It is baffling. The structuring of many of these transfers over a period of time - e.g 5 years means that £50M buy only shows up as £10M per year in the books. So club with City's income can splash the cash at will. And then we have all those issues about "sponsorship" , "investment" etc by businesses and organisations owned by or connected to the state which effectively owns City. These murky deals boost their revenues and/or keep expenditure off their books. It needs to be be more transparent.
Citeh are a law unto themselves. If they want rid of a wage, they can lend a player to one of their satellite teams, that aren't under UEFA's governance. The wage is gone. Allowing clubs to sponsor themselves to ridiculous levels was the clincher. Once you can do that, then there's no limit. Citehcan do as they see fit. If the rules are changed, they will hire the best lawyers to find a way round them. They're not in this to come second but I would expect them to want to see a pay back at some point. I would reckon that their end game is a super league whereby they play BM, RM, Barcelona, Juve, etc. rather than Burnley, Stoke and Bournemouth. It's the natural outcome out of that level of investment.
Payment is different to accounting. All players (assets) will be capitalised and the depreciation will be over the life of the contract, whether the payment is up front or over several years. So VVD's cost will be £15m per year, but they will also be accounting for Firminho, Mane, Salah, possibly Lallana etc.
But they will be paying for them with 2017/18 income so it's easier to comply with FFP. £29M for Firmino in 2015 was a big fee; modest outlay in 2018.
I don't know. If the mancs and Chelsea pissed off to their own little league the smaller clubs would stop playing like a Pulis send-off and games may well become more entertaining. We'd never achieve much in a Super League as the truly big clubs dwarf us in size to the extent that even if catching up was a possibility it would take more time than any of us have left on this miserable planet. Siphon off the top 2 or 3 wealthiest clubs in every European league to form one big plastic orgy and I think the soul of the game would make a significant return. Ticket prices and merchandise would fall and local grassroots fans would feel more valued as supporters rather than consumers. It's something that i agree will inevitably happen in the coming decades and I welcome it. But when it does happen I want us standing on the same side of the fence as the Notts Counties and Leyton Orients of the world.
We've not built a 62,000 stadium and built ourselves into one of the top 10/11 richest clubs in Europe to watch others form a Super League that doesn't include us. We're on a race against time to ensure our place in it, when it happens. Whether we never win the new competition or not, being in it will be everything to future owners and supporters. What we want is irrelevant. Being on the outside of the new competition will be like perpetually playing in the Europa League. A perfectly sensible tournament that most people don't give a crap about and which will see us consigned to an afterthought. I don't want it but if it comes into being, we have to be part of it.
I love this reply and for me it represents what football is about and I support CK's comments here. Sadly I do see what Bran and PS are saying but that is all about money and if and when it happens and I am still around I might just start supporting a team on the football side of this divide.
Again you're simply wrong, as the Taurine FC empire amply demonstrates: first they gained a foothold in European football by destabilising the Austrian league for over a decade while purging the club they replaced from history, then they moved on MLS and attempted to move a franchise into New York in order to destabilise that league (and were only stopped when MLS stepped in and enforced the franchise rights), then it was the Bundesliga where they skirted licensing rules by literally buying the place of another team in the fifth tier before pumping it full of cash (and players from the other Taurine FC clubs) to raise them into the Bundesliga as quickly as possible. This is why Taurine FC Salzburg is significant: if they were nipped in the bud sometime between 2004-6 when it was obvious they were up to as much good as a 2am chicken donor, Taurine FC Leipzig literally wouldn't exist - which would also have had the knock-on effect of stopping the ever-growing number Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed bin Sultan bin Zayed bin Khalifa Al Nahyan Teams that currently have franchises in Manchester, New York, Melbourne, Girona and Montevideo (while also having a stake in a further club in Yokohama) which, just like the Taurine FC clubs, have been shuttling players back and forth between one another. Also, as I forgot to mention before, Ligue 1 has its own set of FFP rules that had served to regulate the league, and this is the important thing: Monaco came into money at the same time as PSG and were very bold with throwing it around, going as far as bringing in a trio of Jorge Mendes clients on the assumption that instantaneous success would follow and they'd get away with it. Instead what happened was Ligue 1 put their foot down and, by complete coincidence, James Rodriguez was promptly sold to Los Ladrones while Falcao spent a couple of seasons being loaned to Chelsea and Man Utd - yet this season PSG have decided to see just how much of the piss they can take out of the FFP regulations (although they still skirted full-on pisstaking by loaning in Mbappe rather than signing him outright) due to either working under the same assumptions as Monaco did a few years earlier, or gambling on the idea that while smaller clubs are likely to get one hell of a slap for breaking FFP regulations, larger clubs wouldn't.
After years of Mark Clattenberk causing fans to invoke the name of Jesus Christ due to the standard of his refereeing in the UK, should anyone be surprised that a match he was officiating in Saudi Arabia had the Mu'addin call people to prayers while the match was taking place?
I'm gutted Arsenal got through tonight. I wanted both teams to get stuffed out of sight and nowhere near a cup final.
I hope there is another solution. Possibly rather than an all play all league the Swiss system used in chess tournaments could be adopted. That way you could have four 25 team European leagues playing 8 matches and then the top 2 in each could then play a 14 match league. With a reduced domestic league of 16 clubs that would be a similar number of matches to what we have now but there would be a lot more matches between the major clubs. We will go bust if we stand on the sidelines because the TV money lost is essential.
Unfortunately if they make the signings they are after they will be stronger in the run in...hope I am wrong though.
I agree. They’ve lost Sanchez which is a blow but Walcott and Coquelin were dead wood. MickeyTaryan under Wenger looks like a good fit. Aubameyang is class and tbh I’m surprised Chelsea aren’t after him. With no champions league and out the FA Cup, arsenal can fully focus on the League.
Totally agree with your opening paragraph, totally disagree with the second. The trick is to be invited to join but to very publicly decline the invitation and very publicly give the reasons for declining. From then on, the initiative is ours and we become the defacto guardians of true footballing values (if we aren't that already). If let's say Chelsea and Arsenal joined a Euro Super League and we didn't, they would become irrelevant to us. Just like Boca Juniors or Fluminese are now. Both big clubs huge on their own continents, but the fact that we literally never ever play them makes them all but irrelevant to Spurs fans. Bump into a gooner in the pub and what'll the banter be? "Haha you have to play Aston Villa while we get to play Barcelona". "Yeah, and get thrashed by them and pay hundreds for tickets and further hundreds for flights and hotels just to sit in a near-silent stadium with NFL-style advert breaks and a half-time show surrounded by tourists and corporate get-togethers." The only reason the EL is currently so ****e is because the teams who are in it are theoretically able to swap the happy meal for a michelin restaurant. The grass is only greener because the twat lives next door and has a see-through fence. But if the twat is by and large out of sight and out of mind, if the michelin place puts a big sign outside saying 'Plastics Only' and meanwhile the Macdonalds next door is full of the type of people you'd happily invite to your stag do, I know which side of the fence I'd rather be on.
