REPORT; Nick De Marco hit main point on Premier League oversight in Leicester City PSR case

Leicester City lawyer Nick De Marco has said the club’s appeal victory shows a “remarkable” oversight from the Premier League to not address the inconsistencies in their “badly-drafted” rules.

De Marco represented City as an independent panel ruled that the Premier League did not have the jurisdiction to charge the club with a breach of Profit and Sustainability Rules for the 22-23 season. The judgement means City avoided a deduction of what would likely have been at least six points.

In response, the Premier League released a statement saying they were “surprised” and “very disappointed” by the outcome. They went on to say the appeal board provided “limited reasons” for their decision and “failed to take into account the purpose of the rules”.

De Marco previously said that statement was a “concern” and now has addressed the Premier League’s response again. He also expressed surprise that the governing body had not thought to consider such eventualities previously.

Commenting on PSR, De Marco told The Times: “You have all these strange inconsistencies. It’s remarkable to me that the Premier League didn’t think about this before, and you can see from their rather over-the-top press statement that they don’t accept it.

“But their own argument to the panel was, ‘Look, we accept our rules are really badly drafted so can you help us out?’ Which isn’t the argument of someone who’s been very careful and is very confident about their own rules.”

City won their case because they argued their finances could not be assessed until the end of the financial year on June 30. By that point, they had officially been relegated from the Premier League, handing over their shares to Luton earlier in the month, and so were not under top-flight governance.

“Some people say it’s a technicality, a loophole,” De Marco said. “But it’s much more than that in this case because you are relegated on June 13 and your account end is June 30.

“You know that football’s main business is in the summer transfer window, which starts on June 14. So you’ve got two weeks in which you can spend or sell for tens or hundreds of millions, and what you do in those two weeks will be determinative of whether or not you have breached the rules.

“Then imagine a club that’s been completely prudent and is heading to be well within the £105m limit and it’s faced with relegation and it thinks: ‘Okay, we’ve got a lot of players coming out of contract, we’re going to the Championship and we’ve got to get straight back up.’

“So they spend £50m on a couple of the best strikers and that puts them over the limit. They’re over the limit after they’ve left the Premier League. So when you think about it, it’s not a technicality or loophole. The question is when does the breach occur, and the breach only occurs at the end of that period and that period is after the club is in the Premier League.”