Culture
Forest handed four-point deduction for breaching Premier League's financial rules
Nottingham Forest have been handed a four-point deduction following a breach of the Premier League’s profitability and sustainability rules (PSRs).
Forest were referred to an independent commission in January after the club reported losses that exceeded the allowed amount over the three-year reporting cycle ending in the 2022-23 season.
Under the guidelines, they could have been fined or deducted points for the breach, and their four-point deduction now drops them to 18th in the Premier League.
The new Premier League table
They are the second Premier League team this season to be deducted points following a PSR breach after Everton had 10 points docked in November. This was later reduced to six points following a three-day appeal. Everton could face a second points deduction this season after they were charged alongside Forest with another breach of PSR rules in January.
Forest now have seven days to notify whether they intend to appeal against the sanction.
The Premier League has pencilled in May 24 as a backstop date for any appeal which comes after the end of the season on May 19. This date comes ahead of the league’s annual general meeting.
What did the Premier League say?
A statement read: “An independent commission has applied an immediate four-point deduction to Nottingham Forest FC for a breach of the Premier League’s profitability and sustainability rules (PSRs) for the period ending season 2022/23.
“Nottingham Forest was referred to an independent commission on January 15, following an admission by the club that it had breached the relevant PSR threshold of £61million by £34.5m.
“The threshold was lower than £105m as the club spent two seasons of the assessment period in the EFL Championship. The case was heard in accordance with new Premier League Rules, which provide an expedited timetable for PSR cases to be resolved in the same season the complaint is issued.
“The independent commission determined the sanction following a two-day hearing this month, at which the club had the opportunity to detail a range of mitigating factors.
“The commission found that the club had demonstrated ‘exceptional cooperation’ in its dealings with the Premier League throughout the process.”
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What did Forest say?
A club statement read: “Nottingham Forest is extremely disappointed with the decision of the commission to impose a sanction on the club of four points, to be applied with immediate effect.”
“We were extremely dismayed by the tone and content of the Premier League’s submissions before the commission,” it added. “After months of engagement with the Premier League, and exceptional cooperation throughout, this was unexpected and has harmed the trust and confidence we had in the Premier League.”
Club statement.
— Nottingham Forest (@NFFC) March 18, 2024
The club also called the Premier League’s initial starting point for a sanction of eight points as “utterly disproportionate” and pointed to a number of “unique circumstances” involved and the mitigation they put forward.
They also said the commission’s decision “raises issues of concern for all aspirant clubs” and that the rationale that clubs should only invest after they have realised a profit on their player development “destroys mobility in the football pyramid” and will lead to “the stagnation of our national game.”
“We believe that the high levels of cooperation the club has shown during this process, and which are confirmed and recorded in the commission’s decision, were not reciprocated by the Premier League,” the statement added.
How did we get here?
Forest were referred to the commission by the Premier League in January for the alleged breach, which concerns the PSR calculation for the three-year reporting period ending with the 2022-23 season.
Forest stated they would “continue to cooperate fully with the Premier League on this matter and are confident of a speedy and fair resolution”.
Forest have signed more than 40 players since securing promotion in May 2022, with owner Evangelos Marinakis sanctioning a transfer spend of around £250m ($318m) to help the club establish themselves in the top flight.
Forest believed they had worked within the regulations when it came to the allowable losses with a lot of the issue centring around Brennan Johnson’s sale to Tottenham Hotspur.
Johnson’s sale to Tottenham was key to Forest’s argument (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
The club’s argument — which they have made in conversations with the Premier League — was that they could have sold Johnson earlier in the window but doing so at that point would have meant accepting a markedly lower price. His sale did not go through until September 1, well after the financial year ended, for £47.5m.
New guidelines aimed at fast-tracking PSR decisions have been introduced to ensure any basic breaches of the regulations are dealt with in time for punishments, such as points deductions, to be levied in the same season as the charge is brought.
All clubs had to submit their accounts for 2022-23 by December 31 — rather than in March as they had previously — with any breaches and subsequent charges confirmed 14 days later.
What are profitability and sustainability rules?
All Premier League clubs are assessed for their adherence to the competition’s profitability and sustainability rules each year.
Their compliance with said rules is assessed by reference to the club’s PSR calculation, which is the aggregate of its adjusted earnings before tax for the relevant assessment period.
Under the PSR, clubs are allowed to lose a maximum of £105m over three seasons (or £35m a season) but certain costs can be deducted, such as investment in youth development, infrastructure, community and women’s football.
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There were also specific allowances relating to COVID and, to help clubs, the league combined the two pandemic-hit seasons into one, turning the three-year accounting period into four years.
Forest’s permitted losses are lower than the £105m limit because the club were in the Football League during a portion of the accounting period. Their top figure instead amounts to £61m, which breaks down as £13m for the 2020-21 and 2021-22 seasons when they were in the Championship, plus £35m for last season, their first back in the top flight.
Have there been any other cases like this?
Forest are just the third club to face action like this, following Everton’s two separate breaches and subsequent points deduction this season, while Manchester City were hit with more than 100 charges last February.
The outcome of City’s case has not yet been communicated, with The Athletic reporting that a verdict — which would be subject to appeal — likely to take considerable time to be reached.
Last year, Chelsea’s new owners self-reported incomplete financial information related to transactions that took place during the stewardship of the previous owner, Roman Abramovich, between 2012 and 2019.
Transactions made under Abramovich are still under investigation (Paul Gilham/Getty Images)
European governing body UEFA fined them €10m for the historical breach in July while the Premier League and English FA are continuing to investigate.
There have been several precedents in the English Football League in recent years, but a punishment relating to breaches of PSR in the top tier of English football was unprecedented before Everton.
In fact, on only two other occasions has a club been handed a points penalty in Premier League history.
Middlesbrough were docked three points for failing to fulfil a fixture in the 1996-97 season while Portsmouth were hit with a nine-point penalty in January of the 2009-10 campaign after going into administration.
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‘Frustration and disappointment for Forest’
Analysis by Nottingham Forest correspondent Paul Taylor
There is frustration and disappointment at Nottingham Forest, as they find themselves plunged into the Premier League relegation zone by a four point deduction for breaching profit and sustainability regulations.
And, over the weekend, the suggestion from within the club was that four points was the level of punishment at which they would consider making an appeal. They have 14 days to lodge that appeal, so they do have time to digest the verdict, before rushing into a decision. But it is likely that they will.
The fact that it drops them into the bottom three, will rub a little additional salt into the wound.
Nottingham Forest’s run in
| Team | Date | Home/away |
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March 30 |
Home |
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April 2 |
Home |
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April 8 |
Away |
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April 13 |
Home |
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April 20 |
Away |
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April 27 |
Home |
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May 4 |
Away |
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May 11 |
Home |
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May 19 |
Away |
As will the fact that, throughout the process, Forest feel as though they have gone out of their way to work with the Premier League — to accept that they have breached regulations, but to explain what they believe were mitigating circumstances — largely surrounding the sale of Brennan Johnson, late in the window.
But, amid the frustration — at a time when Forest have felt hard done by over a number of controversial refereeing decisions — there will also be an understanding that the punishment might have been more severe.
And, even amid the possibility of an appeal, Forest at least now know what they are facing, as they look to secure a third season of top flight football, under Nuno Espirito Santo.
(Top photo: Jon Hobley/MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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