Two questions, kept apart
Part of this essay has a narrow job. It explains how points deductions work under the Premier League’s financial rules, distinguishes a sanction a commission has to decide from a formula written into the rules, and tests some of the numbers now circulating publicly against that difference.
The other essays published by The Uneven Field are concerned with something broader: permission, publication and power.
The sanction question and the question those essays ask overlap, but only up to a point. They use some of the same figures and some of the same cases, then ask different questions of them. What matters here is working out what the sanction cases genuinely add to the argument, what they simply confirm, and which parts of them a Manchester City supporter could reasonably rely on without turning the piece into a defence of Manchester City.
There is a simple principle running through all of this. Proper enforcement of financial rules does not prove that the structure created by those rules is fair. Equally, an uneven structure does not tell us whether a club’s accounts were accurate.
That distinction matters because much of the public discussion since the commission’s findings of 29 September 2026 has blurred the two. The number of charges has been treated as though it determines the punishment. Everton’s six-point deduction on appeal has been turned into a sort of unit price. And criticism of a system in which spending power is tied to revenue has been used both as an answer to the City findings and, from the other direction, as something those findings somehow discredit.
None of those conclusions follows. The cases show why, once they are read for what the tribunals did rather than for the sum it is tempting to reverse-engineer from the result.
What the sanction cases show
The useful question is a narrow one. Once a club has crossed either the profitability and sustainability loss threshold or the squad-cost red line, how is a sporting sanction arrived at, and how much of that arrival is arithmetic?
Under the profitability and sustainability rules, the important figure is not the headline loss in a club’s statutory accounts, and it is not the number of charges. The test uses an adjusted loss over a rolling three-season period. For most Premier League clubs the upper threshold is £105 million. A club that has spent part of the period in the EFL has a lower one. Nottingham Forest’s was £61 million: the commission recorded that the £105 million threshold had been reduced by £44 million because the club had spent the two earlier seasons of the period in the EFL. Before the comparison, costs the rules treat as being in the general interest of football are added back. The notes to the League’s statement of 17 January 2025 describe those add-backs as including, for example, youth development, community expenditure, women’s football, investment in infrastructure and depreciation of tangible fixed assets. For 2019/20, 2020/21 and 2021/22, permitted COVID costs could be added back as well.3, 6
Everton’s first case shows the calculation, and then shows that the sanction was not a function of it. For the period ending in 2021/22 the commission found an adjusted loss of £124.5 million against the £105 million threshold, an excess of £19.5 million. That was after £70.2 million of COVID-related exclusions had already been allowed under the League’s COVID guidance, where its evidential standard had been met: standard add-backs, and two years’ averaged impairment provisions. The further COVID claims, advanced as mitigation, were the ones that failed that standard. The commission ordered an immediate deduction of 10 points.1
The Appeal Board substituted an immediate six. It did not get there by dividing £19.5 million by £6.5 million.
In that case the Premier League had asked for a starting point of six points and one further point for every £5 million over the threshold. It had made clear that this was a submission, not a formula binding the commission. The commission refused to adopt it. At paragraph 136 it said there was no fixed formula, and that the deduction had to be fixed from the culpability in the case. The Appeal Board agreed, at paragraph 186, that the refusal was right: the proposal was not a guideline.1, 2
The words “no fixed formula” do appear again in the appeal. At paragraph 187 they are the club’s description of the way the commission had gone about its task. They are not the Board announcing a £6.5 million step and then disowning it.2
What the Board did say, at paragraph 210, is that the English Football League’s guidelines prescribe a minimum of three points, absent particular mitigation, increased by one point for every £2 million to £2.5 million up to a maximum of 12. It then said that, without descending to precise numbers, which would be over-mathematical, a significant overspend of the order of 20 per cent appeared to call for a further three. Counsel for the club calculated that this percentage reading produced a starting point of six, before any allowance for an improving trend. The six was not produced by working through the pounds-per-point scale, and the Board did not adopt counsel’s calculation as its method. At paragraph 226 it called the excess nearly £20 million, with modest credit for trend and modest aggravation for inaccurate information bearing directly on the extent of the breach, which paragraph 225 identifies as the representation about stadium interest. Taking all of that into account, paragraph 227 treats six points as the appropriate sanction. Paragraph 228 says the deduction is appropriate if given immediate effect, and the order at paragraph 230 is an immediate six. Six coincides with three plus three. It also coincides with £19.5 million divided by £6.5 million, added to three. The Board performed neither sum.2
The Premier League offered both readings to the Forest commission. Forest’s excess was 77 per cent larger than Everton’s. One version took the three points the League said had been added for Everton’s £19.5 million, multiplied them by 1.77, and got 5.31. It treated 5.31 as five. Five, added to the minimum of three, was a starting point of eight. The other, at paragraph 14.4, was the £6.5 million step: three further points for £19.5 million, and therefore five points for Forest’s £34.5 million, again added to three, and again eight. From that eight the League suggested two points off for the early plea and the co-operation.3
The commission adopted neither version. Paragraph 14.11 says there is no fixed formula, and that a pounds-per-point approach was not too dissimilar to guidance the Everton tribunals had already declined to follow. Its own table is the one that matters. Three points as the entry point for a significant breach. A further three because the excess was larger than Everton’s, the two breaches, in its view, still being in the same band. It said it did not know how the Appeal Board had arrived at Everton’s extra three, and that some part of those three must have related to the incorrect information Everton had given the League. That was not a feature of Forest’s case. The larger excess, on its own, was what moved Forest up by three, to a starting point of six. Two off for the early plea and the co-operation, taken together. Other mitigation was rejected. Four points, immediate.3
On 6 May 2024 an appeal board, in a decision the League published the next day, left those four points in place. The club’s grounds were that the sale of a player, two months after the end of the accounting period, should have been treated as mitigation, and that some or all of the deduction should have been suspended. There was no challenge to the two points taken off for the plea and the co-operation. The only challenge to the starting point of six was that it had made no allowance for the sale. Both grounds were rejected.4
The figures underneath that four are not in doubt. Forest admitted an adjusted loss of £95,536,000 against its £61 million threshold, an excess of £34,536,000. The excess was larger than Everton’s. The deduction was smaller. That is what a discretion looks like when it is actually being exercised. It is not a larger formula from which points of mercy have been removed.3
Everton’s second commission, for the period ending 2022/23, is the same kind of decision, with one difference that is easy to miss. The admitted excess was £16,630,015. The commission also expressed it as about £16.6 million, and as 15.8 per cent over the threshold. Three points for the breach, which this commission read the earlier appeal as requiring for any breach. Two more because 15.8 per cent was less than an overspend of the order of 20 per cent, and not so much less that only one point would do. That reason is paragraph 187 of this second commission. Five, before mitigation.5
The League had described those same two points in another way: two complete quanta of £6.5 million, with about £3.6 million left in reserve, or, alternatively, the percentage. The commission worried, as the Forest commission had, that a strict rate of that kind was too formulaic, and it suspected the Appeal Board had not meant to legislate one. It nevertheless treated the comparison as a good indication of what could be expected, considered in the round, and it adopted the approach on that basis. The reason it wrote down was the percentage, not the quanta. It also read the appeal differently from Forest. On its view the extra three points in the appeal were for the size of the breach, or else the modest aggravation and the modest mitigation had cancelled one another out, leaving the quantum as the matter to be reflected. The two commissions reconstructed the same six points, and they did not reconstruct them in the same way.5
Two points came off because the club had already been sanctioned for years that overlapped with the first case. One more came off for the loss of the USM Services sponsorship and the admission at the first opportunity, taken together. The commission rejected the other mitigation, and it did not treat the co-operation as exceptional. The deduction was an immediate two points. The club appealed in May 2024 and withdrew, and the two points remained. The outstanding part of the complaint, which concerned the treatment of interest on the new stadium, was discontinued by a joint statement on 17 January 2025. The club faced no further action.5, 6
So the £6.5 million figure, in the profitability cases, is a reconstruction the League invited later panels to adopt. Forest declined to use it as the method. The second Everton commission said a strict rate would be too formulaic, adopted the comparison as an indication, and wrote its reason as a percentage. Neither decision contains the figure as a rule. The figure that is actually written into a rule comes later, and the fixed element of that rule is six points, not three.
The Squad Cost Rules for 2026/27 are a ratio of squad cost to football revenue, in the sense those rules define it. That figure is not a club’s statutory turnover. It includes the annualised transfer amount arising from disposals of player registrations and from the release of a contracted manager. The green threshold is 85 per cent. The red threshold is 85 per cent plus a club error margin. For 2026/27 that margin begins at 30 percentage points, so the red line begins at 115 per cent. It can be reduced by the negative feedback loop. It is not a permanent 115 per cent for every club in every season.7
Above the red line the sporting sanction is in the rule. Under F.4 it is the sum of a fixed six points and a variable number. The variable number is the red-threshold overspend divided by £6.5 million, rounded up to the nearest whole point, so that any part of a step counts as a point. Where the club has breached the red threshold in consecutive seasons, F.5 multiplies that sum by 1.3 in the second season and by 1.6 in the third, and increases the previous season’s multiple by 0.3 for each consecutive season after that. The result is rounded up to the nearest whole point. The deduction is of points scored or to be scored in the competition. Under F.2 the design is that it is final and takes effect immediately. F.3 withholds that immediacy where the time for a challenge has not expired, where a red-threshold impact may still materialise, or where the Board decides, exceptionally, to wait. Owner equity does not increase either threshold. The thresholds are percentages of that defined revenue.7
A club that knows its red-threshold overspend, and knows whether the season is consecutive, can therefore calculate the points the rule states, once those figures are established and once any outstanding challenge has been resolved. That is a different thing from knowing them on the day the accounts are signed.
None of this allows Everton’s six, or Forest’s four, to be multiplied by a number of charges. Everton’s six points were the sanction in one appeal, for one published excess of £19.5 million. They are not a unit.
And none of it is the Manchester City case.
The League’s statement of 29 September 2026 says an independent commission found the club guilty of all the charges of serious breach over the nine seasons from 2009/10 to 2017/18, and of the majority of the charges of failing to co-operate. It records that three of the four alleged breaches of the duties of co-operation and utmost good faith were upheld. It says the commission found sham contracts, and that the purpose of the schemes was to artificially inflate revenue and reduce costs by more than £900 million, so that the club would appear to comply with the financial rules. The club says it is innocent of the accusations. It says the appeal was lodged at 7pm on 1 October, inside the deadline the League had set for 2 October. The League confirmed on 2 October that the appeal had been lodged with the Chair of the Judicial Panel. The grounds have not been published. The sanction is for a separate hearing, which the League says will be private. No sanction has been decided.8, 9, 10
There is no published three-year overage in that case against which the Everton or Forest exercises could be run, and the Squad Cost Rules did not govern the seasons in question. What those decisions show is how a profitability breach was sanctioned when the excess was a single admitted figure. What the 2026/27 rules show is how a squad-cost breach is sanctioned when the rules say so. Neither prices the City findings. Neither tells us whether the line a club is accused of crossing was a fair line to draw.
What the other pieces already argue
Who Gets to Spend asks that second question.
Revenue-based controls limit what a club may spend, and they give the club with the greater revenue more room. At an 85 per cent threshold, £600 million of defined football revenue carries £510 million of squad cost before the green line. £150 million carries £127.5 million. Those are the sums. They are not a finding that any club’s revenue is either of those figures.
Whether the system gives a challenger a realistic route upwards is a different question from whether a particular club reported its revenue accurately.
That essay separates questions that public debate bundles together: financial survival, permission to spend, control of the competition, access to it, and the suitability of individual owners. The calculator, How the rules land, applies the published 2026/27 thresholds to numbers the reader supplies, and it describes the result as arithmetic rather than as a regulatory finding.
The public-record paper does the same with Everton, Forest and Manchester United. It asks what can be established from published decisions and from filed accounts. Unequal publication is not, by itself, unequal treatment.
The Ledger Cup records the City findings, the club’s denial, and an appeal whose grounds have not been published. It does not replace the commission’s finding with one of its own.
The sanction question and the question those essays ask can share the cases without being about the same thing. Those essays are interested in how permission to spend is distributed. The cases are interesting, for present purposes, because of what a commission did once a club was said to have gone past the limit, and because of what the 2026/27 rules now do instead of leaving that question to the next panel.
Someone who has read the other pieces here will recognise the Everton and Forest figures, and the proposition that accurate accounts do not make the competitive hierarchy fair. Someone who has only followed the sanction decisions will know a great deal about how those panels moved from a breach to a number of points, and very little about why one club’s ceiling is a multiple of another’s.
That gap is worth keeping open, from both sides. The sanction has to be described as the panel described it. The criticism of the rule has to stay a criticism of the rule, and not a claim to have measured how far the rule has already fixed the sporting order.
Three things worth taking from the cases
The first is the change in what a club can know before the decision.
Under the profitability rules there was no sanction formula. Panels started from the seriousness of a breach, moved for the scale of the excess, and then for mitigation, and they said when they were refusing to do it with a rate. A club could see the range in which previous panels had landed. It could not calculate the order.
The 2026/27 rules are the change. The step is in the rule. The fixed element is six points, rather than the three the later commissions used as an entry point before they added for the scale of the excess, and any part of a £6.5 million step is rounded up to a whole point rather than left as a matter of impression. Consecutive seasons multiply the total, and that product is rounded up as well. There is still a dispute about the figures, about the ratio, and about whether the deduction is immediate. There is no longer a dispute, once those are settled, about which number the rule requires.
That is a change in the kind of rule, not only in its severity. The old regime limited a stock of losses over three seasons. The new one limits the flow of squad spending against revenue. The sanction changes with the test. It is not the old loss cap under another name.
The second point is less comfortable, and it belongs to the new rule rather than to Everton.
Take two clubs, each £7 million above its red line, and assume each still has the full opening margin of 30 percentage points. One red line, at 115 per cent of £150 million of defined football revenue, is £172.5 million. The other, at 115 per cent of £600 million, is £690 million. The sporting sanction under the formula is the same.
The common step is not a subsidy to the larger club. The inequality has already happened, because the line is a percentage of revenue. The larger club is allowed to spend more before either of them is a single pound over the red line.
A system can therefore punish an absolute excess in the same way for both, having first permitted them very different amounts of spending. Those are different complaints. One is about whether tying permission to existing revenue reproduces the earning order and closes off owner equity as a way of catching up. The other is about whether an excess of the same number of pounds should carry the same sporting consequence for clubs of different size. Who Gets to Spend has pursued the first. The Squad Cost Rules make the second visible, because they are the first version in which the step really is a step.
Neither complaint establishes that a particular club is in breach.
The third point is the use of precedent as a price list.
Everton’s six points have become a unit in public argument. Multiplied by 115, the figure often given for the number of charges, they produce a very large number. Multiplied by another count, they produce another. The League’s statement does not use the charge count as a tariff, and the arithmetic looks hard only because it contains a multiplication.
Forest is the short answer. The excess was £34,536,000 against Everton’s £19.5 million, and the deduction was four points against six. The commission added three for that greater scale, not a point per £6.5 million, having said that part of Everton’s own extra three must have been the incorrect information, and it took two off for the plea and the co-operation. Everton’s second case took two points off a starting five because of years already punished, and one more for the lost sponsorship and the admission. Same rule, known excess, deduction not determined by the excess alone.
Carrying Everton’s six into a case about sham revenue and failures to co-operate does something further. It takes the result of one discretionary decision and treats it as the rate for another. Forest refused that move when the Premier League invited it, and the second Everton commission would not turn the same invitation into a rate. There is no basis for making it about Manchester City.
What can fairly be recognised
A Manchester City supporter can take several points from the public record without needing the commission to have been wrong.
An appeal has been lodged. The club says it went in at 7pm on 1 October, inside the deadline the League had set, and the League confirmed it the next day. The grounds are not public. A discussion that presents a points deduction as though it had already been calculated is ahead of the sanction, and ahead of an appeal that has not been decided. Recognising that does not require a view on the findings.9, 10
The number of charges is not a tariff. The League’s account is sham revenue over nine seasons, failures to co-operate with the investigation, and schemes whose purpose was to inflate revenue and reduce costs by more than £900 million. That is not a club reporting one three-year adjusted loss a stated sum above £105 million. Refusing to multiply six by the charge count does not minimise the findings. It declines a calculation the profitability cases do not support and the Squad Cost Rules do not provide. The multiplication is meaningless. It does not follow that the findings fall away.
The permission to spend is uneven, and that unevenness does not depend on this appeal. A larger revenue is a larger allowance. Owner equity does not, by itself, buy more room under the squad-cost ratio. The 1992 settlement kept promotion and relegation and moved the sale of the competition’s commercial rights. Revenue, and the parachute payments paid to clubs coming out of the Premier League, change the conditions on which clubs enter and compete. Those are arguments about the structure. They are available whether the appeal succeeds or fails. Attaching them to the club’s innocence weakens them. A structural criticism that works only if one club wins its case is a club defence in structural language.
There is a narrower point about what has been published. For Everton and Forest there are published overages, because complaints were determined and the decisions were issued. There is no equivalent published commission calculation for Manchester United in the cycle for which its filed accounts contain large exceptional items. Those accounts are not the League’s assessment. The public has more information about some clubs than about others, and that limits what an outside reader can know. It does not establish that the League allowed one club something it refused another. The same caution applies here. A gap in what has been published is not filled by borrowing Everton’s deduction.
There is a line under this.
Criticism of unequal permission is not an answer to the accounting findings. If those findings are right, revenue was recorded in a way the rules did not treat as revenue, and the club could appear to comply with limits that turn revenue into permission to spend. Both of the following can be true. The rule can favour clubs that already earn more. Every club can still be required to report its revenue accurately. One does not dispose of the other.
Saying the system is uneven is a claim about its design. It does not answer the question the commission was asked. The reverse holds as well. A finding that sponsorship did not reflect the arrangements does not show that the system is well designed. Enforcing a revenue-based rule means the revenue hierarchy is applied to figures that are what the rules mean by revenue. It does not decide whether that hierarchy ought to set spending permission in the first place.
The limits
Two limits are worth stating, because the rest of the argument depends on them.
The sanction discussion above is taken from the published decisions: the Everton commission of 17 November 2023, the Appeal Board of 26 February 2024, the Forest commission of 18 March 2024, the appeal board decision of 6 May 2024, and the Everton commission of 8 April 2024, together with the Premier League’s statements of 7 May 2024, publishing the Forest appeal, and of 17 January 2025, discontinuing the remaining stadium-interest complaint. The add-backs are as described in the notes to that January statement. The Squad Cost Rules cited above are Appendix 2 to the 2026/27 handbook, including the revenue definition and rules F.2, F.3, F.4 and F.5. The City findings, as described here, are the League’s statement of 29 September 2026, the club’s statement of 2 October 2026, and the League’s confirmation the same day that the appeal had been lodged. This essay does not have the commission’s unredacted reasons, and it does not have the grounds of appeal. That is enough to show why a charge-count tariff does not exist. It is not enough to predict a sanction or a result.
The other limit is empirical. A revenue-based permission tends, by its design, to reproduce the existing order of earnings. That is a claim about the rule. It is not a measurement of the rule’s effect on who finishes where. The same is true of the equal step. The formula does not scale the deduction to the size of the club. It does not tell us how often clubs of different sizes will cross the red line, or what the deductions will do to league position. Those questions need a different piece of work. This is not it.
Within those limits the distinction holds.
The profitability cases show how a panel moved from a known excess to a number of points when it had no formula, and why Everton’s six cannot be used as one. The 2026/27 rules show the formula that has replaced that discretion, and the sense in which an equal step sits on top of unequal ceilings. The other essays ask how the permission to spend is distributed, and why enforcing the rule accurately is not proof that the distribution is fair.
A Manchester City supporter can point to the appeal, refuse the multiplication of charges by Everton’s deduction, question a system in which permission rises with revenue already earned, and point out that the public record is fuller for some clubs than for others.
None of that is a finding that the commission was wrong. The structural argument is stronger if it does not need Manchester City to win.