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Let’s start at the end. When the Appeal Board explained, at paragraph 161 of its decision of 30 July 2026, why Chelsea’s suspended six point deduction could not stand, it found that no direct evidence had been identified to support the Commission’s conclusion that the club acquired a squad with _“a depth of talent at every level”_ beyond what compliance would have allowed. Further it found no evidence had been adduced to support the finding that rival clubs were deprived of a fair opportunity of signing the same players.
Remarkably, however, this is because The FA presented none of the evidence you would ordinarily expect. There is no record of any witness of fact who might have spoken to the motivation of the club at the time or the impact of the signings. No evidence of any type is referred to that make clear to the Commission something every football fan has heard for years - that during this Chelsea era, the club was obsessed with winning and were ruthless in trying to get there.
Likewise, there was no evaluation of expert evidence as to whether a sporting advantage had been gained. No model of what fourteen seasons of concealed spending bought on the pitch was tested, and no competitor club was ever asked to explain what it might have done with a fair run at Willian or Eden Hazard. There was no evidence on any of this because The FA _chose_ to present none.
Nor did The FA fall back on the established legal position, well known to every football regulator and lawyer, that a sporting advantage is properly inferred from serious financial breaches precisely because actual advantage is so hard to prove. The FA chose not to make that argument either, and instead did something stranger.
As the Appeal Board records at paragraph 162, The FA supported Chelsea’s argument that actual sporting advantage should be assessed on a transaction by transaction basis. Transposed to the PSR cases, that approach would have Everton’s or Forest’s overspend audited player by player for a provable edge, a near impossible exercise and one never suggested as necessary in those cases. The whole logic of the settled inference is that sporting advantage accrues at squad level and resists itemisation. This is exactly what the Commission had found but, surprisingly, exactly what The FA helped Chelsea then dismantle.
Against that background, Chelsea winning the appeal would have shocked nobody. In practical terms it changed little, since every sporting sanction in the case was suspended anyway, itself a wholesale departure from the established norms in the football jurisprudence, but a win is a win.
In contrast to The FA’s ultimate approach, the most damning description of Chelsea’s conduct came from The FA itself. Paragraph 7 of its submissions on sanction records _“deliberate and intentional behaviour by CFC, which was carried out by individuals at the highest levels of the Club or under their direction and with their full knowledge and approval”_ and _“deliberate and intentional concealment thereof from The FA by submitting false and misleading documentation.”_
It goes on to state the _“plain and obvious inference that many of these breaches were committed in order to secure the registration of the player in question at all costs.”_
Seventy four breaches across 44 transactions involving 32 players, of whom 18 were minors, spanning fourteen seasons at a cost of at least £48m. The Commission’s Written Reasons of 12 January 2026 went further, describing at paragraph 8, a _“shameful and arrogant disregard for the Rules of the game,”_ and recording the creation of sham agreements designed to defeat detection. Finally, HMRC was deprived of millions of pounds of tax.
Having stated this egregious picture, The FA asked the Commission for a fine of £10 million and a registration ban suspended for two years. The Nottingham Forest Appeal Board had disposed of the argument that sporting sanctions for serious breaches could properly be suspended, holding that where a breach is serious enough, it will rarely be appropriate to suspend it, and that fairness to compliant clubs will usually require the sanction to be immediate. The Everton Appeal Board had reached the same conclusion in February 2024.
The FA’s treatment of sporting advantage was more remarkable still. The law here is settled and was presumably sitting in The FA’s own bundle of authorities. In UEFA v Dynamo Moscow, the adjudicatory chamber rejected the argument that a regulator must prove a measurable sporting advantage, holding that financial breaches are in principle detrimental to compliant clubs because it confers a direct advantage in the market for players.
In EFL v Sheffield Wednesday, it was explained that _“a points deduction is not designed to assess and reflect the sporting benefit from the breach, which is likely to be impossible to quantify. Instead, it is to punish and to deter with the wider aim of upholding the integrity of the competition and protecting the interests of the game.”_ The Everton Appeal Board endorsed both as clear authority (albeit for PSR in that case), confirmed the inference is rebuttable but that the burden of rebutting it sits with the club, and held that _any_ breach of the PSR threshold warranted a points deduction to the exclusion of anything softer. Nottingham Forest ran a rebuttal argument, saying it had gained no advantage from its overspend, and lost, the Commission holding it had gone through the season with a squad it could not afford.
That is the settled position in football financial breach cases - the inference arises from the breach, no measurable advantage need be proved, and the club carries the burden of displacing it.
Nevertheless, The FA appears to have been a passive participant on these points. In its submissions to the Commission, it went no further than conceding that one possible inference was that Chelsea had acted in the hope of a sporting advantage, and declined to invite any finding at all. The Chair of the Commission, HH Clement Goldstone KC, noted at the outset of the hearing that any reference to a points deduction was _“conspicuous by its absence”_ from the written submissions.
Pressed on what other motive there could possibly have been for a thirteen year scheme of concealed payments to acquire footballers, Brian O’Neill KC for The FA (yes for The FA) suggested that a very wealthy man might have acted _“perhaps for the thrill of the chase,”_ or from a desire to buy something because he could and thereby deny it to others. The FA maintained it could not point to clear and compelling evidence of a motive to gain sporting advantage.
This was The FA documenting the acquisition of players including Hazard, Willian, Eto’o, Ramires, David Luiz, Schurrle and Matic through concealed offshore payments, telling its tribunal it could not say why the club had wanted the players. It remains a complete mystery.
When the Commission nevertheless imposed its six point deduction, the Premier League’s representations of 26 January 2026 pleaded that _“sporting outcomes should be decided on the pitch, wherever possible,”_ reminded the Commission that no FA tribunal had imposed a points deduction on a Premier League club in thirty years, and suggested any sporting sanction might sit more comfortably in a competition The FA actually runs. The letter said nothing about the minors, the sham agreements or the clubs that competed honestly against Chelsea for a decade. The FA adopted the League’s framing within a week, and by the appeal in May 2026 was conceding that its own Commission had not been entitled to find an actual sporting advantage.
Faced with no arguments in support of the Commission’s position, the Appeal Board allowed the appeal, quashed the finding for want of any identified evidence, and substituted the suspended registration ban The FA and Chelsea had wanted all along. On the material before it, the Appeal Board had little choice.
Everton, Forest and Leicester were docked points, immediately, for overspending a three-year threshold by amounts that would barely cover Chelsea’s agents. Chelsea ran a concealed scheme for more than a decade, through sham contracts and offshore shell companies, reaching into the transfers of children as well as internationals, and came away with a fine and largely toothless suspended sanctions.
The FA had the law, the club’s own admissions and the Commission itself on its side. There were numerous easy chances in this game but the regulators missed them all.
_Stefan Borson is a lawyer, football finance commentator and Partner and Head of Sport at McCarthy Denning._