Manchester United made losses of £257m over last three years but remain compliant with PSR - Give us a clue

We're not going to sit here and say that we totally understand the Premier League's Profit and Sustainability Rules but we thought we had a better understanding than we do. Clearly.

The bizarre nature of PSR has baffled many a sports writer over the years, in fact it has often been an issue for actual journalists to get their head around it.

Okay, we'll go one further - we're not actually sure that most people involved with football actually understand it.

The one thing that we thought we had a firm grasp of, however, was that a club could not make losses of over £105 million over a rolling three-year period, and if a club was found to have breached that, then they'd be sanctioned with a points deduction as Everton and Nottingham Forest were.

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How can being £150m over budget still be 'compliant'?

Without getting too comfortable in our tin-foil hats, there has always seemed to be plenty of wiggle room for the "Big Six" to manoeuvre within these parameters - a hotel sale here, a COVID allowance there etc etc, but The Chronicle has reported today that Manchester United have made losses of £257.4 million over the last three year period.

That is a whopping £152.4 million over the allowable loss limit. That's another three-year reporting period's worth of losses plus another 40-odd million pounds and yet, Manchester United are adamant they are compliant with PSR.

How is that possible? How can that be even remotely possible? There can't be enough write-offs in the world to make those numbers work. We already know they got a special allowance for COVID that no other club got. In fact, COVID was a huge factor in Everton's losses and they still got hit with a points deduction.

Newcastle are part of Sky Sports' "Big Seven" so rules no longer apply to us

With this, Manchester City's 115 breaches that we all know they will escape punishment for, Chelsea's mind-blowing accountancy that sees them selling their own assets to themselves and still being able to buy 900 players every window, you really have to wonder why any club even bothers.

Sky Sports included Newcastle United as a part of the "Big Seven" before the season got underway, so we should take full advantage and just go nuts with the PIF's money because now we're part of the elite the rules don't matter to us anymore.

Can somebody please make it make sense?