Matt Maher: Football is a simple game complicated by auditors

You can use your feet or head to move the ball but not your opponent. The aim is to get it between those white sticks at the end of the field. The team that does it most, wins the game and gets three points. They share one each if it’s a draw.

For most of the sport’s existence, the most complicated thing for newcomers to understand was the offside rule. Even that didn’t take too much explaining.

Just lately, however, things have been getting a whole lot more complicated.

The introduction of VAR, which was always going to cause a reinterpretation of the rule book once incidents could be refereed in slow- motion replay, hasn’t helped.

Worse, lack of effective explanation regularly leaves supporters who pay good money to attend matches completely in the dark as to why certain decisions are made. There are probably still Villa fans who went to December’s 1-1 draw with Sheffield United who still have no clue as to why Leon Bailey’s “opening” goal was chalked off.

Yet even VAR cannot hold a candle to the confusion caused by the game’s financial rules.

This week is shaping up to be a big one in the Premier League relegation battle and the main event is not taking place on a pitch.

Instead it is behind closed doors, involves a KC-led legal team and a three-person independent commission which will hear the case both for and against Nottingham Forest after the club were charged with breaching the league’s profit and sustainability (PSR) rules. The outcome probably won’t be known until next month and even then, there will be the opportunity for the club to appeal any sanction. It means that, in the very likely probability of a points deduction, the final standings of the league table may not be known until several days after the final round of fixtures on May 19.

Most would agree football needs some form of cost controls, yet it also feels fair to say the Premier League needs to sharpen up its act.

We’ve already seen the table amended twice without a ball being kicked, first when Everton were hit by a 10-point deduction in November and then when it was reduced to six a couple of weeks ago. No doubt a nightmare for the Toffees, it is also no picnic for their rivals either, Luton seeing their gap to safety grow from goal difference to four points with the publication of a press release. If clubs breach agreed rules, then of course they should be punished. But when hundreds of millions of pounds is at stake and said clubs can afford expensive lawyers, the league has a responsibility to make sure it get things right the first time.

Of even greater importance is the need for transparency when it comes to the reporting of financial results.

At first glance, the rules seem straightforward enough. Clubs in the Premier League are allowed to lose a maximum of £105million over a rolling three-year cycle.

And yet is not simply a case of looking at the last three years of accounts and calculating whether a club has breached the regulations from there.

That’s because they are allowed to deduct money spent on infrastructure, youth development and women’s football from the PSR equation. For two seasons, clubs were also able to knock off any money lost as a direct result of the Covid-19 pandemic.

It is a big reason why Villa were this week able to report a loss of £119m for a single season and yet still remain within the three-year PSR threshold. None of which is easy for supporters to understand, particularly when the magical PSR figure is known only to the clubs and the league.

Even now, we do not know for sure by how much Everton and Forest are alleged to have breached the rules for the 2020-23 cycle.

Lack of transparency is becoming a theme. Back in January, Premier League chief executive Richard Masters told parliament a date had been set for the hearing into Manchester City’s alleged 115 breaches of the spending rules, yet did not reveal when that date was. Why not? What could be stopping him?

For a sport where fans invest so much emotion, not to mention money, it simply is not good enough to leave them so consistently in the dark.

If the game is serious about imposing cost controls – and in an era when nation states are now in charge of clubs, it really should be – then it needs to start making the system a whole lot easier to follow.

That means, in the Premier League and EFL, bringing in a mechanism where clubs publish the PSR or any relevant figure, so everyone knows where they stand. It is how they do it in the NFL, which has long implemented a salary cap to keep competitive balance.

Football’s simplicity is one of the reasons it became known for so long as the people’s game.

Much of the time these days it feels more like a game for people with accountancy degrees.