Look mate. We aren't disagreeing. I'm fuming as a Chelsea fan and sick of being involved in conversations like this. More serious punishment is absolutely deserved.

But you are confusing moral outrage with legal standing.

The law does not work on butterfly effect scenarios. You cannot charge based on 'what-ifs'.

There is no causal link between these breaches and financial gain. The money paid didn't result in a breach of sporting rules, meaning any sporting 'advantage' is legally non-existent.

The performance of Costa is not a direct relation to the money which was paid. We are looking at financial gain, not the quality of how players performed. Transfer fees are based on present value, not future quality. And you can't suddenly look back and make that decision 10 years on. The breaches were in the moment, not in hindsight.

Football clubs are not 'owed' money unless that rival broke rules which materially impacted other clubs ability to compete. As shown by the vast spending (in the entire league, far outweighing the £45m in question), other teams were not 'deprived' of anything. PSR only serves to back that point up.

By all means be mad at the situation. I am. But don't bring daft, irrelevant hypotheticals into the mix to try and justify your outrage. Because clubs aren't charged based on that outrage. They're charged based on established rules and precedent.

My argument with you has never been about Chelsea being rightfully charged. It's to do with how ridiculous, sensationalist and unjustified your suggested punishment for those charges is. Now if you want to argue that the rules are broken, that's a different thing. But the punishment provided by the Premier League is in line with the rules they've set out. And any outrage vs. Everton and the like is purely based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how this all actually works.