Further to this debate, I see in the news this morning that Manufactured City managed to publish figure showing a loss of £197mil! The biggest single season loss in footballing history. the Premier League, in total, lost £361mil. Now that's hardly a sustainable business model. These kind of figures will be like a red rag to a bull to Platini and UEFA.
The reason i cant see the FFP working is because of: a) The reasons already stated by others about these billionaire owners being...shall we say...less than honorable with things like sponsorships etc. b) There are only two clubs on the planet that have a turnover big enough to sustain their spending AND have a realistic chance of staying among the elite, those clubs are Man Utd and Real Madrid. Sure Arsenal make money, but thats because they dont spend any and that is reflected in their trophy haul (ie nothing). Can you really see a CL where clubs like City, Chelsea, Barca, Inter Milan, AC Milan, etc are all banned from it. What do you think would happen? These teams would branch away and make their own European Competition, much like when the top English clubs broke away from the football league to make the Premiership.
The scenario you envisage would require all these clubs to see eye to eye and reach an agreement that is satisfactory to all. Given the nature of the owners of many of these clubs, I just can't see that happening. For the English teams ( at the moment yourselves and City) to break away it would require the cooperation of the other major European clubs - not going to happen anytime soon. Platini seems determined to push this through, and I wouldn't underestimate his ability to do so. He sees himself as a future FIFA supremo, and he's ferociously ambitious.
It all depends on the scale of the sanctions I think. Some clubs already have such ridiculous wage bills (but also have fantastically rich owners) that they won't be able cut down their bills enough to fully comply in time, but it may even be cheaper and less damaging to the club to just pay the fine instead of selling a major earner, with all the potential on-pitch ramifications that entails. If UEFA are really serious about this they'll ramp the sanctions up to huge levels, big enough to seriously hurt an Abramovic or Mansour etc. Then it really will get interesting.
i thought the sanctions were barring from european competition rather than fines. Fines are bloody pointless
If they have rules for FFP then they must have published sanctions if they are broken, but I've never heard what they are. Does anyone know? If there are no known sanctions then the rules are rather pointless! If the club can "control" its own revenue indirectly, such as by an affiliated company that seems to exist only to give gigantic sponsorship deals (this is of course a hypothetical situation, yeah right), then surely the sponsorship can simply be increased to meet the required revenue. The precedent is set, if UEFA think that the current level of sponsorship is fine then they can't quibble about it being increased because that wouldn't be doing anything different from now, simply (sorry for the pun) moving the goalposts. Also clubs of this magnitude can do all sorts of things with creative accounting. If major firms can get away with not paying billions in tax somehow, then major football businesses will somehow be able to do the same thing. They might pay a proportion in the players wages in some other form that is not covered by the rules etc. Most of all what interest have UEFA shown to date for really tackling this problem. Just having a rule is pointless unless it is enforced, and enforced in a meaningful way. And are UEFA really prepared to impose the sanctions that will be needed? Also as mentioned earlier, are they prepared (are they able) to get to grips with the special rules that apply to Spanish clubs which give them an unfair financial advantage?
are they prepared (are they able) to get to grips with the special rules that apply to Spanish clubs which give them an unfair financial advantage? This needs to be addressed also. Although Real Madrid turn a profit, they seem to spank ridiculous amounts of that profit on stupid signing fees (ahem Zidane and Ronaldo), only to then need bailing out by their government. Why should they be able to spend £80 million on one player, which then ends up being at the tax payers expense!
Indeed. This is not unlike a private company that is still receiving state subsidies paying out dividends. I don't want to get all political but that's a disgrace.
City make me sick, a 200 million pound loss this year and probably a portion going to UEFA to keep them happy
Well if the sanctions are just fines then obviously they need to be very substantial, although ideally they'd be linked to some sort of European ban as well. Don't forget that any ban on competing in Europe will lose the club quite a bit of revenue as well, compounding the potential financial misery of the club. Does anyone know what the sanctions are, out of interest?
Nope,that's what is called sticking to the UEFA rules. You really need to know what is and isn't counted. You apparently don't.
I believe that first they offer the club accounting help,yes seriously,after that they suspend players from the CL squad. Currently the squad is 25 players,UEFA can reduce that down to 20 over a period of YEARS. Then they can ban you. All told before being banned should take about 10 years.
