“It’s payback time” – Kieran Maguire on why the EFL and Premier League are joining forces against Leicester

The football finance expert tells NTT20.COM that the Foxes could face not one but two sets of points deductions...

On the pitch, Leicester City have started the 2025/26 season better than their recently relegated counterparts: they’re 4th with 11 points from six games, while Ipswich Town and Southampton sit 17th and 19th. Off the pitch, the question of a possible points deduction for Profit & Sustainability Rules (PSR) breaches rumbles on… and, according to Kieran Maguire, it looks likely to get worse before it gets better.

The author of The Price of Football, and host of the podcast by the same name, has explained to NTT20.COM why the authorities’ latest case against Leicester might not fail in the way their previous attempt did.

“There’s an outstanding case from the Premier League relating to the club’s finances for the three years ending 30th June 2024 – a potential breach of PSR,” says Maguire. “Leicester managed to not just overturn but effectively prosecute the Premier League when they were there, and kicked a few cans down the road. That has resulted in the Premier League and the EFL now deciding they’re going to work together on the financial side of things.

“Previously, if the Premier League had investigated Leicester when they’d been there for three years, then Leicester got relegated and the Premier League concluded that there should be a points deduction, the EFL would’ve said, ‘Well, that’s your problem. We’re separate organisations; you can sort that out when Leicester go back up.’ But it now looks as if they’ll implement each other’s policies.”

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A work of legal art

PSR limits Premier League clubs to losses of £105m across three years (less if they’ve been recently promoted). The new charges refer to the three financial years ending in June 2024. The previous charges were for an alleged PSR breach in the three seasons ending in June 2023, the summer that Brendan Rodgers’ side suffered a shock relegation. The club had those charges overturned upon appeal with what Maguire calls “an absolute work of legal art”.

“Nick De Marco is a lawyer and a genius,” he explains. “He managed to prove that on 30th June 2023, Leicester weren’t in the Premier League, because they had transferred their share in the Premier League to [the promoted] Luton Town, and the EFL couldn’t prosecute them because they weren’t in the EFL for the season 2022/23.” Leicester showed that their accounting period for that financial year ended on June 30th, when they apparently existed in this liminal space between divisions – “a Twilight Zone of football,” as Maguire puts it.

“But these things come back to haunt you,” he continues. “I think the Premier League and the EFL both feel slightly aggrieved that they’ve lost cases to Leicester in the past couple of years – and now it’s payback time.”

Earlier this year, the Premier League’s challenge to the appeal board’s August 2024 decision in Leicester’s favour – their appeal to the appeal to the appeal, if you like – was rejected, and the league had this to say in response:

“While the arbitration panel decided that the appeal board was wrong, they found the appeal board’s decision was not a perverse interpretation of the law (which was the relevant test to overturn the decision), and therefore dismissed the Premier League’s claim.”

Leicester, for their part, declared that, “The club has simply sought to ensure (in the interests of providing consistency and certainty for all clubs) that the rules are applied based on how they are actually written.”

The Premier League has since closed this legal loophole, no doubt thanking Leicester for alerting them to it. And now it can’t help the club in this new investigation into losses incurred from 2021 to 2024. That same arbitration panel confirmed that the Premier League now has jurisdiction, even though Leicester spent the last of those seasons in the Championship, because the EFL have effectively said, “Have at it” (or, more precisely, “the EFL validly transferred responsibility for its investigation to the Premier League in June 2024, when the club was promoted from the Championship”).

And that’s not all.

Not single spies but in battalions

The club’s accounts for 2024/25 naturally haven’t been released yet, but the losses they carried into that season are unlikely to have vanished overnight. In terms of transfer fees, Leicester are reported to have spent twice what they received during the 24/25 campaign, while several well-paid squad players remained on the books and on the bench. “It could be,” Maguire muses, “that Leicester receive separate charges from the EFL during 2025/26. That’s my concern. I think the EFL might start a separate prosecution in a few months’ time.

“Leicester could face one or they could face two potential sets of points deductions, coming through in the same season.”

It’s notable that Leicester had a summer of unusual inactivity in 2025. Whether that was driven by the surrounding off-pitch uncertainty is, well, uncertain, but the club provided fans with next to no communication for weeks following relegation, until Ruud van Nistelrooy’s inevitable departure as manager was finally announced on 27th June. When they appointed Martí Cifuentes on 15th July, more than three months after the Foxes’ relegation was confirmed, it was rumoured (though not confirmed) that the ex-QPR boss had to pay part of his own compensation fee to join Leicester.

They did, however, have a busy deadline day. On 1st September, Leicester brought in three players on loan while loaning out five of their own, following a summer in which they’d signed one player – 38-year-old back-up goalkeeper Asmir Begovic – while offloading a number of first-teamers and making some £50m in sales. Maguire notes they chose to receive a lot of that cash up front.

“The other thing that’s been noticeable with Leicester in the past few seasons is when they’ve sold players,” Maguire begins.

“Most player deals these days are on an instalments basis. If you look at the [2024] sale of Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall from Leicester to Chelsea, and I’ve got the documentations, you can see it was £30m but actually that was three instalments of £10m – so, £10m in down payments, £10m in a year and £10m in two years. What Leicester did, though, is go to a bank and say, ‘We’ve got these two IOUs from Chelsea, dated 2025 and 2026. Can we effectively have a payday loan? You give us the money and Chelsea will pay the instalments to you.’

“They’ve also done that with the sale of Mads Hermansen [to West Ham this summer]. We’ve got three payments here of £3.775m, and West Ham would have paid a deposit as well. Leicester have done this with TV money, too, with parachute payments. So, from a cash point of view, they do seem to be in… not a terrible position but not a great position, either.”

Vampire kangaroos

Maguire does add, “I’m not worried about Leicester in terms of ‘can they pay the bills?’ – it’s a PSR concern.” Besides, it’s actually quite common for clubs to engage in this behaviour.

“Wolves have done it,” Maguire continues. “West Ham have done it. Spurs have just done it with their TV money. All of the clubs are buying players on credit, but it’s a bit like living your life on your credit card and then you’ve got to pay it. There’s an Australian bank called Macquarie that specialises in being a payday loan provider to the football loan industry – that’s who Spurs and Leicester have used. They’re known as ‘the vampire kangaroo’.” (This, by the way, is a twist on Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi describing investment bank Goldman Sachs in 2009 as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity”, which does make more zoological sense; at NTT20.COM we make no comment on Macquarie being a kangaroo, vampiric or otherwise.)

As ever, the only sure thing is that we can’t be sure exactly when, how or even if Leicester will be hit with points deductions. Manchester City have shown that such matters can last some time.

But the EFL and the Premier League are combining to ensure that, after Leicester escaped punishment for overspending in the years 2020 to 2023, they can’t use the same loophole for 2021 to 2024. That avenue, at least, is closed. They face three charges for alleged breaches in the 2023/24 season – not just the claims of a supposed PSR breach itself but failing to provide annual accounts by 31st December 2024 and not giving “full, complete and prompt assistance” in response to the Premier League’s inquiries. What’s more, there’s a possibility of a second points deduction if Leicester are found guilty of a PSR breach in their 2024/25 records, to be released later this season, and the EFL won’t lack motivation to act if that is the case.

In other words, it may be a doubly good thing that Cifuentes’ side have started well. The Premier League and the EFL are going fox-hunting.