The Premier League's associated party transaction (APT) rules require any deal between a club and a company linked to its owners to go to the League's Board. The Board checks whether the deal is at "fair market value", meaning what independent, knowledgeable parties would agree at arm's length, and if it decides the deal is overvalued it can make the club cut it to a lower figure. Premier League
If Manchester City is in your feed, these are the rules behind the long fight over whether City's sponsorships from Abu Dhabi-linked companies were priced fairly. That fight is over: in September 2025 City settled and accepted that the current rules are "valid and binding". Most coverage was about who won. This piece covers how the rules actually work.
Why the rules exist
Premier League clubs face spending limits linked to their income. A club whose owner also controls other businesses could pump extra money in by having those businesses pay over the odds for sponsorship. The APT rules are meant to close that gap.
The League first brought them in in December 2021 and changed them in March 2024 and again in November 2024. Its stated aim is to protect "financial stability, integrity, and competitive balance". The law firm Farrer & Co points out that the rules arrived just after Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund bought Newcastle United in late 2021.
Before then, the Board could only look at related-party deals once they showed up in a club's annual accounts. That could be many months after the deal was signed and the money paid.
What counts as an "associated party"
The definition is broad. It covers companies in the same group as the club, companies that share owners or board members with it, and companies materially influenced by the same party.
One clause gets little attention but matters a great deal. The 2026/27 Handbook says a person or company is associated with a club if both are directly or indirectly controlled, jointly controlled or materially influenced by the same government, public or state-funded body. That is what pulls in clubs with state-linked owners: a state-owned airline or bank can count as associated with a club even when no single company owns both.
Loans from owners are covered too. The Handbook defines a shareholder loan as a loan between the club and a group company or anyone holding more than 5% of its shares.
How fair market value is judged
The Handbook defines fair market value as the amount an asset, right or service could be sold, licensed or exchanged for "between knowledgeable, willing parties in an arm's length transaction".
To test a deal against that, the Board has to weigh three kinds of evidence:
- An independent expert's valuation, with some exceptions.
- Whatever relevant information the club provides.
- Comparable deals. These come from a "Databank" set up in 2021. Every club must submit every commercial deal worth more than £100,000 a year on average.
In practice, a proposed £X-a-year shirt deal with an owner-linked company is compared with what other clubs get from sponsors with no link to them.
Since the City litigation, clubs get to see that evidence before the decision. If the Board is going to rule a deal "evidently not at Fair Market Value", it must first share the comparable data it relied on with the club's outside lawyers and experts, who must keep it confidential. The club then has seven days to respond (Rule E.65).
If the Board still finds the deal overvalued, it can make the club restate or change it, and the club can't sign it above the restated value. Commercial rights deals, player transfers and supplies of goods and services each have their own protocols.
The timetable, and why the money waits
Under the 2026/27 rules (E.49–E.52), every APT goes to the Board, either before signing or within two clear working days after. A director of the associated company must declare that they consider the deal to be at fair market value.
The key point: a club can start providing the rights, such as putting a logo on the shirt, before approval. But receiving any payment before approval is a breach. The one exception is the principal of a shareholder loan.
That is why delays matter. Rule E.59 gives the Board 10 clear working days to finish an assessment. That limit falls away if the Board needs more information or faces exceptional circumstances. If the club then supplies information promptly, standard commercial deals and player transfers should be decided within 30 days. Delay was one of City's main complaints about its Etihad and First Abu Dhabi Bank deals (more below).
The catch-all: "Threshold Transactions"
What stops a club from routing owner money through a middleman company with no formal link? A rule few articles mention.
Deals with parties that are not associated must still be submitted as "Threshold Transactions" if they average more than £1m a year or, if lower, 5% of the club's turnover. The Board then decides whether each one is really an APT, or whether it wasn't done at arm's length.
What happened in City's challenge
City's case went through several stages, and some older coverage is now out of date.
October 2024. A tribunal found the APT rules necessary in principle. But it held that leaving shareholder loans, which are often interest-free, out of the rules was discriminatory and unlawful. It also found the February 2024 changes, which made the fair market value test harder to pass, unlawful.
The tribunal also set aside the League's decisions on City's sponsorships with Etihad Aviation Group and First Abu Dhabi Bank. It found the process unfair for two reasons: City couldn't comment on the comparable data before the decision, and the decisions were unreasonably delayed. The disclosure rule described above is the fix for the first problem.
November 2024. Clubs voted through amended rules by 16 votes to 4. Manchester City, Aston Villa, Newcastle and Nottingham Forest voted against.
February 2025. The tribunal ruled that the unlawful parts couldn't be cut out on their own, so the pre-November-2024 rules were "void and unenforceable" as a whole. The League said the November 2024 rules stayed "in full force", including fair market value checks on shareholder loans.
September 2025. The League and City settled City's second challenge. City accepted the current rules, and both sides agreed to say nothing more.
Keep this in mind when you read the League's own summary of the rules. It is the League putting its own case, and it says the League has followed its processes. It doesn't mention that a tribunal found its handling of City's deals procedurally unfair and the earlier rules void.
Not the same as the "115 charges"
The APT dispute is often mixed up with the separate case over City's alleged breaches of financial rules, known as the 115 charges. The two are legally distinct. Farrer & Co notes that the APT settlement did not affect the 115-charges case.
It isn't only about City
Owner-linked deals get approved, too. The League cleared Chelsea's £76.5m sale of two Stamford Bridge hotels to a sister company, BlueCo 22 Properties. That deal helped Chelsea stay within the League's profit and sustainability rules (PSR).
How the rules fit from 2026/27
In the 2026/27 Handbook the APT rules are renumbered E.49–E.79. They now feed into the new Squad Cost Ratio (SCR) system rather than PSR. The SCR system has deadlines built in. Assessments that could push a club over the SCR "Red Threshold" can be fast-tracked to finish by 20 March. Clubs that want to challenge an assessment at independent arbitration must file by 27 March.
What outsiders can't see
The League doesn't publish the results of individual assessments, so the figure finally approved for City's renewed Etihad deal, for example, isn't public. The Databank comparables are confidential, so nobody outside can check how values are set. The terms of the September 2025 settlement are confidential too, apart from City accepting the rules.
It's also unclear whether the void 2021–24 rules leave any room for claims about deals assessed in those years. The tribunal said any benefit to City depended on its second challenge, and that ended in a confidential settlement. No assessment data has been published yet under the new SCR system either, so it's too early to say whether it changes how often deals are restated or challenged.