Andy Burnham has been speaking to Mark Chapman on The Sports Agents podcast about Nottingham Forest’s 4-point deduction for breaching the Premier League’s Profitability and Sustainability Rules:
“I feel so frustrated about it. They’ve ruined this season, the second to last season at Goodison Park, they have ruined it.
“The fact that this grand old ground is just shrouded constantly in protest and frustration and anger, it isn’t right to me. But not just to us, look at the whole bottom of the table.
“Nobody knows where they are, nobody knows what is going on. Nobody knows what the next deduction will be… And you look at the process they’ve got Forest and ourselves in now.
“Have they used the formula that they sent to the original commission that looked at Everton, to the commission looking at Forest? I don’t know the answer to that question…
“Will they use the same formula with Everton? Will Everton and Forest be the only clubs ever to be charged under this opaque… I won’t even call it a regime… because I think they’ve been making it up as they go along.
“And this is the point, I think they took this action against Everton and targeted us in the way that they have done to try and prove that they could regulate to push back the idea of a government regulator.
“I think what they’ve done is the precise opposite, they’ve proved they can’t regulate. They’ve proved they cannot do it fairly, openly, and transparently and this is the situation that we are in.”
“I think the Premier League has made the case for one, it’s just not like any form of regulation that I’ve ever seen, where you just don’t know where you stand.
“You just don’t know the framework that they’re using to make judgements on the sanction that should be applied. And then you’ve got the whole effect on football, there was barely a transfer window this time round.
“Everyone’s kind of standing back. I was at Rochdale FC the other night, a club that is struggling at the top of National League now. And they were saying to me that they were hoping to sell a player and it all fell through because the club that was going to buy said, ‘oh no, we can’t’, because of the whole nervousness around this.
“I think it’s killed this season; I honestly think this whole thing has made this season a bit of a nightmare and the Premier League need to step back and take a proper look at this. There can be no complacency that English football always stays up there.
“We’ve got to a point where you can’t celebrate a goal because you think some faceless person somewhere in an industrial park is going to rule it out and we’re going to have this situation on the final day of the Premier League where we won’t know who is staying up and who is going down.
“There is a conflict of interests, absolutely bound up in this whole thing and I don’t think that the promoter of a product can also be the regulator of a product, particularly given the amount of money that is circulating in the game.
“But I just come back to that this is a founding member of the Football League, a founding member of the Premier League that is trying to build a new stadium to enhance the Premier League, that was doing that through Covid and a war in Ukraine and opened its books to say we might have a problem.
“And I’m not saying that this club was being particularly well run by the owner in the period concerned, but if you add all of that together and then you say, ‘woah, we’re deducting 10 points’, well, obviously they got that wrong anyway because it has been reduced, but it was disproportionate, and it was because of something else.
“They were chasing something else when they went for Everton, and they were trying to make the government back off. But for me it’s just proven we need an independent regulator for football.
“Somebody that is not doing two things, promoting, and regulating at the same time. The regulator should be the regulator and nothing else. And by the way, they should be putting in place a deal for the Football League and football beneath the Football League.
“The fact that the Premier League can’t do that, that the clubs can’t do that, I think speaks volumes about a game that has been left to regulate itself and can’t regulate itself and now needs to see a strong independent regulator do the job for them.”