Let’s be very clear about what this is. Everton were dragged before an independent commission, hit with a points deduction, and made to feel like the villains of English football – all for overspending by a margin that wouldn’t register as a rounding error at Manchester City or Chelsea. And now, with those clubs still facing questions of their own, the Premier League wants to quietly introduce a system where cases can be settled behind closed doors.
Sky News’ Mark Kleinman reports that top-flight clubs will vote at next month’s annual meeting on a proposal to allow negotiated settlements for alleged PSR breaches, bypassing the automatic referral to an independent commission that ensnared Everton and Nottingham Forest. Football industry sources describe it as an attempt to simplify and speed up the sanctions process. Others might use different words.
Remind me = what did Everton actually do?
Under PSR, clubs cannot lose more than £105m over a rolling three-year period — reduced by £22m for each season spent outside the top flight. Everton were found to have exceeded that threshold by £16.6m and were handed a points deduction. Nottingham Forest followed. Leicester City received six points off from the EFL after relegation, a punishment that contributed to their relegation to League One.
These are clubs without sovereign wealth backing. Clubs without limitless owner resources to absorb losses indefinitely. Clubs who were, by the letter of the rules, guilty – but who many Blues supporters feel were selectively pursued while far greater financial irregularities at the top of the game were allowed to rumble on through years of legal process with no competitive consequences whatsoever.
And now they’re changing the rules
If the vote passes next month, the settlement option would come into force immediately – though PSR itself is already being scrapped at the start of next season anyway. It will be replaced by Squad Cost Ratio (SCR) and Sustainability and Systemic Resilience (SSR), frameworks designed to mirror UEFA’s financial rules and sit alongside the new independent football regulator.
So the system that punished Everton is being dismantled. The replacement offers clubs the chance to negotiate their way out of charges quietly, without the public spectacle of a commission – without the headlines, the points deductions, the reputational damage. Without, in other words, what Everton went through.
The question Evertonians are entitled to ask
If this settlement mechanism had existed two years ago, would Everton have been put through the wringer in the same way? Would the process have been so public, so damaging, so final? And if the answer is no – then what does that say about the process that was used against them?
The Premier League declined to comment. Of course they did.
