iwasthere2012 wrote:zuricity wrote:Nice one CARL.
Apart from Carl's contribution above, I'm still waiting for someone in the press to come out and call this for what it is. I know Brennan and one or two others have written pieces about how FFP was a sham in the past. It's time some of the press actually earned an honest living and wrote something resembling journalism.
It should really be put out there what the last few years have been about and these pathetic reasons that they are putting forward for changing now should be exposed.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/footba ... en-it.htmlI told you that Michel Platini was destroying football... finally even he has now seen it
UEFA want to relax their rules on the controversial Financial Fair Play
Michel Platini has finally seen what some of us knew eight years ago
Financial Fair Play in its current form destroys competitions
Whatever the two Milan clubs want, they seem to get from UEFA
By MARTIN SAMUEL - SPORT FOR THE DAILY MAIL
PUBLISHED: 23:10, 19 May 2015 | UPDATED: 01:40, 20 May 2015
Say what you like about Michel Platini, but he’s no slouch. It only took the ruination of the Bundesliga, the reduction of the giants of Italian football to neutered also-rans, the destruction of leagues across Eastern Europe, £100million-plus in unjustly levelled fines, the milking of fans for owner profit at clubs such as Newcastle, legal actions in double figures across Europe and the creation of a sinister, untouchable European elite for him to work out what some of us knew eight years ago.
Namely, this. ‘Those who despise Chelsea invariably fail to answer one basic question: how else is a team meant to break into the cosy club that is the Champions League, and remain there, without spending beyond its means?’ That was from a column in The Times published on February 21, 2007. You’re welcome. Weekly bulletins on similar lines have been issued since.
Hell, it’s been a long road but finally someone at UEFA saw sense. Financial Fair Play in its present form destroys competition. It creates, in Germany and elsewhere, worthless one-team leagues, it strangles investment and discourages new money from coming into the game. It makes heroes of profiteers like Mike Ashley and Karl Oyston and villains of enhancers such as Sheik Mansour and Jack Walker. It creates inevitabilities and foregone conclusions and values accountancy over ambition.
Its dismal mantra was adopted by some of football’s slowest minds, and as a result may yet destroy Queens Park Rangers. All of this was entirely predictable and, baby, I’ve got the back catalogue to prove it. Anyway, hate to say I told you so, as The Hives sang, so we’ll move on.
Here is today’s question. Why is it that whatever is good for the two Milan clubs also happens to be what is best for football, according to UEFA? Ever wondered that? Whatever the Milan clubs want, they get. When they wanted FFP, in it came; now they want more financial freedom, they get that, too.
Don’t be mistaken. The relaxation of UEFA’s wrecking ball regulation is a mighty positive for football, particularly if it ensures that, from here, owner investment must be a gift. UEFA should also consider simultaneously closing loopholes such as Roman Abramovich’s £1billion loan to Fordstam, the company through which he owns Chelsea. This would prevent another Portsmouth from occurring.
Yet there are plenty of clubs and recent developments that could be cited as highlighting the need for change in FFP rules. Bayern Munich’s stockpiling of the best domestic talent in Germany; the summer plundering of Southampton; nine consecutive title wins for BATE Borisov in Belarus; the failure to find a buyer for Everton; the fine of roughly £50m for Manchester City, despite their wonderful regeneration project in east Manchester.
Russian Roman Abramovich poured money into Chelsea and made them one of England's elite teams
Yet the name that is said to have provoked this rethink at UEFA is that of AC Milan. Silvio Berlusconi wants to sell his club, but can’t, because a new owner would need to spend heavily to move Milan from midtable torpor, and UEFA rules do not allow that. So now it’s all change.
When Platini introduced FFP, he cited the wishes of the club bosses as high onhis list of considerations. ‘It is mainly the owners who asked us to do something,’ he said before the Champions League draw in 2009. ‘Abramovich, Berlusconi and Massimo Moratti at Inter. They do not want to fork out any more.’
Not much of a philosophy, then, was it? I don’t want to spend my money, so you can’t either. I’ve got what I want, so let’s just pull up this drawbridge.
Abramovich, we know, was a turncoat. Having bought his way into the elite, he crossed the floor because he didn’t want other new owners matching his spending power and challenging Chelsea’s supremacy. These are the principles that Jose Mourinho now espouses as if they are (a) noble and (b) his own.
For Berlusconi and Moratti, however, it was different. Their clubs were part of the establishment, but maintaining that status with men like Abramovich around was becoming a huge financial drain. Tie spending power to revenue and that was the problem solved, they thought. The new owners from the east would be shackled and the status quo maintained.
What they had not anticipated was the parlous financial state of Italian football. Poor matchday revenues, underdeveloped commercial opportunities with many clubs not owning their stadiums and a TV deal which paled into insignificance beside the sums on offer in England and Spain. Suddenly committed to spending what they earned, the influence of the Milanese clubs collapsed.
In 2012, AC Milan sold their two best players, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Thiago Silva, and the current squad is a pale imitation of the glory days. Inter were largely jettisoned by Moratti in 2013 — he retained a stake of 28.1 per cent — but new owner Erick Thohir has been unable to move forward, saddled with the demands of FFP and huge debt.
So now the protectionist, exclusionist plan A has failed to work, the Milan clubs have advanced plan B: back to the future. The principles they demanded threatened to ruin the pair of them. But, don’t worry, they’ve got some new ones over here.
That is likely to be the stance of the English elite, too. They will need to find a fresh position on the moral high ground, because the old sermons won’t convince any more.
Financial Fair Play, we were so often told, came from a desire to prevent another implosion such as the one at Portsmouth or Leeds United. That is why Manchester City should be banned from Europe, or, as Mourinho suggested, docked points.
Yet if UEFA rules now prevent owners or third parties from loaning clubs huge sums of money — and then just as airily demanding arbitrary repayment — these financial catastrophes will no longer be possible.
So what will be the case for FFP then? The elite will be forced into the open to admit it is not Portsmouth who are being protected, but the financial and political supremacy of Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool or Arsenal. David Gill, former chief executive of United, was among those who helped frame FFP. Amazingly, what was best for the European game appeared to correspond precisely with what was best for his old club. It was the same for Karl-Heinz Rummenigge at Bayern Munich, too.
But not for the rest of Europe. As Arsene Wenger pointed out yesterday, the Premier League’s new television deal is the other vehicle for change, terrifying the continent with its enormity. If English clubs have so much additional revenue then they can spend accordingly and blow their rivals away. This was always a complication.
In FFP terms, one size could never fit all. How can clubs be tethered to turnover if Barcelona and Real Madrid’s television deal is constructed in an entirely different way from that of the rest of Europe?
How can clubs all work under the same financial regulation when each country has different laws on, for instance, taxation — meaning at one stage it would have cost Paris Saint-Germain roughly 30 per cent more to pay Wayne Rooney the same salary he earns at Manchester United.
AC Milan sold Zlatan Ibrahimovic to Paris Saint-Germain in 2012 and are a shadow of some of their old teams
How can there be one rule for a league that routinely receives forms of state aid, when others do not? The only way FFP could ever have been fair was if UEFA took into account the variables in different domestic competitions, and addressed issues of wealth distribution in the Champions League.
Once the size of the Premier League’s television deal became apparent, however, it was plain that parts of continental Europe were simply going to become uncompetitive. Milan, for example. Now those clubs are back in the game, and so are a lot of others — which is just as it should be.
So Platini got the right result, eventually, but perhaps for the wrong reasons. Next time, he shouldn’t try so hard to please the entitled elite. ‘It’s not easy,’ said Wenger of FFP yesterday. ‘There are very intelligent people at UEFA who have worked for a few years now on that problem.’ Really? They should have worked harder then.
Any negative that can be seen from eight years out by a bloke with an E grade maths O level sitting in his front room, really shouldn’t have been too much for Europe’s brains trust to compute. Fair play didn’t have to be rocket science; it just had to be fair.
