In the summer of 2025, after Manchester City’s acquittal via appeal on 115 charges of breaching the Premier League’s financial regulations, the league’s clubs voted to abolish their discredited Profit and Sustainability Rules, the set of guidelines created years earlier in the failed hope they might prevent teams from spending themselves — and everyone else — into ruin.

The decision brought an end to more than a year of increasingly bitter infighting among the league’s members, and even the final vote was hardly unanimous. Six teams lobbied furiously to retain the cost controls, though that number did not include City or Chelsea, two members of the supposed “elite” whose status was effectively protected by the rules.

The outcome was attributed largely to public pressure. Punishments applied in previous years to Everton and Nottingham Forest for more minor breaches had been deemed as unjustly “punishing the fans,” despite the fact that the same could be said for the existence of the red card.

And while every major sports league in the world has some sort of cost-control mechanism — because sports are more fun when they act as a search for excellence rather than merely a test of wealth — nobody was ever really prepared to make that case to the public or volunteer what a world without regulation would look like.