By Tony Attwood
Why so many articles about Uefa and Financial Fair Play?
Two reasons really. One is that it is just about the biggest thing happening in football at the moment, apart possibly from the issue of corruption. The other is that a full and proper implementation of FFP will cause problems for some clubs and benefits for others. Arsenal is definitely on the benefit side.
So Uefa has said it will look closely at Chelsea, Manchester City and PSG in terms of their sponsorship deals to ensure that no one has broken the rules on investments from related parties.
In effect this means that they may have broken the rule that says that clubs can’t count income from such sources as being exempt from money considered under FFP, unless it is at a “fair market value”.
So if Manchester City (to name but a few) were to sign a 10-year £350million stadium and shirt sponsorship contract (to take a number at random) with airline Etihad (to choose an example at out of the blue), which is based in Abu Dhabi (to choose a country by just opening the atlas and seeing what page we get to), and we find that the ruling family of that country also owns the club (by some wild coincidence), then Uefa has to say if this deal is a deliberate attempt to get around the rules, or is set at a fair market price.
And then again if we take a figure like £200million-a-year (chosen of course by spinning a wheel) and take a club (let’s say, for the sake of example and nothing more, PSG), and note that their owners are the Qatari Investment Authority, and let us say, oh, just for no reason than its there, that the money comes from the Qatar Tourism Authority, which (we might conjecture), handles 23 tourists a year from France, we can say, well, that’s fine then. All straight and above board. Nothing to worry about. Hunky dory. Tickety boo.
Now we won’t know what Uefa thinks, until it has a thought, but basically if they let either of these deals go through, then FFP is not so much dead, as merely a twinkle in someone’s eye which was never born and has never got off the ground.
So what does Uefa think? General secretary Gianni Infantino said, of the clubs, “They have to demonstrate that they can cover their costs with the revenues that they generate without cheating. If the result is that something went wrong then sanctions will be taken.”
In Uefa’s defence we have to note that they have excluded a few clubs from its competitions, including Portsmouth, Malaga and Besiktas for breaking some details of FFP – although not the little details that Man C and PSG are alleged by some wild and thoughtless bloggers to have broken.
So Uefa has set up an independent “chamber” which will impose sanctions if they are needed. And that could start legal action over the true and reasonable meaning of the phrase “fair market value”.
Mr Infantino continued,“We were always worried – and I say this with a smile – with clubs that were telling us, ‘We will sue you if you dare take sanctions against us for Financial Fair Play regulations’, [because] we have the other clubs who will sue us if we don’t take sanctions against those who have breached the rules.”
Uefa has however released the 2011 Club Licensing Benchmarking Report, which shows quite clearly that (to take an example at random) Chelsea and Manchester City would have be expelled from the Champs League two years back if the limited loss rule had been in force two years ago. And to show that it is not just an English thing, so would 18 other clubs that exceeded the maximum €45 million losses over three years.
But what would these sanctions be, I hear you cry. Anything from fines (which are of course meaningless to Chelsea and Manchester City), to expulsion from the Champions League and Europa League, which might make Mr Abramovich pack up his yacht and toddle off to somewhere less boisterous than the King’s Road.
Mr Infantino added that, “Last year… when we published this benchmarking report for the clubs, we were saying that it’s a wake-up call for the clubs. But I think the clubs are really ‘up’, that the Financial Fair Play rules show that they have teeth and that those are biting now.”
So there we have it. Whatever Uefa do, someone is going to sue them. Which by and large should be rather interesting. One might say that the future of European football depends totally on who wins the legal battle.
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Shard,
the FFFP regs aren’t designed to stop inflation of wages, and nor are they in any way “fair”, when the inevitable outcomes are projected.
They are protectionist, and serve only the elite few, ironically City are probably now established in that select group, hence the crude attempts of the usual suspects to take them even further for the Premier League.
We don’t want these laws even tho we stand to benefit the most, they are just plain wrong.
How to bring true fairness into football is another debate entirely, one in which I’m sure we’re all happy to engage in.
Its Grim Oop North @ Feb 14 10.32 am – Sorry you were unable to view the cartoon .I’m able to still view it but thru Facebook .
Anyway it says – “A woman is always right ….just sometimes
confused ,misinformed ,rude , stubborn ,unchangeable , senseless … but never wrong !”
I guess we all have had first hand experience of this !
Shard,
Fiszman aside, Arsenal have indeed “financially doped” (a stupid saying IMHO – I prefer the word investment) in the past. Firstly under Henry Norris, then under Samuel Hill-Wood who initially bankrolled his home town team Glossop North End to the top flight (it’s been suggested he used £30,000 of his own money which was a huge amount at the turn of the 20th century) but they didn’t have the support base to work towards becoming self-funding, due in some part to the fact that Glossop is only 15 miles from Manchester and the 2 Manchester clubs had the monopoly in terms of support in the city itself and the surrounding area. Some years after severing his ties with GNE, Hill-Wood became chairman of Arsenal where his investment made more of a long-lasting an impact than it did at Glossop because Arsenal were a bigger club that could draw on support from the biggest city in England.
As for the comment that City’s owner has invested a sum of money “the likes of which football has never seen before”, instead of pointing fingers at City, perhaps the question should be asked as to why, in today’s game, it takes so much money for a decent sized club to become realistic title challengers. You pretty much agreed with me the other week that the gap between the haves and have-nots has never been greater and naturally that in turn makes it a damn sight harder for clubs outside the top 4 or 5 to become genuine challengers – unless they received outside investment.
I actually hold UEFA largely responsible for fuelling this imbalance. By paying such huge amounts of money to clubs qualifying for the Champions League while treating the Europa League as an afterthought this significant additional income has, in turn, given clubs a major advantage over their domestic rivals that haven’t finished in the CL places and this just serves to cement those clubs as perennial qualifiers every year. The fact that we now live in a world where finishing 4th in the Premier League is viewed as being far more important than winning the FA Cup tells us everything we need to know about how priorities have changed, eg: City got £3.4 million for winning the FA Cup in 2011 yet that pales into insignificance against the £20 million or so that we’ll get for not winning a single Champions League game this season. That’s right – a failed Champions League campaign nets us 6 times as much as we got for winning the most famous domestic cup competition in world football. You really couldn’t make it up.
So after reading so many different views over FFP can we assume that it won’t make a huge difference anyway as loopholes will be discovered and ploughed through? How on earth can there ever be a level playing field in football? It seems that FFP will serve the bigger clubs better than the smaller ones. Will its introduction mean Everton, Newcastle or even Swansea could ever win the league? Isn’t it amazing to consider that Cardiff would have been league champions back in the twenties if the goal difference rule had been applied. Or that Derby or Ipswich have won the league in living memory.
Here’s my idea. It’s not a finely honed solution but quite revolutionary and such things are difficult to finesse.
At the beginning of every season each player’s name is placed in a hat corresponding to his favoured on field position. Then the twenty PL teams are placed in one hat. A team is drawn out of the hat and that team then gets to pick one player for each position from each relevant hat. The next team is drawn out of the hat and follows the same procedure. It would introduce an element of fun and guarantee no team has an unfair advantage. There would be a flat wage for all players of £2,000 a week. This reduced yet substantial wage would perhaps teach footballers some respect towards money. No transfer window in the season. At the season’s end the process is repeated.
There you have a fairly level playing field. It would almost certainly expunge the dreaded sugar daddy from club ownership. Perhaps performances in Europe would suffer but as those competitions seem prone to corruption what actual loss
would that be?
And what a colourful league we’d have. Even Wigan might win the league one season. Anyone could be relegated. So much more refreshing than the usual cartel ruminating at the top of the table.
Just thought I’d throw this into the argument. Sorry for repeating this but this thread seems more active at the moment.
Walter, I agree that those figures surrounding the wages of Tony Adams are very interesting. From £6,000 a week in the mid-1990′s to £20,000 a week and then you have Sol Campbell earning £100,000 a week just 5 years later, or £60,000 a week according to an Arsenal fan on here. So there we have it – Sol’s contract at Arsenal was netting him between 10 and 16 times what TA was earning just 5 or 6 years previous.
Like I say, it makes for very interesting reading because I think it’s fair to say that you’ve just made a mockery of your own assumption that inflation in football has only increased by 47% since 1992
don’t worry M18CTID, I already admitted that Arsenal is the root of all evil in the football world.
I even think if they trace them down even the meteors in Russia from today are a direct result of Arsenal being financially doped in the 90ties. Not long now and the media will discover that the meteor in fact was just the huge suitcase that Fiszman used to bring his 50M to Arsenal. And after filling the clubs bank account they wanted to get rid of the evidence. But TA had seen it. Arsenal then put the suitcase in a rocket (this is where Kroenke steps in – NASA)
Maybe he was hoping to find out if there was still some money in it and that is the reason he went over there in Russia. But it landed on the wrong place.
TA being Tony Adams. Not our own Tony Attwood
To be honest Walter, it makes a refreshing change to see Arsenal getting blamed for all football’s evils instead of City