'Friendly' transfer deals are put under the microscope

Finance rules see a flurry of June Premier League signings

- RICHARD JOLLY

There are types of transfer. There are free transfers and record-breaking transfers. There are statement signings and desperation signings. Now there is a new addition to the genre:

PSR transfers (for the uninitiated, PSR stands for Profit and Sustainability Rules). The flurry at the end of June reflected a new cut-off point in the calendar: the end of the footballing financial year.

So 30 June became a different kind of deadline day: the point by which the imperilled had to sell, to avoid the threat of deductions. It can feel like a strange result of Financial Fair Play, one of its laws of unintended consequences (the extra benefit of selling academy products, who qualify as pure profit in the accounts, being another).

The requirement to limit losses to £105m over a three-year period was underlined last season: everyone, it seemed, is scarred by the points penalties Everton and Nottingham Forest incurred for their own breaches. The failure of Forest’s Brennan Johnson argument – that they had received an offer for the Welsh winger by the end of June last year, rejected it because it did not meet their valuation and sold him for a higher sum two months later – seemed to serve as a warning to anyone else inclined to adopt the same approach.

And it created a cabal, a cartel, who all had an incentive to trade and give the impression they formed an informal agreement to buy from one another. Everton, Nottingham Forest, Newcastle, Leicester, Aston Villa and Chelsea conducted a remarkable amount of business with each other, and discussed even more (Dominic Calvert-Lewin did not, in the end, go to St James’ Park, for instance).