Eddie Howe is frustrated with the Premier League’s financial regulations – should we have any sympathy?

Profitability and sustainability. Two concepts that many working within the football industry would think, for the most part, are good things. But over the coming weeks and months, do not be surprised if you hear more and more top-flight managers follow the lead of Eddie Howe in expressing their annoyance at both.

“It’s a frustration for everyone connected to us because the owners are very ambitious and they would like to help and improve the squad at every opportunity they have,” Howe lamented when asked about the Premier League’s profitability and sustainability regulations (PSR) on Friday. “The rules don’t allow that. We’re acting in the way we can.”

Howe’s comments followed those of Newcastle United chief executive Darren Eales, who suggested this week that Everton’s 10-point deduction for breaching the Premier League’s version of financial fair play (FFP) at the end of the 2021-22 season has “showed that there were teeth to the PSR regime”.

Why the focus now? Well, because early next week, top-flight clubs should receive their first indication as to whether they were PSR compliant during the 2022-23 campaign. Newcastle are not expected to be in breach for this cycle, although a pre-tax loss of £73.9m in their latest set of accounts diminishes their headroom for next season’s test.

That is already affecting Newcastle’s ability to spend during the January window. And as Eales admitted, it means even Howe’s best and most valuable players have a price in the market. “Every Premier League club will sell players now because of the rules placed upon them,” the Newcastle manager added. “Selling players is vital to being able to bring players in the other way.”

And while it will be difficult for many to summon up sympathy for a club who are majority-owned by the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia and who have spent more than £400m on transfers since that takeover in October 2021, Howe was not the only dissenting voice heard during Friday’s round of pre-match press conferences.

Just as Newcastle broke through the so-called ‘Big Six’ last season, Aston Villa have done the same this term. But understandably, Unai Emery and the hierarchy at Villa Park want to push further.

“They want to invest more and more but accept the rules and accept financial fair play,” Emery said of the Villa owners. Echoing Howe, he admitted they too will have to sell players before they can buy in the future. “We have to accept the rules and accept that if we want to sign someone, one has to leave on our list in the squad.”

There is a fundamental tension at play here. Top-flight English football is a multi-billion-pound industry where those billions can only be spread out and spent over the long term. At the same time, it is an industry with an insatiable appetite for growth, investment and success. No manager, chief executive or owner wants to invest tomorrow if they are ready to invest today.

One argument goes that by limiting that ability to spend, financial regulation merely protects and strengthens English and European football’s dominant forces. It is not one without merit. By design, FFP allows clubs with the highest revenues to spend more than their rivals. How, in that landscape, do ambitious clubs with fewer resources at their disposal break into the elite, except by an injection of sovereign wealth?

It feels instructive that the fairytale of Leicester City’s 2015-16 title-winning campaign — the exception which proves the rule of ‘Big Six’ dominance over the past decade — was followed by relegation last season, one that came amid reluctance to spend due to concerns about compliance with financial rules.

If a 5,000-1 shot at glory followed by an Icarus-esque fall from grace is the best mid-ranking Premier League clubs can hope for from the present system, it does not seem one worth defending. But then what is the alternative?

For those who value clubs as more than businesses but as community assets that require protection, it cannot be a return to European clubs losing almost $2billion (£1.57bn in today’s money) in total annually, as they were before UEFA’s FFP regulations were introduced at the turn of the last decade. The rules have been a success in that regard, greatly improving the solvency of smaller clubs.

It cannot be an absence of spending rules either. Were there no regulation in place whatsoever, owners with the deepest pockets would have free reign to flood the market with that money — inflating prices, distorting budgets and widening the gap between the group of haves and have-nots.

If the current system is accused of entrenching the power of the status quo, then its outright abolition would only create a new supremacy of the super rich, one that may prove even harder to shift. After all, when was the current status quo forged and formed but pre-FFP, during the unregulated years of the 1990s and 2000s?

So if not revolution, what about reform? The Premier League’s PSR allows for losses of up to £90million over three years to be covered by funding from ownership — provided that comes in the form of equity, rather than a gift or a loan. Widening those margins could be one way to encourage more investment while maintaining a strict regulatory framework.

But the question then will be, as ever, where to draw the line? That is difficult to answer when many of us watching on from the outside believe it was crossed long ago. Ideally, the playing field would not need to be levelled in the first place.

Yet in the absence of a fair, equitable model of redistributing football’s wealth — seemingly more of a hopelessly romantic prospect with every passing year — a form of regulation which allows for gradual, organic and sustainable growth, which protects clubs from their own worst instincts to spend beyond their means, and which prevents sovereign wealth from quickly distorting the game’s already fragile competitive balance further is maybe the best we can hope for.

For all its faults and imperfections, that sounds a lot like the system as it already exists. And for the most part, that sounds like a good thing.

(Top photo: Alex Dodd – CameraSport via Getty Images)