Chelsea ‘selling’ their hotels and training ground to… Chelsea??? PSR a total joke if this is allowed | OneFootball

One of the basic tenets in sport is that there should be a level playing field and the laws and rules of a game should apply equally to all competitors.

However, you might question if this actually happens in football.

On the field, the self-appointed elite teams are often the beneficiaries of questionable refereeing decisions, such as when the referee went against the laws of the game to allow Liverpool to score a last-minute goal against Forest. Or the penalty that was awarded to PSG against Newcastle United that has allowed them to reach the latter stages of the Champions League.

Although I think you can put most refereeing mistakes down to human error. There does appear to be unconscious bias and the pressure put on referees by these self-appointed elite clubs and their managers, means some decisions make you wonder what’s really going on. These ‘mistakes’ are particularly hard to take when VAR was supposed to eliminate clear and obvious errors.

However, I’d say that it is off the field where there is the most obvious bias towards the elite teams.

Most of the changes in the game in the last few decades from the formation of the Champions League to the scrapping of FA Cup replays, have been brought in to benefit these elite clubs.

It’s in the application of financial rules where there is the most obvious bias towards the ‘big six’ clubs.

If you are a Forest or Everton fan, it must seem unfair that you are having points deducted for breaking the financial rules, when the owners of Chelsea and Man City have spent far more than their income for a far greater length of time, yet so far they’ve escaped any punishment.

The current owners of Chelsea have been able to spend a billion pounds on players thanks to some financial trickery.

The Chelsea owners are seemingly set to be allowed to use another financial ‘loophole’ to get around the PSR rules. Some hotels have been ‘sold’ by a subsidiary of the Chelsea holding company, to another subsidiary of the Chelsea holding company. The income from this ‘sale’ may help allow Chelsea to stay within the PSR spending limits.

Apparently, the only question being asked by the Premier League, is not why are they being allowed to get away with this nonsense, but whether the owners of Chelsea paid themselves the market value for these hotels.

It gets even worse.

As it has emerged that as well as the hotels ‘sale’, Chelsea are now reported to have done the same with a ‘sale’ of their training ground. One part of Chelsea ‘buying’ the training ground from another part. All of this using apparent loopholes to get around breaking the PSR limitations, if they can get away with it.

This is why both Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR) are being brought into disrepute, because whilst clubs like Forest and Everton and Newcastle United are supposed to stick to the rules, clubs like Chelsea are apparently able to bend them via these loopholes.

Having clubs run in a sustainable way is a good idea but there doesn’t seem to be a level playing field and the way the rules are implemented, seems to particularly affect teams outside the supposed ‘big’ six.

As Newcastle United fans, we keep being told we may be forced to sell some of our top players to stay within these financial rules, which would allow some of these self-appointed elite clubs to pick up some of our players, making it even harder for us to challenge the status quo.

What I’d really like to see is clubs spending judged over the last couple of decades rather than the last few years, so clubs like Chelsea wouldn’t have an unfair advantage over those clubs that now want to challenge the status quo. However, failing that, I’d just like to see the rules being properly and fairly enforced.