Premier League chief executive Richard Masters says a decision regarding whether or not to scrap the Premier League’s controversial profit and sustainability regulations (PSR) is “coming up”.
BBC Sport claims a decision will be made at a meeting in November to determine whether top-flight clubs persist with the current regulations or adopt an ‘alternative system.’
Newcastle United is one of the clubs to have been openly critical of current financial regulations, which were introduced in 2015/16 and allow losses of up to £105m over a three-year reporting cycle. The Magpies, as the richest club in the world due to their Saudi Arabian investment, are limited to what they can spend despite their ambition to take the club to the very top.
The Toon aren’t the only Premier League club to criticize PSR, with the likes of Nottingham Forest and Everton docked points in the 2023/24 campaign for breaching those rules.
In February earlier this year, clubs voted to persist with PSR for the 2025-26 campaign, with a squad cost ratio (SCR) system of financial control implemented by the top-flight governing body on a shadowing, non-binding basis.
That approach is not too dissimilar to UEFA’s existing financial rules, which allow clubs to spend up to a percentage of their total revenues on squad-related costs. As one of the nine Premier League clubs competing in Europe, Newcastle has had to comply with those regulations, with both Chelsea and Aston Villa fined in July for previously breaching those rules.
Speaking at the Leaders sports conference in London, when asked about SCR, Masters said: “We are talking to our clubs about an alternative system. That’s not to say we don’t think the PSR system works.
“It’s about closer alignment with European regulation, which is squad cost ratio, which is a revenue test. In UEFA, it’s now set at 70%. Our system will be 85% because we always want our clubs to have the ability to invest.
“The Premier League has been built on the back of investment in which international capital flows [are] coming in. We don’t want that to be to be stifled off.”
Speaking in 2024 after selling both players, the Newcastle boss told Simon Jordan’s podcast Up Front: “I felt really uncomfortable in the summer when we were forced to make sales of two really talented young players in Elliot Anderson and Yankuba Minteh, against our will really for financial reasons.
“One was an academy product we’d invested in since he joined the club as a young lad. You just think, ‘why are we doing this? This doesn’t feel right’.
“I understand the rules to a degree. I understand the concept but I think how it is fundamentally working at the moment is not right.”
Many supporters feel the current measures limit not just Newcastle’s ability to break into the Premier League top-six, but it also rings true for the likes of Nottingham Forest and Aston Villa.
During the protracted takeover, a number of clubs were keen to block the Saudi-led consortium from taking control of the Magpies and implement new APT rules to halt any progress once the deal had gone through.
“The PSR is a look-back profitability test and has its own strengths and weaknesses. No system will be perfect,” said Masters.
“We have to keep these things balanced and continue the conversation with our clubs, and that’s an important decision, so we should take the time to get it right. But that decision is coming up.”
The report from the BBC continues and says: “The Premier League is also trialling another model known as ‘top to bottom anchoring’ (TBA) which effectively caps the amount any club can spend as a multiple of the income earned by the league’s bottom side.
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