13th August 2026

Duties of care in adjudication: Judges, Premier League independent commissions, and the systemic-risk governance gap

The immediate context is the Burnley FC v Everton FC compensation decision (PLJP 2023/3, 2 June 2026) and the systemic risk should Everton’s appeal fail.

TL;DR

• Judges owe no enforceable tort duty of care to third parties, the economy or the wider population when deciding cases, but English law nonetheless embeds systematic consequence-sensitivity through doctrine (the Caparo “fair, just and reasonable” limb and the “floodgates” principle), remedial discretion (Coventry v Lawrence), statutory sentencing purposes and guidelines (which expressly require courts to weigh impact on employees, customers and the wider economy), and the public-interest test in deferred prosecution agreements (Rolls-Royce). Premier League independent commissions have none of these institutional consequence-filters: they are private contractual tribunals that apply the Premier League Rules as written, and Rule W.51.5 directs them to award compensatory damages that are, in the rule’s own words, “unlimited in amount”  with no cap, no proportionality gate, no ability-to-pay provision, and no mandate to consider the “wider interests of the game.”

• Every mature regulated industry vests its regulator or adjudicative bodies with an express or implied duty to the stability of the system as a whole. Ofwat must secure that companies can finance their functions (Water Industry Act 1991, s.2); the FCA/PRA weigh financial stability and can reduce penalties causing serious hardship (DEPP 6.5D); the CMA and EU Commission recognise inability-to-pay. Football now has such a body, the Independent Football Regulator, created by the Football Governance Act 2025 with an express “systemic financial resilience objective” (s.6(b)). but the IFR has no power to stay, cap or override a Rule W commission’s compensation award. That is the governance gap.

• The Burnley v Everton decision (£26.0m principal plus £9.1m interest, uncapped and non-contextualised against systemic risk) is the first activation of an inter-club compensation pipeline that could cascade to the Manchester City and other cases. The Premier League and its clubs should act now to amend Rule W.51.5 (causation standard, quantum caps/tariffs, mandatory mediation), build an express “interests of the game” and ability-to-pay gate into the compensation regime, establish a league-level netting or compensation-fund mechanism, and formally engage the IFR’s systemic-resilience and State of the Game functions, rather than leaving systemic outcomes to individual commissions that no rule requires to consider them.

Key Findings

1. Judicial immunity is about personal liability, not institutional indifference to consequences. A judge cannot be sued for a judicial act (Sirros v Moore [1975] QB 118; Re McC (A Minor) [1985] AC 528). This absence of a personal duty of care is entirely distinct from the doctrinal mechanisms by which the common law forces judges to weigh wider consequences.

2. The common law’s principal consequence-filter is the Caparo “fair, just and reasonable” limb and the floodgates doctrine. In Caparo Industries plc v Dickman [1990] 2 AC 605 the House of Lords refused a duty of care that would expose defendants to “liability in an indeterminate amount for an indeterminate time to an indeterminate class” (Cardozo CJ, Ultramares Corp v Touche (1931)). This is the law consciously refusing to let a single case generate systemic liability, precisely the discipline Rule W.51.5 lacks.

3. Sentencing law expressly requires courts to weigh wider economic and social effects. The Sentencing Council’s definitive guideline for corporate offenders directs courts to consider a fine’s impact on employees, customers, service users and the local economy; the DPA public-interest test (SFO v Rolls-Royce, Leveson P, 2017) openly weighed employment, the supply chain and national economic interest.

4. Premier League commissions are private contractual tribunals, creatures of a contract (the Handbook) between member clubs, drawn from an independent Judicial Panel. They apply the Rules as written; the Rules contain no systemic-stability objective and no direction to weigh the “wider interests of the game” in a compensation claim.

5. Rule W.51.5 awards uncapped compensatory damages with no consequence-filter. The Burnley v Everton commission treated the claim as an ordinary contractual damages claim; found causation on a bare balance of probabilities (a 51.47% model output) with no loss-of-a-chance discount; and applied no proportionality, ability-to-pay or “interests of the game” gate. The phrase “interests of the game” appears in the decision only in a quoted authority about sanctions, not in the commission’s own reasoning about the compensation award.

6. Football uniquely built inter-competitor civil liability into its rules. This was a design choice: Formula 1 (Red Bull’s 2021 cost-cap breach) and rugby union (Saracens’ 2019 salary-cap breach) produced no inter-competitor compensation claims because their governance frameworks contain no equivalent to Rule W.51.5.

7. The Independent Football Regulator has the systemic mandate the commissions lack, but not the power to use it here. The IFR’s “systemic financial resilience objective” (Football Governance Act 2025, s.6(b)) is engaged by cascading inter-club litigation, but the IFR cannot cap awards, stay Rule W proceedings, or override commission decisions.

Details

Judicial duties and consequentialist reasoning in English law

Judicial immunity distinguished from institutional consequence-sensitivity. A judge owes no private-law duty of care enforceable in tort. In Sirros v Moore [1975] QB 118, Lord Denning MR held that “no action is maintainable against a judge for anything said or done by him in the exercise of a jurisdiction which belongs to him… No matter that the judge was under some gross error or ignorance, or was actuated by envy, hatred and malice… he is not liable to an action.” 

The rationale, as the case explains, is public not personal: immunity is given “not so much for their own sake as for the sake of the public… that being free from actions, they may be free in thought and independent in judgment.” Re McC (A Minor) [1985] AC 528 refined the boundary for inferior courts. The analytical point for this report: the absence of a personal duty of care says nothing about whether the substance of judicial decision-making must attend to wider consequences. It must,  but through doctrine, not tort liability.

The floodgates doctrine and Caparo. The primary vehicle by which English law refuses to let individual cases generate systemic liability is the third limb of Caparo Industries plc v Dickman [1990] 2 AC 605: whether it is “fair, just and reasonable” to impose a duty of care. This limb, per Lord Bridge, expressly permits consideration of “wider societal implications, resource allocation concerns, and the need to avoid imposing indeterminate liability.” The animating fear is Cardozo CJ’s warning in Ultramares Corp v Touche (1931) against “liability in an indeterminate amount for an indeterminate time to an indeterminate class.” The same policy reasoning runs through the immunity/no-duty line of public-authority cases: Hill v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire [1989] AC 53; X (Minors) v Bedfordshire County Council [1995] 2 AC 633; Michael v Chief Constable of South Wales [2015] UKSC 2; and Robinson v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire [2018] UKSC 4 (recalibrating Caparo toward incremental reasoning by analogy). Marc Rich & Co v Bishop Rock Marine (The Nicholas H) [1996] AC 211 applied the fair-just-reasonable filter to deny a duty owed by a classification society, expressly on policy grounds concerning the wider maritime-insurance system. 

The doctrinal lesson: English judges are institutionally trained and doctrinally required to ask whether a ruling will open floodgates,  the very question no Premier League commission is directed to ask.

Public policy in remedies and quantum. Beyond duty, courts weigh wider consequences at the remedial stage. In Coventry v Lawrence [2014] UKSC 13 the Supreme Court loosened the rigid Shelfer test and held that public interest and the economic value of the defendant’s activity may justify awarding damages instead of an injunction,  i.e. the court may decline the “correct” remedy for the individual claimant where the wider public interest (including third-party employment and amenity) so requires. Lord Denning’s dissent in Miller v Jackson [1977] QB 966 (“the public interest should prevail over the private interest”) is the classic statement, substantially vindicated in Coventry. This is consequentialism embedded in remedial discretion.

Sentencing: express statutory and guideline consequence-sensitivity. Section 57 of the Sentencing Act 2020 sets five statutory purposes of sentencing for adults: punishment, reduction of crime (including by deterrence), reform and rehabilitation, protection of the public, and reparation. More directly relevant, the Sentencing Council’s definitive guideline for corporate offenders (fraud, bribery and money laundering; and the parallel health-and-safety and environmental guidelines) requires courts, after setting a fine with “real economic impact which will bring home to both management and shareholders the need to operate within the law,” to consider the “impact of the fine on employment of staff, service users, customers and local economy”, while pointedly excluding impact on shareholders. The guideline accepts that putting an offender out of business may in some cases be acceptable, but the calibration exercise is explicitly consequence-sensitive. R v Thames Water Utilities illustrates courts scaling fines to a very large undertaking’s means and profitability.

Deferred prosecution agreements and the public interest. The DPA regime is the clearest example of an English judge openly weighing systemic economic consequences. In the Rolls-Royce DPA (approved by Sir Brian Leveson P, President of the Queen’s Bench Division, 17 January 2017; total settlement £671m, of which the UK component was £497.25m), the court expressly took into account that Rolls-Royce employed “a total of 50,000 people” and was “of central importance to the United Kingdom”,  Leveson P separately described it as “a jewel in the UK’s industrial crown”, and that a prosecution would have damaged the UK defence industry, harmed supply-chain businesses, distorted competition and prompted redundancies and a share-price fall. The court granted a 50% penalty discount despite the absence of self-reporting. The subsequent Ultra Electronics DPA echoed this, noting the DPA would “help safeguard the position of innocent employees and the public from adverse effects on the UK defence industry.” This is judicial consequentialism at its most explicit, a direct template for the kind of “wider interests” analysis football commissions do not perform.

Precedent and the declaratory function. Judges are acutely aware that rulings operate as precedent affecting the wider economy. The debate over prospective overruling in Re Spectrum Plus Ltd [2005] UKHL 41 shows the senior judiciary grappling openly with the systemic/economic consequences of changing the law,  the House of Lords accepted that prospective overruling could, in principle, be available to avoid economic disruption, precisely because judges recognise their decisions ripple beyond the parties.

 Legal theory. Ronald Dworkin (Taking Rights Seriously, 1977; Law’s Empire, 1986) argued that judges “characteristically are and should be” guided by arguments of principle (individual rights) not policy (collective goals), because judges are unelected and policy-based adjudication is quasi-retroactive. 

H.L.A. Hart and John Griffith contested this, observing that judges plainly do weigh policy (e.g. D v NSPCC). Richard Posner’s economic analysis of law is frankly consequentialist. The synthesis that is relevant here, even on Dworkin’s restrictive view, the legislature supplies the policy/consequence filter; the common law then supplies its own through the Caparo policy limb and remedial discretion. In football, neither a legislature nor an equivalent doctrinal filter operates on the commissions,  the “rules as contract” simply direct compensation.

 Premier League independent commissions

Constitutional structure. The Premier League is a company limited by guarantee owned by its 20 member clubs; its Rules (the Handbook) are, in the commissions’ own words, a “contract” between the clubs and an expression of a “joint venture.” Disciplinary proceedings run under Section W and arbitration under Section X. Since 2019 the League has used a wholly independent Judicial Panel: members are appointed under Rules W.19, W.20 and W.26 by an independent Chair (Murray Rosen KC until his term ended; clubs unanimously approved Sir Gary Hickinbottom, a former Lord Justice of Appeal, as his successor in February 2025 for a five-year term). The Chair selects three-member commissions from the Panel; commissions are “independent of the Premier League and its clubs”; proceedings are private; and under Rule W.82.2 (W.83.3 in later numbering) the final decision is published. Appeal Boards (also appointed by the Panel Chair, one member having held judicial office) hear appeals.

Legal character and susceptibility to challenge. Section X arbitrations are arbitrations under the Arbitration Act 1996 (challengeable on limited grounds,  s.68 serious irregularity, s.69 point of law). Section W disciplinary commissions are contractual/expert tribunals. Judicial review does not lie (R v Disciplinary Committee of the Jockey Club, ex p Aga Khan [1993] 1 WLR 909); instead the courts exercise a private-law supervisory jurisdiction “akin to” judicial review. Per Richards J in Bradley v The Jockey Club [2004] EWHC 2164, upheld [2005] EWCA Civ 1056: “the function of the court is not to take the primary decision but to ensure that the primary decision-maker has operated within lawful limits.” Crucially, Bradley confirms that the tribunal,  not the reviewing court,  is the proportionality decision-maker, and the court affords a wide margin. So even the supervisory safety-net does not import a systemic “interests of the game” filter; it polices legality and rationality, not wider consequences.

What the Rules direct commissions to consider- sanctions. In the PSR sanctioning cases the commissions articulated a clear, and narrow, purpose set. The first Everton commission (10-point deduction, 17 November 2023, reduced to 6 on appeal 26 February 2024) held that sanction must serve “punishment, deterrence, vindication of compliant clubs, and the protection of the integrity of the sport,” that “any sanction should go no further than reasonably necessary to achieve those four aims,” and (quoting Lord Dyson in Sheffield Wednesday FC v The Football League, SR/196/2020) that a points deduction’s “wider aim [is] upholding the integrity of the competition and protecting the interests of the game.” 

The Appeal Board clarified that “punishment is far less important than maintaining the integrity of the competition… with deterrence being an important overlapping aim.” Everton’s second case (2 points) and Nottingham Forest (4 points) applied the same framework, the second Everton commission noting a sanction “must reflect the aims of the PSR in the wider context of the Premier League, being a joint venture of all the clubs” and “must… ensure public confidence in the Premier League.” 

So in sanctioning, a limited species of “wider interest” (competition integrity, deterrence, confidence) is present, but it is directed at protecting the integrity of the competition, not at avoiding systemic financial damage to the game.

What the Rules direct commissions to consider – compensation. This is the crux. The Burnley v Everton claim (PLJP 2023/3) was brought, in the words of the decision’s own title page, “in the matter of a claim for compensation… under Rule W.51.5 of the Premier League Rules” (2021/22 numbering; the equivalent in current Rules is W.52.5; the decision notes at footnote 19 that “although the numbers have changed in subsequent years the relevant provisions are not in dispute”). 

The commission (David Phillips KC FCIArb; HH Alan Greenwood; Nick Igoe ACA) had earlier ruled (Construction Issue, 25 October 2024) that Rule W compensation is not a further sanction but a contractual claim in which conventional principles of causation and damages apply. 

The object, per the decision, was “to put [Burnley] in the position that it would have been in if Everton had not breached the PSR.” Rule W.51.5 empowers the commission to “order the Respondent to pay compensation unlimited in amount.” The commission expressly declined to use the scale of Everton’s overspend (£19.5m) as a proxy or cap for loss: “We do not accept that the scale of the overspend represented a suitable proxy for Burnley’s financial loss” (para 181).

 The result: £26.0m principal (a £24.6m operating-loss component plus a £1.4m player-trading component) plus £9.1m compound pre-award interest at Burnley’s actual borrowing cost (10.49% rising to 11.81%), a total of some £35.0m as at 31 July 2025, with interest continuing at 11.81%. Burnley had claimed £51.7m before interest (para 8: “Burnley alleges its recoverable loss to be in the region of £51.7 million”). Everton’s PSR loss for the period ending 30 June 2022 was found to be £124.5m against the £105m permitted maximum — a £19.5m breach (para 63).

Two features are decisive for this report:

• Causation was found on a bare balance of probabilities with no discount. The commission preferred the Wilson/Daniels model (Everton’s 38 matches simulated 100,000 times), whose Scenario 4 gave a 51.47% probability that Everton, not Burnley, would have been relegated absent the overspend. At paragraph 170: “on the balance of probabilities, the breach of the PSR caused Everton to avoid relegation… That finding means that Everton’s breach of the PSR caused Burnley to be relegated.” Because causation was found on the balance of probabilities rather than as a loss of a chance, no percentage discount was applied to quantum,  a 51.47% probability yielded 100% of the assessed loss. This is a legitimate but aggressive application of the “all-or-nothing” causation rule, and it maximises the volatility of outcomes. (The decision itself is internally inconsistent, writing “51.46%” at paras 144 and 167 against “51.47%” in the para 88 table, a minor point that underscores the false precision criticised by commentators.)
• No systemic / floodgates / “interests of the game” analysis appears in the commission’s compensation reasoning. The commission confined itself to causation and quantum. The phrase “interests of the game” appears only in the quoted Sheffield Wednesday authority about sanctions. Everton’s characterisation of the award as “a dangerous and unworkable precedent” and “fundamentally flawed in both law and fact” is a public statement, not a submission the commission addressed on the merits in its reasoning. Ability to pay and financial soundness were raised only at the enforcement stage (Everton sought an escrow/stay by reference to Burnley’s financial position), and were rejected; a stay of enforcement was refused. Everton is appealing as of right.

Contrast with FA Rule K, CAS and UEFA CFCB. FA Rule K arbitrations are likewise private (Arbitration Act 1996) but are governed by the FA’s regulatory objectives. CAS jurisprudence expressly invokes the “specificity of sport” (see e.g. the ENIC UEFA integrity-rule award; the uniformity rationale in CAS 2005/A/983 & 984 Suárez) and reviews sanctions for whether they are “evidently and grossly disproportionate.”

CAS thus builds a proportionality-and-specificity filter into its review that the Premier League compensation regime does not require of first-instance commissions. UEFA’s Club Financial Control Body operates a settlement/proportionality practice under the financial-sustainability regulations. 

The point is not that football tribunals cannot weigh wider interests, CAS routinely does, but that the Premier League’s Rule W.51.5 compensation power, as construed, does not direct them to.

The governance gap. No body in the Premier League structure is tasked with weighing the systemic effects of adjudicative outcomes. 

The commissions are (rightly) independent and apply the Rules as written. The Premier League Board is a party, prosecutor and rule-maker, and is structurally conflicted, since its own breach findings create the platform for one member to sue another. The member-club voting structure (a 14-club supermajority to change Rules) guards collective commercial interests in rule-making, but no organ guards the collective interest in adjudicative outcomes. This is the vacuum.

Regulators in other regulated industries: the wider duty

The comparative evidence is one-directional: every mature regulated sector vests systemic responsibility in the regulator or its adjudicative bodies.

Water (Ofwat). Section 2 of the Water Industry Act 1991 imposes a statutory duty on Ofwat to “secure that water companies can (in particular through securing reasonable returns on their capital) finance the proper carrying out of their statutory functions,” alongside a resilience objective to secure long-term resilience. 

This is a regulator with an express statutory duty not to destroy the regulated entity. The special administration regime (invoked for Bulb Energy and discussed around Thames Water) is the ultimate systemic backstop,  evidence that continuity of service and systemic stability override the “correct” outcome for any single failing firm.

Financial services (FCA/PRA/Bank of England). The FCA’s strategic objective is that markets function well, with operational objectives of consumer protection, integrity and competition (FSMA 2000), plus a new secondary international-competitiveness-and-growth objective (FSMA 2023).

The PRA’s general objective is the safety and soundness of firms, pursued so as to avoid disorderly failure and protect financial stability. Enforcement is explicitly calibrated for systemic and hardship effects: under DEPP 6.5D the FCA will reduce a penalty causing “serious financial hardship,” and DEPP contemplates reduction where there would be “a severe adverse impact on a person’s shareholders or a consequential impact on market confidence or market stability.” The RDC and Upper Tribunal provide structured review; “too big to fail” is a systemic concept built into the architecture.

Competition (CMA / EU Commission). The EU Commission’s 2006 Fining Guidelines, point 35, permit inability-to-pay reductions “in a specific social and economic context” where a fine “would irretrievably jeopardise the economic viability of the undertaking.” The CMA’s penalty-setting principles likewise include ability-to-pay and proportionality adjustments. 

Notably, the follow-on damages model (Competition Act 1998; Competition Appeal Tribunal) is the closest structural analogue to Rule W.51.5,  a regulatory finding becoming the platform for civil damages. Mastercard Inc & Ors v Merricks [2020] UKSC 51 (11 December 2020) permitted a £14bn opt-out collective claim on behalf of 46.2 million UK consumers, arising from the European Commission’s 2007 finding that Mastercard’s multilateral interchange fees infringed Article 101 TFEU; the claim was ultimately settled on 3 December 2024 for £200m. The lesson is twofold: quantum can vastly exceed the original penalty once a follow-on mechanism exists, but a mature system channels and ultimately rationalises that exposure.

Professional regulators (SRA/GMC/GDC). Here the balance runs the other way, instructively: in Bolton v Law Society [1994] 1 WLR 512, Sir Thomas Bingham MR held that “the reputation of the profession is more important than the fortunes of any individual member,” so individual hardship does not displace a proportionate sanction. This confirms that where the governing purpose is systemic confidence, tribunals subordinate individual consequences, the mirror image of a compensation regime with no systemic purpose at all.

The Independent Football Regulator. The decisive new comparator. The Football Governance Act 2025 (Royal Assent 21 July 2025) creates the IFR with three statutory objectives (s.6): the club financial soundness objective; the systemic financial resilience objective (“to protect and promote the financial resilience of English football”); and the heritage objective.

 It regulates the top five men’s tiers via an operating-licence regime, with a “State of the Game” reporting function and regulatory principles including proportionality. Parliament has thus created, for the first time, a football body with an express systemic-resilience duty, the very duty the Premier League’s private adjudicative system lacks. 

But the IFR’s jurisdiction is regulatory, not arbitral: it cannot stay, cap or override a Rule W commission’s compensation award, cannot direct the Premier League to amend Rule W.51.5, and cannot intervene in the private contractual proceedings between clubs. The gap between the IFR’s systemic mandate and the commissions’ non-contextualised compensation power is the central structural problem this report identifies.

The Everton / Burnley systemic-risk analysis

The Burnley decision converts PSR enforcement from an internal disciplinary exercise into a mechanism for club-against-club litigation. The systemic risks, assuming the decision survives appeal:

A litigation pipeline. The closest precedent, Sheffield United v West Ham (the Carlos Tevez affair): a 2007 Premier League commission fined West Ham £5.5m with no points deduction; Sheffield United were relegated; an FA arbitration panel chaired by Lord Griffiths found West Ham liable, and the parties settled in 2009 for a reported £18m–£25m, shows the mechanism has existed since at least 2009; Burnley activates and extends it to PSR breaches. Leeds United reportedly pursued and settled a claim against Everton in September 2025 on confidential terms.

The Manchester City exposure is football’s single largest risk. With the 115/130-charge case, several top-six clubs (reported to include Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United and Tottenham) have reportedly served rights-reservation notices within the six-year Limitation Act window, with individual exposure estimates reported at well over £100m each. 

A guilty finding followed by Burnley-style litigation would be multi-season, multi-claimant and uncertain in quantum, an existential threat, and one in which the Premier League itself is the investigating party whose findings would arm member-versus-member claims.

Balance-sheet and going-concern effects. Under IAS 37/IFRS 9, clubs under PSR investigation or with admitted historic breaches must now carry hard-to-bound contingent-liability provisions or disclosures. This affects debt covenants tied to net asset value, borrowing costs, stadium-financing headroom, insurability, and M&A due diligence (the Friedkin Group acquired Everton with the Burnley claim live and its quantum known).

Perverse incentives. Because quantum is defined by the claimant’s loss, not the breacher’s gain, a modest breach (£19.5m) can generate a £35m+ award, an asymmetric, hard-to-price risk. 

It creates incentives to litigate rivals, to reduce transfer spending defensively (dampening the market the League wants to grow), and, as one commentator observed, to reduce cooperation with investigations, since cooperation that limits League sanctions may nonetheless expose a club to unlimited inter-club claims.

Cross-sector cascade evidence. LIBOR is the clearest cascade: regulators in the US, UK and EU fined banks more than $9bn for manipulation of a rate underpinning over $300 trillion of contracts, and Keefe, Bruyette & Woods estimated banks could pay up to a further $35bn in private legal settlements,  the follow-on litigation dwarfing the original penalties and running for over a decade. CMA/EU follow-on claims (Merricks) confirm the same structural dynamic. 

By contrast, F1 and rugby produced no inter-competitor claims. In Formula 1, Red Bull’s 2021 cost-cap breach (an overspend of £1,864,000, 1.6% over the $145m cap) drew, via an FIA Accepted Breach Agreement of 28 October 2022, a $7m fine (£6.059m) and a 10% reduction in 2023 aerodynamic testing, with no compensation to rivals. In rugby, Saracens’ 2019 salary-cap breach drew a 35-point deduction and a £5,360,272.31 fine from a Premiership Rugby independent panel chaired by Lord Dyson (November 2019), with the 12 other clubs each receiving £350,000 from the fine proceeds,  a rough collective reparation, and again no inter-competitor compensation claims. Football’s exposure is a design choice, not an accident: only the Premier League built an explicit, uncapped inter-club compensation mechanism into its rules.

So what are the recommendations?

For Premier League club boards (immediate):

1. Instruct finance directors and auditors to assess whether PSR-adjacent conduct, or any rights-reservation notice received, requires contingent-liability disclosure in the next accounts. Treat received reserved-rights notices as probable contingent liabilities.
2. Build full Rule W.51.5 exposure assessment (as both potential defendant and potential claimant) into all club-acquisition due diligence.

For the Premier League and its clubs (collective, short-to-medium term),  press for rule amendments rather than ad hoc litigation: 

3. Amend Rule W.51.5 to introduce: (a) a defined causation-methodology standard; (b) a proportionate-chance (loss-of-a-chance) approach where the causation probability falls below a threshold (e.g. 60%), rather than all-or-nothing at 51%; (c) a quantum cap or tariff (e.g. a multiple of the net loss directly attributable to the breach season, or a cap referenced to the scale of the breach); and (d) a compulsory mediation requirement before any compensation claim proceeds. 
4. Introduce an express “wider interests of the game” and ability-to-pay/financial-soundness gate into the commissions’ terms of reference for compensation claims, drawing on the CAS “specificity of sport” doctrine, the Sentencing Council corporate-offender model (impact on employees, community, wider economy) and DEPP 6.5D (serious-financial-hardship reduction). This would give commissions the consequence-filter that English courts possess by doctrine and that the commissions presently lack. 
5. Create a league-level compensation fund or netting mechanism, analogous to the Saracens model (fine proceeds redistributed to other clubs) or the Financial Services Compensation Scheme,  so that reparation to harmed clubs does not depend on unbounded bilateral awards that can destabilise the paying club.

For the Premier League and the IFR (structural): 

6. Formally engage the IFR’s systemic financial resilience objective (s.6(b)) and State of the Game function to commission an independent assessment of whether inter-club PSR compensation litigation constitutes a systemic risk within the meaning of the Football Governance Act 2025; use the FCA–IFR information-sharing MOU to draw on the LIBOR/follow-on experience. 
7. Consider whether compensation quantum in inter-club cases should be transferred to a statutory scheme or determined with IFR oversight, given that no organ within the Premier League structure is currently tasked with weighing systemic effects.

Benchmarks that would change the analysis: if Everton’s appeal reverses the decision or substitutes a loss-of-a-chance/discounted approach, the acute pipeline risk substantially recedes and reform becomes less urgent. 

Conversely, escalation triggers requiring immediate action: (a) a guilty finding in the Manchester City case; (b) any single modelled exposure exceeding one season’s central distribution to a club; or (c) aggregate modelled exposure threatening more than one club’s licensing solvency.

Caveats and Limitations

The Burnley decision is under appeal and not final. Everton’s appeal is as of right; a stay was refused but the appeal may reduce, remit or reverse the award. Much of the systemic-risk analysis assumes, per the brief, that the decision stands.

Commission decisions are persuasive, not binding. There is no common-law doctrine of precedent within the private disciplinary system; each future claim turns on its own causation and quantum. The Manchester City and Chelsea scenarios are materially harder on causation than a single-season relegation. (In Chelsea’s case the Premier League’s own finding was that the club would not have breached PSR even had the relevant payments been disclosed, substantially weakening PSR-based compensation claims against it specifically.)

Data limitations. Many Premier League commission decisions are only partially published or redacted. The ~290-page Burnley decision was reviewed in substantial part; certain sections (the concluding paragraphs and full interest computation) were confirmed via top-tier law-firm analyses quoting the decision (Herbert Smith Freehills; Mishcon de Reya) and via ESPN’s reporting (10 June 2026: “£26m… plus interest of £9.1m,” total “more than £35 million,” Burnley having sought £51.7m, Everton’s overspend “£19.5m”) rather than from the primary text directly. Pipeline-claim figures (“significantly more than £100m per club”) are attributed to press reporting of clubs’ own estimates and are not adjudicated liabilities. The Sheffield United/West Ham settlement figure was never officially confirmed. Rolls-Royce headcount is reported both as “50,000” (per the DPA judgment quoted here) and, in some accounts, as “over 40,000 in more than 50 countries.”

Rule numbering. The Burnley decision uses 2021/22 Rule numbering (W.51.5); the current equivalent is W.52.5. The relevant provision is not in dispute.

This article does not constitute legal or investment advice.