· 3 June 2025, 10:00
**Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR) are arguably the worst thing to happen to football since hideously wealthy entities came into the game and started buying success.**
At least when the billionaire playboys hit the scene they made things interesting, bringing the best players to the Premier League, being absolutely mental, sacking managers for only winning 4-0 when they should have been winning by five, but PSR has put a stop to all that craziness, just in time to stop Newcastle from getting involved.
We're not saying that unchecked spending was good for the game by any means; there should definitely be some sort of cap, but that cap should relate to the club's wealth in general, rather than an arbitrary, outdated figure of £105 million in losses over three seasons.
But if we're going to blanket every club with the same rules, then at least make sure they're enforced properly. Chelsea should have been done for breaching PSR every year since it came in, but they keep finding and exploiting loopholes to avoid sanctions.
> [](https://twitter.com/martynziegler/status/1929579908637864358)
Chelsea have been amazing at exploiting Premier League's PSR loopholes
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Originally, they'd sign players on enormous eight-year contracts so that the actual transfer cost was amortised over eight years, lessening its impact on the yearly figures. They got away with that for months, and then the loophole was closed.
Lately, they've been selling off parts of the club to its own sister companies for inflated prices to avoid PSR sanctions, and now, [The Times](https://www.thetimes.com/article/25a9507e-5a5a-4b7f-ae06-8e3082ad34d1?shareToken=d833ea2a046f6a5dae27167bfe29e73c) reports that the Premier League are about to close that loophole too.
So, Chelsea gets to continue, sanction-free, despite blatantly exploiting loopholes, but now nobody else can do it. Chelsea gains a leg up while everyone else struggles under the ridiculous rule.
We don't even know who to be mad at, we're just mad
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It's hard to be mad at Chelsea because they found the loopholes and made them work. It's just annoying that, because they exploited gaps in the Premier League's rules that they can't rectify retroactively, all they can do is close the loophole to prevent any other club from doing the same thing.
Chelsea can't be punished because they technically did nothing wrong, but now no other team can gain that significant advantage that they have taken advantage of.
Herein lies yet another problem with PSR and how it has never been about fairness. We wonder just how much faster these loopholes would have been closed if it were Newcastle who found them, or any other team outside of the cartel, for that matter.
It is time to scrap PSR and just let crazy owners do crazy things and bring the excitement back to the game.