Whilst opposed to the fact Leicester City managed to avoid punishment from the Premier League over alleged financial rules breaches, Simon Jordan says that the EFL’s follow-up statement on the case has little meaning.
The Foxes’ appeal against the Premier League was upheld earlier this week in what was a huge win for the club. Now they are safe from the threat of a points deduction in that case, having successfully proven league chiefs acted outside of their jurisdiction in March when dealing a charge for a breach of Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR) as relegation meant the club became an EFL side during the period.
As for the Football League themselves, they weighed in on the debate with their own statement in response. The contents explained their shared frustrations with the Premier League and how it is ‘not right’ that a club is able to escape punishment due to movement between divisions.
“They’ve already lost their case, so they can say what they’ve just said,” Jordan bluntly responded on talkSPORT. “They’ve already lost their argument because Leicester had them over as well in terms of the argument they had no jurisdiction over Leicester.
“When they landed in the EFL after relegation, they had to show their accounts which show what their likely outcomes are for the next 12 months. They didn’t believe they had to do that because those projections were supposed to be in March of the year [2023], but they weren’t in the EFL in March, so they said: ‘we’re not going to give you those because you don’t have jurisdiction’.
“They didn’t, which meant that they didn’t have to sell the players that possibly those figures may have told them that they did. They stole a march, got promoted and won the league. That would have made the EFL bristle. Subsequently you have got the same set of circumstances in the Premier League and now what the EFL are saying is what I said.”
But whilst indifferent to the establishment’s outcry, the radio pundit laid bare his opposition to City’s legal achievement in this process.
Jordan continued: “Whether you like the rules or not – and I am not a fan of them, I have grown less of a fan of them over a period of time.
“Fantastic work by the lawyers, and the reasons I had the ire about it yesterday is because I think it is poor – I don’t think it is the way to operate and I think they should have got caught. If Everton got caught, Nottingham Forest got caught and they got points sanctions, these guys have done precisely the same thing and all they have done is exploited the incompetence of the drafting.”
He finished with a warning to the club that they will be heavily scrutinised in future reviews of financial statements.
“What I think will happen to Leicester is they will be after them for the 23/24 season, because those accounts will have to be produced soon. We will have to see if they have got enough juice in their tanks to get around being sanctioned this season still, because the appetite is that the Premier League will not like what they’ve done, you can hear from the EFL they don’t find it particularly amusing either.”
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