I have been doing a bit of research on the FFP. This is what I have found and how I have understood it. Please correct something that I may have got wrong or that could be out of date Financial Fair Play rules have a impact on what we are allowed to do with regards to our wage budget. We can spend what we want on signing players or anything else without it effecting the FFP rules. But the wage budget is the issue. We could sign top players but our wage budget wont allow us to afford to pay these top player wages, even though we could afford it now under our new owners. League 2 clubs can only spend 55% of our turnover on the wages. So its massively important that league 2 teams do their best to boost attendances and seek revenue from anywhere they can to boost their wage budget. More turnover means higher wage budget. The good news is, we are not actually effected by the FFP this season. Teams promoted from non league to league 2 get a 2 year transitional period where the FFP dont actually fully kick in to 55%. Year 1 of the transitional period gived these newly promoted teams no FFP to abide by as it would be unfair on these newly promoted team to have to restrict their wage budget after joining that league. So we dont actually have a wage budget this season. DC may have been given a budget by Higgs but its nothing to do with FFP rules. Year 2 of the transitional period is when the FFP does start to kick in but not at 55% of the turnover like the other league 2 teams. Year 2 is at 75% turnover. So in simple terms, by the end of year 1 of the transitional period, a newly promoted team would need to reduce the wage budget down to 75% of their turnover. By the end of year 2 of the transitional period, a newly promoted team would need to reduce the wage budget down to 55% of their turnover. This is why you see former non league teams - with wealthy owners - who got promoted to league 2, often get promoted to league 1 within the 2 year transitional period. Like Crawley and Fleetwood for example. However, Crawley and Fleetwood are struggling now because they have had their transitional period so have to adhere to the FFP rules and although they may have wealthy owners, they dont have the turnover to allow them to have a high wage budget so cant get the players in they were use to getting. Hense their decline. Us however, we have the potential get up and stay up because we have the fanbase to keep us up to keep the turnover up meaning wage budget up. This is why a bigger new stadium is important. Its also massively important that our new owners sort out the commerical side of things ready for when our transitional period finishes which will help our turnover etc. Its great that Wael has already came out and said as much. DC is no longer restricted on wage budget, which Higgs had put on him as Higgs didnt have the wealth to sustain a decent wage budget in this transitional period. DC now has a wealthy owner who has already said he has met DC and told him he will back whatever he needs. He has told us in his interviews that he will be sitting down with DC to see what he needs. Will Wael take advantage of the FFP not applying to us yet and try to buy our way into league 1 or will he be cautious and not spend as much because if we fail to go up, FFP kicks in to 75% of our turnover? If we over spend due to no FFP and fail to go up and then are stuck with high earners and fail to get below 75% of our turnover, we will then be under a transfer embargo.
Thanks for explaining the process. Its something I've never fully understood but to be honest, up to this point, I never really thought that Rovers would be fortunate enough to be affected by it anyway, so its not something I'd ever taken much notice of. Now of course, things have changed and who knows what the future holds. Still trying to take the turn around in our fortunes in - this kind of thing just doesn't happen to the likes of us !! After all the years of ups and downs (and there have been plenty) our future looks assured and on the face of it, its hard to see anything but good times ahead now. Despite everything else thats gone on before, in my opinion, a certain Mr Higgs deserves great credit for orchestrating this latest deal and securing our club's future in an era when many smaller clubs like us are in dire trouble and heading for financial ruin.
Higgs certainly does. From what I was told yesterday at the game, apparently Higgs wanted the deal to include that he stays on board at the club and have a joint thing with the Al-Qadi family. Not sure if that is true or not. Apparently the family wanted Rovers for themselves as they could see the potential in the club but if its done right and they wanted their own people in place to make sure it goes right. Higgs and the rest could see it was a great deal for Rovers but they were torn on the idea because they wanted to stay at the club and if they enforced that then they would lose the deal. They kind of had no option really. They did get the life long vice presidents role though. I also heard that some of the directors didnt get exactly the price they wanted but felt forced to go ahead. Again, just what I been told. Could be all talk and no truth in it but if it is true then it must have been a hard decision for Higgs to cut ties and the fact that he did, although we dont know how this will all work out, Higgs did do it for the benefit of the club.
CJS Thanks for giving NH some credit for what he has done for this club, some people just seemed to want to knock him at every opportunity, i'm guessing that he has better things to do than read the forum but if he should get bored and read this, this Gashead would like to say thank you very much for all that you did to keep this club going
Listening to the interview with Hamer that I put up earlier in a different thread, near the beginning of his interview he said it was one of the conditions that the existing board members had to go. Kind of co-insides with what I was told at the Mem on Saturday as mentioned above in my last post.
CJS I know it's only a computer game but on Football manager when you get you FFP every month it says something about u21s not being included in it, if that is correct then our youth wages wouldn't be affected would they ? or have complete got this wrong
CJS just googled FFP in League Football, clicked on SCMP and looked under Player Wages and Deductions. It states that Wage costs for youth players on Pro Contracts are excluded These youth players are players who have come through the Youth Development Scheme and have been awarded fulltime contracts and are UNDER the age of TWENTY Hope that helps
All you need to know about FFP is its **** and stops clubs like mine and yours getting into the big boys gang. Worse part of it is the big boys gang's leader is a city fan who is quite often at our home matches. And from next season the parachute payments make it near on impossible to get into the prem unless you find a class of 96 like Man U had.
Yep, I recall that now. So you can see why its hard for lower league clubs to hold on to players over 20 who are showing potential but not ready for 1st team football. FFP stops you really because you need all of your wage budget to get players to do the job now if you know what I mean.
The FFP works differently for you ROD. Rules in League 1/2 is different to the Championship. But next season we may have the same rules But you are right though, it will get harder to get into the Prem.
