In football’s crisis of trust the Premier League as referee is hard to stomach

“Most Premiership fans will have a lower league club that they also support,” Caroline Dinenage observed of the culture, media and sport committee last Tuesday afternoon. As in, less than a week ago. Not the 1970s, which was probably the last time the statement in question was true. Not 2007, the last time the competition was actually called the Premiership. But anyway, here we are at the cutting edge of modern football governance. Seems like these guys are right on top of things!

In any case, a mild grilling from a toothless parliamentary committee – the interrogative equivalent of a toaster on its lowest setting – will have been the least of Richard Masters’s problems last week. The announcement that Everton and Nottingham Forest have been referred to an independent panel for breaching the Premier League’s profitability and sustainability rules now means that a fifth of the clubs in the division – Manchester City and Chelsea the others – are under some sort of investigation for financial misconduct. Many of the rest are reining in their usual January shopping spree in order to avoid sanctions. If this isn’t a crisis – of legitimacy, of probity, of trust – then it will certainly do until the crisis arrives.

Related: Nottingham Forest and Everton could face points deduction after Premier League charges

And of course in the immediate aftermath there has been the usual foam of tribalism, disinformation and demagoguery: a new form of terrace warfare, fought not with clubs or iron bars but with little screen grabs of pdf documents and the rat emoji. The main arguments, in increasing order of preposterousness: fans are being unjustly punished for the sins of their club’s owners; financial fair play rules are a brake on ambition; the Premier League is endemically corrupt and run by a shady lizard cartel that – somehow – includes the zero‑time winners Tottenham Hotspur.

“The sanction,” Everton’s fan advisory board writes in a letter submitted to the appeal board reviewing the 10-point deduction imposed on them last year for previous rule breaches, “left fans, and not just Everton fans, with the sense that powerful and wealthy clubs will be treated more favourably.”

All of these arguments can be soundly rebutted in turn. You can point out that there is a difference between “punishing the fans” and something you just don’t like. You can point out that two of the biggest clubs in the world in Manchester City and Chelsea are also under investigation, that forcing clubs to sell in order to buy is not some egregious abuse of human freedom but quite literally how money works. That Everton and Forest are not merely helpless recipients of cartel justice, but equal shareholders of the Premier League who signed off on the very rules that now condemn them. That the “sell‑to‑buy” model worked out pretty well for Everton when they were trying to persuade Burnley to sell Dwight McNeil, or for Nottingham Forest when they were trying to buy Lewis O’Brien from Huddersfield Town.

You can point out the shameless opportunism of Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, when he says that this is “not just Everton’s fight but everyone’s”, albeit not a fight in which he seemed to take much of an interest until Everton were involved. You can point out that financial fair play regulations exist not to punish fans but to protect them from the very worst fate of all: bankruptcy, liquidation, oblivion, empty Saturday afternoons. And that to a billionaire owner or a pauper, a mere financial sanction is no kind of sanction at all. If a punishment doesn’t sting, then you can argue over whether it is really a punishment at all.

Still, though. Something about all this doesn’t quite sit right. Partly it is the idea that the Premier League – a competition that has always been in thrall to extravagant overspending, that built its entire appeal on flaunted excess and unlevel playing fields – gets to sit in judgment of anybody about anything. Partly it is the idea that Everton can be punished twice for a set of accounts that are mostly the same. But mostly it is this sense that we are being forced to relitigate the past, to reconsider and re‑evaluate seasons and events that have already taken place, simply because those in charge at the time failed to do their duty.

We’re fighting in 2024 the battles that should have been fought in 2014 and 2004, or even earlier. Decisions that were botched, shirked, ignored years ago are now coming home to roost. The unregulated free‑for‑all that allowed first the oligarchs, and then the venture capitalists, and then the state actors, to claim a piece of our turf. Players signed for ridiculous sums by sporting directors and owners who are now long gone. The decision to let the Super League breakaway clubs slide back into the competition with a paltry £3.7m fine for their trouble.

A media that – in large part but by no means exclusively – failed to ask the right questions at the right time, who simply waved at the vultures as they flew over the threshold, because these publications and these journalists made their living trading spurious transfer gossip, and it did absolutely boss numbers. A governing class that wanted no part of football, that never tried to understand the game or the ways in which it was changing, but was happy to have the Premier League trophy flown out on trade visits.

Football has a crisis of governance, and it has a crisis of inequality, and it has a crisis of sustainability, and it has a crisis of middle‑aged people still calling it the Premiership. But above all, it has a crisis of trust. Before the proposed introduction of an independent regulator, the Premier League is desperately trying to show the world it can regulate itself, with an urgency it should probably have shown two decades ago. It’s trying to claw back our trust. It may already be too late.

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