A few more thoughts about these compensation payments. Firstly, the judgement says sporting advantage is inferred for the four seasons within the calculation. It doesn’t say for subsequent seasons. If we are not in breach for the period up to the end of 22/23 (which we don’t know yet) I’m not sure the judgement for 21/22 gives grounds for Leicester or Leeds to claim against us- they may have action against the PL for the timing of the hearing but that’s not on us.
So imo only really Burnley have a realistic claim. In any case they precede Leicester so if Burnley make their case we relegated them then we wouldn’t have been in the division to relegate Leicester.
Indeed to defeat Burnley’s preceding claim Leicester would have to argue our sporting advantage was worth less than four points (otherwise we’d have gone down in 21/22) but was worth two or more. That’s incredibly specific when the commission itself said sporting advantage couldn’t be quantified. It’ll be interesting to see if Leicester even follow through on their threat. Leeds have even less claim other than some 21/22 place money.
Onto Burnley then, who would first need to show causation. In their case that would be that we’d have been four points worse off without the 19.5m overspend. We know the commission say advantage can’t be quantified, but even in broad strokes 4 points is actually quite a lot at that end of the table and it would be hard to attribute it to 19.5m overspend over the course of four seasons. There’s no magic formula to correlate spend to points and I’m not sure where they’d even begin.
Next they need to show harm, in this case financial harm. Yes they went down, and that costs revenue, but they’ve rebuilt their team, had a lovely time in the championship, and come straight back up.
It’s also possible and arguable that they’d be worse off now if we had taken their place in 21/22. In 21/22 they finished 3 points behind Leeds, 5 off Southampton and 17 points off Leicester so in 22/23 in all likelihood they’d have been serious relegation contenders. It’s highly possible that had they stayed up in 21/22 they’d be a Championship side now with the same financial loss but a worse sporting position. Now they’d say that’s all guesswork and hypotheticals but that’s making our point for us- you can’t guess what would’ve happened in alternative scenarios, which is what’s required to say we’d have gone down in 21/22.
Financially, I won’t go deep into numbers because I don’t know their books but I will say that their net transfer spend in the subsequent seasons far exceeds ours, they have a net spend of 70m plus since their relegation and we have a net transfer profit of 67m. The fact they have net spent 140m more than us on transfers maybe suggests we haven’t caused them a massive financial loss? It’s not a simple task to show they are massively worse off financially or as a club in general as a result of anything we did.
I’ve rambled so the final point I’ll make is that even if we did gain a sporting advantage over them the fact they are in the league this year means the sporting advantage is compensated by the points deduction whatever it ends up being, as that gives them a sporting advantage over us this year. It certainly significantly increases their chances of avoiding relegation, the rest is on their players, but that in itself is arguably adequate and appropriate compensation.
So imo only really Burnley have a realistic claim. In any case they precede Leicester so if Burnley make their case we relegated them then we wouldn’t have been in the division to relegate Leicester.
Indeed to defeat Burnley’s preceding claim Leicester would have to argue our sporting advantage was worth less than four points (otherwise we’d have gone down in 21/22) but was worth two or more. That’s incredibly specific when the commission itself said sporting advantage couldn’t be quantified. It’ll be interesting to see if Leicester even follow through on their threat. Leeds have even less claim other than some 21/22 place money.
Onto Burnley then, who would first need to show causation. In their case that would be that we’d have been four points worse off without the 19.5m overspend. We know the commission say advantage can’t be quantified, but even in broad strokes 4 points is actually quite a lot at that end of the table and it would be hard to attribute it to 19.5m overspend over the course of four seasons. There’s no magic formula to correlate spend to points and I’m not sure where they’d even begin.
Next they need to show harm, in this case financial harm. Yes they went down, and that costs revenue, but they’ve rebuilt their team, had a lovely time in the championship, and come straight back up.
It’s also possible and arguable that they’d be worse off now if we had taken their place in 21/22. In 21/22 they finished 3 points behind Leeds, 5 off Southampton and 17 points off Leicester so in 22/23 in all likelihood they’d have been serious relegation contenders. It’s highly possible that had they stayed up in 21/22 they’d be a Championship side now with the same financial loss but a worse sporting position. Now they’d say that’s all guesswork and hypotheticals but that’s making our point for us- you can’t guess what would’ve happened in alternative scenarios, which is what’s required to say we’d have gone down in 21/22.
Financially, I won’t go deep into numbers because I don’t know their books but I will say that their net transfer spend in the subsequent seasons far exceeds ours, they have a net spend of 70m plus since their relegation and we have a net transfer profit of 67m. The fact they have net spent 140m more than us on transfers maybe suggests we haven’t caused them a massive financial loss? It’s not a simple task to show they are massively worse off financially or as a club in general as a result of anything we did.
I’ve rambled so the final point I’ll make is that even if we did gain a sporting advantage over them the fact they are in the league this year means the sporting advantage is compensated by the points deduction whatever it ends up being, as that gives them a sporting advantage over us this year. It certainly significantly increases their chances of avoiding relegation, the rest is on their players, but that in itself is arguably adequate and appropriate compensation.
