24 June 2024 , 07:00
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Chelsea, Aston Villa and Everton have engaged in a succession of transfer deals to beat a Premier League deadline.
All three clubs are close to falling foul of the rules around profit and sustainability, otherwise known as PSR. Top-flight sides are allowed total losses of £105million over a rolling three-year period, adjusted for those clubs not in the division for all three years.
The Toffees and Nottingham Forest were both found guilty of breaking those rules last season. That saw them fined and handed points deductions, though neither side were relegated down to the Championship.
Now, Everton are again in danger of breaking them again, along with Chelsea and Villa. June 30 marks the end of football's financial year, meaning deals have to be completed before then to be included in the accounts for the season just gone.
With just six days to go before that deadline, the three sides have engaged in a succession of cross-player transactions. Such deals are a key way of balancing the books, due to purchases being amortised over several years while the full amount for any sale is accounted in the year it happens.
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Homegrown players in particular are valuable because selling them represents pure profit. As a result, Chelsea have bought Omari Kellyman from Villa for £19m, despite the midfielder playing just 35 minutes of Premier League football last season.
In return, Villa will spend £37.5m to buy Ian Maatsen from the Blues, subject to personal terms being agreed. The Midlands side have also bought Lewis Dobbin from Everton for an undisclosed fee.
That deal came a day after midfielder Tim Iroegbunam made a switch in the opposite direction for a reported £9m. Newcastle are expected to engage in similar transactions to ease their own PSR concerns.
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Omari Kellyman will join Chelsea from Villa in a similar deal to Maatsen'sThe written reasons for Forest's points deduction, published by the independent commission in March made the importance of the June 30 deadline clear. Before the same date last year, Forest attempted to sell star attacker Brennan Johnson to ensure their compliance with PSR.
But his £47.5m move to Tottenham did not go through until the end of the window, too late to address the £34.5m breach in their books. That led to a four-point deduction for the East Midlands side.
There is nothing to stop clubs from engaging in these types of deals with fellow top-flight sides. They do need to satisfy regulations around 'fair market value' which were introduced after Newcastle were bought by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund.
That means clubs with the same owner cannot bail each other out with inflated prices. There have been suggestions that those rules could be tightened due to difficulties assessing player valuations, though that has not yet been looked at.