West Brom: EFL torn to shreds over ‘completely wrong and unnecessary’ points deduction
West Brom’s two-point deduction this season should have been suspended by the EFL, according to Keith Wyness.
The former Everton chief executive, speaking to Football Insider, said that he was “disappointed” in the timing of the Championship club’s points deduction.
West Brom had been charged, and then were found to have breached the EFL’s profit and sustainability rules, which led to the points deduction with just two league matches remaining.
The Baggies have since secured their Championship status for another season ahead of their final game of the campaign against Sheffield Wednesday this weekend.
West Brom deny breaching the financial regulations, and may appeal against the decision, which is down to a disagreement with the EFL on how interest payments on loans taken out by previous owner Lai Guochuan should be categorised.
West Brom backed by local MP amid anger over EFL verdict
Everton’s former chief Keith Wyness – who served as CEO at Goodison Park between 2004 and 2009 and now runs a football consultancy advising elite clubs – says that the EFL should not have imposed a points deduction immediately on West Brom.
Speaking on the new edition of Football Insider‘s Inside Track podcast, Wyness believes the EFL’s financial rules could be made clearer in the future.
| West Brom’s 2024-25 financial results. | |
| Revenue | £30.4m |
| Operating Expenses | £62.7m |
| Commercial Income | £8.2m |
| Profit On Player Sales | £9.2m |
He told Football Insider‘s Inside Track podcast: “Disappointed and disappointed with the timing.
“Now, the local MP wrote saying, look, point one, we didn’t get any written reasons as to why this happened. Point two, it seemed like it was a retrospective decision. Point three, the payments in question were about a charity and the foundation, the West Brom Foundation.
“And point four, the timing, which we all think is completely wrong and unnecessary. The bottom line seems to be how they’ve been accounting for things like the foundation, say for example, give up the pitch for some charity games or for training, and then they want to put a valuation on that and then charge it back to the club.
“That seems perfectly acceptable and quite a fair way to do it. If the club claims that they didn’t know that the EFL had changed their rules on that, and I’ve got to say that there’s an expert they had in there, who was supposedly an expert in this, and he should have been up to speed on that.
“If he wasn’t, then maybe the EFL had not been clear in making this clear. This is one that the EFL could have easily said, look, here’s a suspended points deduction and if there’s another breach of this in the future, this will be invoked.
“I don’t think there was any need to have done this in the way they did it.”
Expert calls for stricter measures to be enforced after West Brom case
Wyness also told Football Insider that the EFL should impose stricter checks on Chinese owners following the situation at West Brom.
The Baggies, now under the ownership of Shilen Patel, faced financial mismanagement under Guochuan, who funded his other businesses by taking loans out of the club.
Wyness believes it was not the first time that a Chinese owner has caused hardship at an English football club, and said he had experience of it first hand at Aston Villa.
The Villans were owned by Tony Xia between 2016 and 2018, and the club became close to going into administration.
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