Brighton and Hove Albion owner Tony Bloom says he has little sympathy for rival Premier League clubs such as Everton and Nottingham Forest who have been punished for breaching profitability and sustainability rules (PSR).
Top-flight teams are set to vote next month on whether to replace PSR with a new system of financial controls based on a squad-cost ratio (SCR), in which clubs’ budgets will be capped at a certain percentage of their income.
Either way, Bloom says, the Premier League needs financial regulation and clubs cannot complain if they are punished for infringing rules which they have effectively chosen themselves.
“You don’t have to agree to the rules. You don’t have to have voted for them. If the league votes rules in, you have to abide by them,” he said.
“No competition can continue if people flout the rules, so people should stick to the rules and if they don’t, there needs to be consequences.
“We don’t want anyone to break the rules. Everyone knows what they are and in PSR it’s a three-year rolling amount you can lose of £105m that doesn’t include things like the academy, the women’s team and any infrastructure projects. It’s a huge amount of money.”
Bloom also hit back at complaints that PSR forced clubs to sell homegrown talent, calling them “really false”. He added: “You don’t have to sell homegrown players. You just need to organise your finances in a way that you are not at risk of going over the limit.”
Bloom: Rules must keep league competitive
The sports betting entrepreneur, whose data-driven recruitment has helped turn Brighton into one of the game’s most profitable clubs, said the Seagulls had not yet decided how they would vote in November’s Premier League summit.
But he warned that any financial rules must stay true to the league’s commitment to maintaining competitive balance between teams at both ends of the table.
“What is really important – and why the Premier League is so popular – is that, even though you’ve got some clubs with huge resources and some of the best teams in the world, on any given day, the bottom few teams can beat them,” he told The Athletic.
“So the gap between top and bottom is somewhat competitive. And if that gap grows too much, the interest in the Premier League will go down and the revenues of the Premier League will go down – and that will all the teams going down the pyramid.
“That for me is paramount and that’s the sort of level of detail that I’ll be looking at to make sure that will continue for decades to come.”