Chelsea clobbered Middlesbrough yesterday in the second game of their series (aka "tie") in the semi-finals of the Carabao Cup. Likely to be Chelsea against Liverpool in the final.
However, Chelsea, Arsenal, and both Manchester teams are skating along the edge of the FA's Profit and Sustainablity Rules (PSR). The rules say that a club cannot show a loss of more than £100 or so over a rolling three years. Everton was already penalized 10 standings points this year; likely to be charged again by the end of this season. All the "big" clubs, except Tottenham and Liverpool are in danger of penalty. That means they cannot spend the way they have spent...Chelsea's new owners, led by Todd Boehly, part owner of the Dodgers, spent about £1 billion in the first year they have owned the team.
Teams can off-set spending by selling players, in which the cost of buying the player subtracts from the revenue of selling. "Academy" players, those signed as teenagers to their first contract and trained up at a team, those count as pure profit.
The idea behind PSR? Seems to be two slightly different reasons:
(1) The FA does not want any more teams to go bankrupt, and a bankrupt team could be closed down permanently. That's a disaster for teams in small towns. The beginning of "Welcome to Wrexham" explains how the Wrexham team got demoted, how the owner walked away, and how fans kept the team going with, I think, many semi-professional players. A catastrophe for the town.
(2) It looks like a way to reduce the power of outside money, such as those oil-sheiks who can buy a team and pour oil-dollars into buying players. PSR seems written to force a team to "live on its own", in the same way that the Lerners have operated the Nats separately from their real estate business. It gets more complicated in England because teams own their stadiums, and have no power to force a city to build a new stadium. When Tottenham decided to build a mega-stadium to replace the ancient and tiny White Hart Lane, the team had to borrow money and build it themselves. It is built. Looks amazing. And it was designed to host NFL games and concerts, adding to Spurs profitability.
