Nottingham Forest

What Everton’s FFP verdict will mean for Forest – according to an expert

Published

10 months ago

February 14, 2024

Nottingham Forest fans should be watching for the verdict of Everton’s appeal very closely.

The Toffees appealed against their 10-point penalty for breaching the Premier League’s profit and sustainability regulations (PSR), which they received for losing in excess of £105m over the period 2019-2022.

Alongside Everton, Forest were charged for breaching PSR for the period 2019-2023, with any case and appeal to be heard and resolved by 15 April this year. It is expected Everton will hear back next week.

Forest have hired “the Lionel Messi of sports law”, Nick De Marco KC, to argue their case, which largely hinges on overspending around player transfers.

i spoke to a football finance expert to find out how Everton’s appeal verdict could affect Forest’s case.

What Everton’s FFP appeal means for Nottingham Forest

Everton’s initial 10-point deduction was both the first penalty handed out for breaching PSR and the most severe deduction in Premier League history.

The scale of their punishment shocked clubs across the league, who did not believe PSR penalties would ever go as far as a points deduction, let alone 10.

Football finance expert Dr Dan Plumley believes that the Everton case has set the bar for PSR punishments and the result of their appeal will define the outcome of cases to come like Forest’s.

“[The Everton appeal] needs to set some sort of benchmark,” Plumley tells i. “We’re in the realms of precedent and benchmark-setting, purely because, as we’ve seen with the Everton case, we’ve never had a points deduction linked to PSR breaches before.

Football finance expert Dr Dan Plumley believes that the Everton case has set the bar for PSR punishments and the result of their appeal will define the outcome of cases to come like Forest’s.

Combined with the effects of Covid-19, Everton’s case is considered complex and nuanced, whereas Forest’s largely revolves around their purchases of 44 players since promotion to the Premier League in 2022.

As Forest spent the first three seasons of the 2019-2023 financial period in the Championship, the loss limit they have breached is £61m, rather than Everton’s £105m.

They will argue the cost of maintaining their Premier League status led to the breach, alongside the decision to sell Brennan Johnson to Tottenham in August for £50m, outside the 2022-23 financial period, rather than to Brentford in June for £30m.

“The Forest one is a little more straightforward versus what we know of the Everton case,” Plumley says. “Principally, the Forest case centres on their spending in the transfer market and wages and contracts linked to that particular item of business.

“It’s those things that have run up the heavy losses: investing in getting back into the Premier League, the amount of players that they’ve signed. It does very much feel that the Forest case is more simply about the amount of player transfers and associated costs, whereas with Everton there’s issues around the way the stadium has been financed.

“It’ll hinge on the Brennan Johnson timing and how the Premier League and any potential independent commission on appeal views that.”

How Nottingham Forest and Everton’s FFP cases are similar

Yet there are some similarities between the two cases, and some will argue it is fairest to derive a punishment from these.

The most obvious is the nature of the respective charges – they have both broken the same rule, and it is predicted Forest’s breach figure is probably similar to Everton’s.