As I understand it, the changes mainly roll back some tweaks that were made to the rules and come in response to the independent hearing on the APT rules. If you remember, City said they had a massive win over the PL. In reality, the panel held that the rules needed changing in three respects:
1. To apply a market-rate interest charge to shareholder loans - the panel held that this was the only ground on which the rules were unlawful and they were at pains to say so.
2. To roll back some updates made to the rules last year.
3. To include a process whereby clubs could access the underlying data on which an APT decision had been made (which would facilitate an appeal against a decision).
The Premier League's statement today says all of those matters are addressed.
At a Premier League Shareholders’ meeting today, clubs approved changes to the League’s Associated Party Transaction (APT) rules
www.premierleague.com
It's interesting that Everton voted in favour of the new rules. They had provided evidence to support City in the previous arbitration. The outcome of City's case is that Everton are stuffed on their shareholder loans under point 1. The PL statement says the new rules give them a pass for historic exposures and they will likely restructure out of any future exposure when the takeover goes through. Any existing loans still in place in January 2025 will be subject to the APT rules. But Everton danced with the Devil and he fucked them. Lesson learned. Lots of clubs will be converting their loans into shares in the coming months (expect to see people tweeting about share issues). This may even be what Newcastle did in the last few weeks.
The roll-back of the earlier changes to the rules isn't a biggie, and in truth it was probably fair as the changes gave too much power to the PL in how they managed the process.
I'd be interested to see what the changes are in 3. I'd have thought this would be the most problematic as full disclosure would lead to clubs' sensitive commercial information being available to the shady clubs in the league. They must have found a way of doing this without giving that data away, and that may be the basis of City's continuing objection - that they think they would need to see all the private information. This is kind of what the decision said, but I think the decision was wrong in that respect as it didn't take over-riding commercial concerns into account.
In terms of what it means for the 115 charges, today doesn't really change anything for that case. The judgment on APT underlined that the principle was fine, but there were some issues with how the process was managed. So to the extent the charges under 115 relate to over-priced, related-party deals, then City are still on a sticky wicket.
For City's on-going troubles, it probably isn't that significant either. On the one hand, you could say that it shows a number of clubs opposed to City, but the reality is that if they get shafted on PSR, they would likely still get some sympathy from clubs who've had PSR run-ins with the PL (Everton, Leicester, Forest, Chelsea). All of those clubs voted in favour of these changes so they evidently see it as a separate issue and want to level the playing field with the oil clubs.
So really all it does is help us to know who is planning to bend the APT rules - City, Villa, Forest and Newcastle. That's not really much of a surprise.
bsky.app
