James Loughran @JamesLoughran - Twitter Profile

PSR was anti-competitive. SCR is arguably worse. Here's why the Premier League's financial rules don't protect competition — they protect the established order. 🧵👇 (all in one post) SCR lets every club spend 85% of football revenue on their squad. Sounds fair, right? Same percentage for everyone. Except 85% of £700m is £595m. 85% of £300m is £255m. The rule doesn't level the playing field — it takes the existing revenue gap and writes it into law. The clubs who built their revenue advantage decades ago (much of it in the pre-regulation era) get to spend from a permanently bigger pot. And here's the part nobody talks about enough: revenue in football follows success. You grow commercial income by winning things and playing in Europe. But to win things you need to spend, and you're only allowed to spend what your current revenue permits. It's a closed loop. The Big Six's moat isn't talent or ideas — it's regulation. Now look at what happens when a club actually breaks through: 🔴⚪ Newcastle. Ended a 70-year domestic trophy drought, qualified for the Champions League — and their "reward" was selling academy graduates before a June 30 accounting deadline to stay PSR compliant. Pure profit on homegrown players sold not for football reasons, but for spreadsheet reasons. 🟣 Aston Villa. Champions League quarter-finalists. Their prize? Forced player sales every June and UEFA fines, because European qualification drops your squad cost ceiling from 85% to UEFA's 70%. Read that again: succeeding LOWERS your spending headroom relative to your domestic rivals who didn't qualify. That's the glass ceiling. Win a trophy, reach the CL, do everything right — and the rules snap you back to your "correct" place in the hierarchy. The league had one genuine chance to fix this: Top-to-Bottom Anchoring, which would have capped everyone's spending at a multiple of the bottom club's TV money. An actual competitive-balance mechanism. The clubs voted it down. So we're left with a system that calls itself "sustainability" but functions as protectionism. Owners with capital ready to invest are barred from doing so. Challengers are forced to sell their best young players to fund ambition. And the same handful of clubs get regulatory cover to stay on top forever. Competition law exists to stop incumbents rigging markets against new entrants. English football has done exactly that — and called it fair play.

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