Premier League “keeping a close eye” on Chelsea and two other clubs who risk breaking “good faith” regulations | OneFootball

Chelsea are being watched by the Premier League after appearing to get involved in a PSR (profit and sustainability rules) cap swapping system along with Everton and Aston Villa.

Nick Purewal of the Evening Standard says the organisation will “observe transfer deals” between the three clubs “to ensure they do not breach their ‘good faith’ regulations.

All three have sold each other players in the last week – in some cases for notably inflated fees. The idea seems to be they each give each other an injection of cash by buying a player.

Omari Kellyman with a Chelsea logo.

Chelsea sail close to the wind

As this article points out, there’s not yet any implication that Chelsea have broken the rules, but the PL are “keeping a close eye on proceedings” to make sure that remains true. There is a “good faith” regulation that this could potentially fall foul of.

So far, as with the deals involving selling hotels and car parks from one part of their enterprise to another, the owners seem to be doing a great job of bending the rules to their greatest extent without breaking them.

It’s not going to endear them to many of their fellow clubs, nor the league itself, but it’s the natural response to restrictions on spending. As long as they’ve judged it right, there should be no issues, even with the league now paying especially close scrutiny to any deals we make.

After hearing that we had no PSR issues at all, it was interesting to see that we did in fact get involved in this Maatsen-Kellyman affair. If we truly had no compliance issues at all for this season, we surely would have delayed the fee for Maatsen into next year’s PSR period. So either there was a need for some cash this year, or there’s another factor at play we just don’t know about yet.