Forest gets the chop
England's Premier League is trying to force its clubs to spend within their means. Some seem to be having quite a hard time of it
There is reportedly trouble at the MLB players’ union, which does not come as a huge surprise given the rather disastrous winter that the membership has witnessed. Japanese unicorn Shohei Ohtani and a few others aside, veteran players saw their perceived free-agent value crater as most teams were cautious about their spending, if they spent at all.
It’s evidence that Major League Baseball, long the holdout in North America in not having a strong salary-suppression mechanism in its CBA with its players, has finally joined everyone else, with even its big-spending teams cowed by the punitive measures of its recently stiffened luxury tax. Blake Snell, coming off a Cy Young season (his second!), waited all winter and ended up with just a two-year deal — even the hard-cap sports like hockey and football would have had teams clearing space for a free-agent catch like that.
Normally this would be the point at which I note that There’s Another Way to Do It, and would cast my gaze longingly across the Atlantic at the football leagues of Europe, which would gasp at the very idea of a salary cap. Big clubs spend what they want, and those that spend poorly or not enough risk performing so badly that they get punted down a level. Meritocracy! The Oakland A’s would be in the Inter-County Baseball League by now in such a world. (And they would deserve it.)
Alas, it is not all cotton candy and rainbows over there, either. This week brought news that Nottingham Forest, one of the 20 clubs in England’s Premier League, has been docked four points for financial malfeasance. There’s got to be a Robin Hood joke in there somewhere. The Premier League is the Sheriff? Or is it King John? Still workshopping this reference.
The PL doesn’t have a salary cap or luxury tax, but it does have a rule — a series of them, really — that requires clubs to spend within their means. The idea is that it prevents clubs at the lower end of the income scale from driving themselves into bankruptcy as they chase glory, while preventing the bigger teams, some of them owned by billionaires, nation states, or billionaires who control nation states, from simply buying all the best players in the world. Instead, they can just buy most of them.
Anyway, Forest. They lost scads of cash in 2022-23, after gaining promotion to the Premier League and then shooting money out of a firehose to buy basically an entirely new roster of players. The are owned by a Greek billionaire who looks exactly what you imagine a Greek billionaire to look like and, the best part, his 23-year-old son oversaw much of the frenzied spending. Instead of the playboy rich kid buying a new Ferrari, he bought Callum Hudson-Odoi. I can’t imagine how this ended in trouble.
Forest knew it was way past its acceptable-losses limit, didn’t sell enough of its bloated squad to make up the difference and, being extra cheeky, even held on to its best asset, forward Brennan Johnson, past the fiscal year-end so it could drive up his transfer fee at the end of the summer market. They did get a better price, but it still meant their year-end numbers were borked.
This all seems reasonable enough. Break rules, get punished. But a points deduction still is extremely arbitrary. Forest is said to have been docked three points — or the equivalent of one football win on the pitch — for the rule breach, and another three points because the scale of the breach (about $70-million). They also got two points back for, honestly, good behaviour. Which is to say, they apologized straight away and didn’t try to present doctored books or anything. So, like, not trying to pull off a fraud was enough to get two points — almost a whole win! — back? These are hugely valuable points. After the deduction, Forest has dropped into the relegation zone, a single point behind Luton Town. The thanks-for-not-lying points could be enough to avoid relegation in the end.
Forest could also appeal and hope to get even more points back. As it happens, fellow PL club Everton had a whopping 10-point deduction this season reduced to six on appeal. Their losses were lower than that of Forest, but I guess they weren’t as pleasant about it? As I say, the whole thing seems bafflingly arbitrary. That penalty also applied to losses from earlier seasons and Everton is alleged to have breached the rules again last year. Which could mean yet more deductions. It’s a mess.
Oh, and Manchester City, winners of five of the last six Premier League titles among many other honours, have been found guilty of 115 (!) breaches of what’s called the profitability and sustainability rules, but that appeal process has been ongoing for many months with essentially no explanation other than that it’s very complicated.
Perhaps there are significant differences between the cases of Man City and its Premier League brethren. Perhaps it will even be fully cleared on appeal. But if Forest is dinged four points for a single violation, and Everton loses six plus who knows how many more, it’s hard to come up with the right number for a deduction if City loses its appeal. How many points for that many breaches? All of them?