Villa are selling again. Spurs just spent £237m. Here's the rulebook nobody explained.

Aston Villa have sold close to £400m of playing talent over the past couple of years — Jacob Ramsey this summer, Morgan Rogers strongly linked to follow — and the club's own manager has said the rules "conditioned" their transfer business. That's not the Premier League's spending rules. Villa are competing in Europe, which means UEFA's Financial Earnings Rule applies to them, alongside a separate Squad Cost Ratio limiting wage spending to a fixed share of turnover. Villa were fined by UEFA last summer for breaching both, and are now operating under a strict settlement.

Tottenham are the mirror image. £237m spent already this summer, a transfer record broken twice inside a week, and — according to reporting citing football finance analysts — as much as £250m of headroom still available under the Premier League's own rules. Same country, same competition, wildly different financial position, because Spurs haven't needed continental competition money to fund the spree and their wage bill is comparatively low next to their revenue.

Two clubs, two completely different regulatory pressures, both loosely described in the press as "FFP." Neither tells you anything about what a Championship, League One or League Two club actually has to do — because none of those three divisions use the rules Villa or Spurs are working under.

The Championship just tore up its own rulebook

For nine years, Championship clubs operated under Profitability and Sustainability rules — P&S — measuring losses against a permitted threshold over a rolling three-year period. It's the regime that caught Birmingham City (nine points, 2022) and Leicester City (six points, this year, applied retrospectively after their promotion).

From this season, it's gone. Championship clubs voted in May to replace P&S entirely with Squad Cost Rules, modelled on the framework the Premier League is introducing for the same season. Instead of measuring total losses, SCR caps how much of a club's income can be spent on players and manager-related costs — set at 85% from 2026-27 — with a separate, capped allowance for owner top-ups: £33m spread across three years, no more than £15m in any single season.

The stated aim is real-time monitoring rather than the old system's habit of catching breaches years after the fact, sometimes attached to clubs that had long since been promoted or relegated by the time the verdict landed. Whether it works that way in practice is something worth watching rather than assuming.

League One tightened. League Two didn't.

Below the Championship, the picture splits further. League One and League Two have never used P&S — they run the Salary Cost Management Protocol, capping wage spending as a share of turnover rather than measuring overall losses.

League One clubs voted this year to cut that cap from 60% to 50% of turnover, and to fold manager pay into the calculation for the first time. They also cut how much of any owner's cash injection can be spent on wages — an owner putting in £500,000 can now only count £250,000 of it toward the wage budget, with the rest expected to go toward things like infrastructure or academy investment instead. Clubs relegated from the Championship get a softer landing: 65% for their first season down, rather than the full 75% cushion the old rules gave them.

League Two clubs considered the same equity-injection tightening and rejected it. Their rules stay as they were. Of the three divisions below the Premier League, League Two now runs the loosest financial regime — which says something about the priorities of clubs at that level, where owner funding is often the difference between competing and not.

Why this actually matters more than the Villa or Spurs story

None of this is abstract. The EFL's own figures show Championship clubs posted combined pre-tax losses of roughly £318m last season, offset mostly by transfer profits rather than underlying operations, and net debt across the division has grown to around £1.5bn. Twelve Championship clubs took equity injections from their owners in a single season, totalling over half a billion pounds between them — with three clubs alone accounting for 70% of that.

That's the backdrop the new Squad Cost Rules are actually addressing: not the glamorous end of the sport, but a division where more than half the clubs are being kept competitive by direct owner funding, and where the previous rules produced points deductions that landed on clubs long after the decisions that caused them.

Whether an 85%-of-income cap with a hard ceiling on top-up funding does better than the old three-year loss test is the question worth returning to once a full season has actually run under it. For now, what's true is this: three divisions, three different rulebooks, all live at once, and the one that changed the most is the one nobody outside football finance circles seems to have noticed changed at all.