on how valuable a certain player is.
Yep, I don't think either Dobbin or Tim are overpriced at around 10m. Both young English youth internationals with some PL experience.

Completely agree with this. I don't think anyone would have batted an eyelid if, hypothetically Villa sold Watkins to Arsenal or Spurs for 80m and you sold Branthwaite to Man United for a similar price to get PSR issues sorted.

The current financial regulations stink and are just there to protect the status quo as much as possible.

The transfer values are definately dodgy. I loved Tim at QPR, but he is nowhere near a 9 million pound player. 3-4 million would have been fair
with the valuation of young English players now, I don't think there's a chance he would be valued at 3-4 million
 
That opens a whole can of worms for the league though tbh. Who decides what transfer fees are inflated ? Antony for 85m? Is it only between PL clubs that they can decide?

has the PL vetoed a transfer before?


Yep, I don't think either Dobbin or Tim are overpriced at around 10m. Both young English youth internationals with some PL experience.

Completely agree with this. I don't think anyone would have batted an eyelid if, hypothetically Villa sold Watkins to Arsenal or Spurs for 80m and you sold Branthwaite to Man United for a similar price to get PSR issues sorted.


with the valuation of young English players now, I don't think there's a chance he would be valued at 3-4 million

The problem isn't overvaluing players in general. If there's another club stupid/desperate enough to meet a crazy valuation a seller sets and agree to overpay, like Chelsea with Cucurella, that's different, and not remotely the same as two clubs who are stuck in the same PSR predicament colluding with each other trading players at an inflated value purely to help each other satisfy PSR rules, which is what everyone is discussing.
 
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I see Everton are after James Philogene. I wonder how much of that goes into Aston Villa’s pocket.

Wouldn't be surprised to see Villa pick up another Everton player.
 
I think the other poster is referring to the accounting treatment of transfers for PSR purposes. In other words, excluding youth-related profits and losses from the calculation.
Then why would anyone invest extravagant money in youth development?

And academy graduates ARE assets, by what logic or argument would they be excluded?

I joked in another thread that if Chelsea somehow branded the most popular popsicle on earth … there would be a call to outlaw sales of flavored water in FFP.

Nobody complained and forced Brighton to sell Caicedo to us lower because they only paid …12? For him. How would you even regulate this between leagues? Inter was forced to sell us Casadei because they were having money issues. It wasn’t inflation, he was a prized academy player; talented guy.

None of the talk around this seems feasible … from so many angles. It just seems like, once again, certain teams wanting only the areas of profit they have a distinct advantage in being counted as legitimate.

Why don’t we take away the credits received for women’s investment as well we are at it.
 
Then why would anyone invest extravagant money in youth development?

And academy graduates ARE assets, by what logic or argument would they be excluded?

I joked in another thread that if Chelsea somehow branded the most popular popsicle on earth … there would be a call to outlaw sales of flavored water in FFP.

Nobody complained and forced Brighton to sell Caicedo to us lower because they only paid …12? For him. How would you even regulate this between leagues? Inter was forced to sell us Casadei because they were having money issues. It wasn’t inflation, he was a prized academy player; talented guy.

None of the talk around this seems feasible … from so many angles. It just seems like, once again, certain teams wanting only the areas of profit they have a distinct advantage in being counted as legitimate.

Why don’t we take away the credits received for women’s investment as well we are at it.
So you can play them in a football match? The same reason you invest extravagant money on signings. Like a football team! Remember them?
I dont really care about the details, removing the incentive to sell academy players vs signings is something that should be done.
As for the red cartel bolox at the end of your post, you get we have academy players too, right? Its such a worthless, weak argument in every context its brought up. Get a better argument