Points deductions, huge fines, stadium sales, rival clubs at each other’s throats: welcome to the mad, bad world of the Championship in 2020. English football’s second tier has always been a place of desperation, with the Premier League’s untold riches tantalisingly in sight, but there is a different emotion now engulfing boardrooms up and down the country: fear.

The cause? The English Football League’s new profitability and sustainability rules, previously known as Financial Fair Play, which – far from being mere bureaucratic box-ticking – are now causing out and out civil war.

In its simplest terms, those rules, introduced in the 2016-17 season, were designed to limit financial losses and control spending, with clubs permitted to lose £39 million over three years.

Birmingham City were the first club to suffer punishment last season, when they were docked nine points for exceeding those losses; this year Sheffield Wednesday and Derby County are facing potential sanctions. Both clubs strenuously deny the charges.

Stoke City are one Championship club who are “dismayed” at the situation, following their relegation from the Premier League in 2018. The feeling within their boardroom is that they could be punished in the future for showing ambition: while the owners – the Coates family – could easily underwrite any financial losses, they are effectively barred from doing so.

Tony Scholes, Stoke’s chief executive, told Telegraph Sport: “We’ve found it sad and quite unseemly that clubs are attacking each other over a set of rules which appear to be ill-conceived. The situation is a mess and it needs sorting out quickly.

“The rules do absolutely nothing to address the key issues, which are sustainability at clubs or the cliff edge between the Premier League and the rest. In fact, they make it worse.

“The battles should take place on the pitch, but clubs are trying to win them away from the pitch to get points deductions for rivals.

“There is hypocrisy everywhere and what the situation needs is for clubs to be honest about the objective and prepared to compromise to reach the solution.

“From our point of view at Stoke, we have a set of local owners who are prepared to invest in their local club in a manner which doesn’t jeopardise the future. But the rules that are in place block that happening.”