Football finance expert Kieran Maguire has revealed that PSR was never meant to keep football competitive hurting teams like Aston Villa wanting to challenge at the top
A leading football finance expert has warned that Aston Villa could find themselves trapped by the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules, aka PSR, claiming the current system effectively prevents ambitious clubs from breaking into the league’s elite by limiting their spending.
Increasingly, the talk of football, PSR, or “Financial Fair Play” rules has changed and shaped a lot of the transfers in the Premier League in recent years, with clubs often having to sell off some of their best home-grown talent to help balance their books.
And now, speaking on his Price of Football podcast, finance analyst and PSR expert Kieran Maguire argued that the regulations were never actually designed to level the playing field. Instead, he argues, their main purpose was to reduce club debt, which has created a system that locks smaller clubs into financial inferiority and keeps the big dogs at the top.
“It is incorrect to say that profit and sustainability rules were brought in to level the playing field,” Maguire explained. “If you actually take a look at the documentation published by UEFA itself, it says, specifically, a level playing field is not the objective of these rules.”
For Aston Villa, that has become a serious issue. Since returning to the Premier League in 2019, the club’s owners, billionaire businessmen Nassef Sawiris and Wes Edens, have invested heavily in the club to try and challenge the classic “big six” that have dominated English football for decades.
Yet, with PSR restrictions limiting how much fresh funding owners can inject, their ability to buy in some big names to challenge for Champions League spots is weakened.
Maguire added that the unintended consequences of PSR are now working against clubs like Villa and Nottingham Forest, who want to push on and invest.
Maguire added: “The danger of having a big six in perpetuity as a result of these rules is a genuine risk, and those clubs who want to be the next Roman Abramovich or next Sheikh Mansour in terms of the financial contribution that can be given by the owners are not able to do so because of those rules.
“It just so happens that Chelsea and Paris Saint-Germain, and Manchester City were on the right side of history.”
Villa were among several clubs forced to make sales during the summer transfer window after being fined by UEFA to stay within the Premier League’s three-year £105m loss threshold.
Despite qualifying for the Champions League this season, Villa’s financial freedom remains tightly controlled compared to the league’s biggest earners, even having to sell their women’s teams in a strange deal to try to conform to the rules.
Maguire added: “If you were going to say that no club can have more than 22 players, you could still get the big clubs getting the best 22 players themselves and the ability for these aspirational or ambitious clubs like Aston Villa, Newcastle United, Everton and Nottingham Forest and so on, who have owners who want to take the club and are willing to take to the club to a new level of spending, is still constrained.
“That’s the problem. I wouldn’t say the current system is a joke, but it doesn’t work if the intention is to make football more competitive. That’s a sad and sorry consequence.”
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