FFP RIP?

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Short term maybe, but still likely to be enforced... otherwise idiotic owners could go crazy and end up in even more dire financial straits... our accounts are far from healthy.
STCC went in the bin in 2019.

FFP has absolutely no meaning at present due to the pandemic. Not that it really did anyway, as City proved when they wheeled out the lawyers. Had they lost that case at CAS I have zero doubt they’d have taken the entire premise of FFP to the civil courts, where it would have died a death, as it’s a restriction of trade.
 
STCC went in the bin in 2019.

FFP has absolutely no meaning at present due to the pandemic. Not that it really did anyway, as City proved when they wheeled out the lawyers. Had they lost that case at CAS I have zero doubt they’d have taken the entire premise of FFP to the civil courts, where it would have died a death, as it’s a restriction of trade.


E.49. Subject to Rule E.53, if the PSR Calculation results in a loss of up to £15m, then the Board shall determine whether the Club will, until the end of T+1, be able to pay its liabilities described in Rule E.14.7.1 and fulfil the obligations set out in Rules E.14.7.2 and E.14.7.3. E.50. Subject to Rule E.53, if the PSR Calculation results in a loss of in excess of £15m then the following shall apply: E.50.1. the Club shall provide, by 31 March in the relevant Season, Future Financial Information to cover the period commencing from its last accounting reference date (as defined in section 391 of the Act) until the end of T+2 and a calculation of estimated aggregated Adjusted Earnings Before Tax until the end of T+2 based on that Future Financial Information; E.50.2. the Club shall provide such evidence of Secure Funding as the Board considers sufficient; and E.50.3. if the Club is unable to provide evidence of Secure Funding as set out in Rule E.50.2, the Board may exercise its powers set out in Rule E.15. E.51. Subject to Rule E.53,

if the PSR Calculation results in losses of in excess of £105m: E.51.1. the Board may exercise its powers set out in Rule E.15; and E.51.2. the Club shall be treated as being in breach of these Rules and accordingly the Board shall refer the breach to a Commission constituted pursuant to Section W of these Rules. E.52. The sum set out in Rule E.51 shall be reduced by £22m for each Season covered by T-1, T-2 and T-3 in which the Club was in membership of The Football League. E.53.

In respect of Season 2019/20, the provisions of Rules E.48 to E.51 shall not apply.



E.15. The powers referred to in Rule E.14 are: E.15.1. to require the Club to submit, agree and adhere to a budget which shall include, but not be limited to, the matters set out in Rule H.1.1 to H.1.3;
E.15.2. to require the Club to provide such further information as the Board shall determine and for such period as it shall determine;
and E.15.3. to refuse any application by that Club to register any Player or any new contract of an existing Player of that Club if the Board reasonably deems that this is necessary in order to ensure that the Club complies with its obligations listed in Rule E.14.7



I think the Premier League still has STCC, but now its based solely on Profit and loss, the old version was binned with limits of wages and stuff.

It was suspended last season and will 100% be suspended this season, possibly considering that clubs have all took a massive hit, would be shocked if they choose to enforce it given the current climate were I would imagine most clubs in the league would fail for the next few seasons.
 
FFP protected the bigger clubs more than it helped the smaller clubs, it won’t be missed
Make no mistake that's what it was designed to do.. Barcelona and Madrid both currently have debt of around a billion each, Madrid slightly more, now UEFA are coming to the rescue... I know it's not going to happen but any financial restriction should be down to debt not income, if you have more than X amount of debt you can't sign players, use what you have and promote from the youth setup, City get hounded by UEFA despite having no debt and Madrid are 1.2 billion euro in debt and not a peep from UEFA.
 
I think Covid is the bigger contributor.

City didn't argue successfully against FFP but did argue that UEFA completely screwed their own case due to not meeting various timelines for bringing the charges.

Bit like when someone gets off in court over a technical issue with the arrest or paperwork.
Completely & totally wrong. They were completely exonerated on all charges with the exception of failing to cooperate
(as each time they submitted evidence it was leaked to the media). Don't believe the media narrative (and twitter).
 

STCC went in the bin in 2019.

FFP has absolutely no meaning at present due to the pandemic. Not that it really did anyway, as City proved when they wheeled out the lawyers. Had they lost that case at CAS I have zero doubt they’d have taken the entire premise of FFP to the civil courts, where it would have died a death, as it’s a restriction of trade.
That was the long term plan I am led to believe. The plan was also to cripple them financially with legal fees. City had budgeted for a 5 year legal fight.
 
I would take a guess that Everybodies accounts are far from healthy...and the 'bigger' they are the less healthy they be
Exactly and it all depends who is going to open their own personal wallet to make them healthy
Will the Glazers , they are selling United shares
Will Kronke , his American Franchises are suffering as well
Will FSG doubtful
Will Moshiri / Usmanov ,Abramovich , Mansour, PSG owners ,more than likely they will
 
I mean, the obvious answer here is that there will be a reason they're doing this.

Personally, think it's ridiculous that there are such restrictions - Imagine someone telling McDonalds or something that they could only spend "x" amount of money each year improving their business. How can you limit someones intentions of making their own business more successful, it wouldn't happen in any other strand of life, unless they're really going to go down a franchise like thing which happens in America (that will never, ever happen).

But surely the motive is to bail out Real, and more specifically Barcelona who are cash strapped? Wouldn't be surprised if Agnelli, over at Juve is flapping it, as they're not going to win the league either, he seems to have the entire football squirming at present.

Hopefully for us, it would be huge,, if Usmanov did actually come in, and the rumours were right that Moshiri was just his puppet, then this would probably propel us to the top of English football. But so many if's. Wouldn't be entirely shocked to see something like teams who have qualified for the CL who's names contain "M, J, B, or A " can spend what they like the rest are restricted to 20p a year.
 
Completely & totally wrong. They were completely exonerated on all charges with the exception of failing to cooperate
(as each time they submitted evidence it was leaked to the media). Don't believe the media narrative (and twitter).
Does that include the Etisalat sponsorship that was time barred? And is Cities excuse for their obstructive behaviour a trustworthy and unbiased narrative and not used by their media team?

Not overly bothered about FFP and if a clubs owners want to pump billions in then I don't see why they shouldn't be able to as long as it's not leveraged on the club but I don't buy the "City were victims of a conspiracy and innocent of all wrongdoing" spiel.

The emails that got leaked to Der Spiel may not have been admissible but they were pretty damning.
 
Make no mistake that's what it was designed to do.. Barcelona and Madrid both currently have debt of around a billion each, Madrid slightly more, now UEFA are coming to the rescue... I know it's not going to happen but any financial restriction should be down to debt not income, if you have more than X amount of debt you can't sign players, use what you have and promote from the youth setup, City get hounded by UEFA despite having no debt and Madrid are 1.2 billion euro in debt and not a peep from UEFA.
Establishment clubs... you are right of course.
 

Completely & totally wrong. They were completely exonerated on all charges with the exception of failing to cooperate
(as each time they submitted evidence it was leaked to the media). Don't believe the media narrative (and twitter).

That is correct. My understanding of the case, which I said at the time and reiterated my thinking on about page 4 of this thread is it's exactly that.

Having read the judgement, while it's clear time frames was one aspect of it mentioned it was not the only asepct mentioned. I mean obviously if it's outside of time frames that has to be mentioned, but it was more that the foundartions of FFP have no precadent in European legislation on commercial enterprises. At no point did the court make the comment that the case was essentially sound, but they got times out, and had they have done, UEFA could have merely re-launched the proceedings and committed to meeting time frames knowing a court had established the principle they were in the right. Given the vendetta they have pursued in this, it would be highly likely they would have looked to bring cases again had they been given that approval. That they didn't, tells you everything.

Aside from that point of order, it is also worth stating, that even if that HAD of happened, it's still not a big win for UEFA. Legal judgements and precadents tend to start on the macro and the micro becomes secondary. There are aspects of Bosman's ruling where the micro didn't quite fit in, but culturally it is the macro that shapes and changes behavioiur. It's also worth saying, it wasn't for 3-4 years before you really started to feel the impact of the ruling. It's never the next day.

However even if it had just been the technicality, the next club charged will just say- Manchester City agreed a sponsorship that was the biggest in the league at the time, and a court has established any action against them has been deemed unlawful. That is now established as precadent and the default position of any court. You would have to be seen to not just be going beyond what Manchester City did, but so far beyond it that it was qualitatively worse and so much so that a decision could be overturned. Like being worse would not be enough. Being qualitatively worse may not be enough, as a judge may say- there's not enough to justify overturning the previous judgement. We can all argue about degrees here and what qualitaitvely worse would mean, but it would be reasnable at the cautious end to assume it wouuld say doubling the leagues highest sponsorship (where City I believe matched it). That sort of thing might be considered a big breach, and might therefore be considered a big enough that they would overturn the principle.

This is all best case scenario for UEFA/FFP as well. The alternative is that the court just views this as an issue of principle, and its not for courts to intervene on how much investment shareholders want to make, or it's not for a body to detirmine the true value on sponsorship deals- they are detirmined by what someone in the market is willing to pay. In that case, no value of sponsor money coming in, or investment would ever be too high.

As a final aside on this particular point, it's also worth saying, City did cut a lot of corners in this as well. From the outside it looked like an org going out of it's way to try and get charged. I don't know if that was the case, or whether there was a naivety/arrogance on their part. But essentially any basic attempt to comply with the rules also makes you look less chargeable than City (of that time). And City at that time were proven to be innocent. So I'm not sure there is a world going back to scenario 1, where you could be qualitatively more dismissive of UEFA's silly rules than City were. Essentially if you make a bit of an effortto follow the rules, legally you are water tight.

I also think the Covid stuff is the other big factor, but both on their own could have easily ended FFP. I also think in honesty, UEFA are seeing a changing of the guard. They are probably a bit worried about some of the abstract threats of a European Super League, that seem to be getting bandied about by some of the traditional teams, who are now skint, and seem to be making a turn. People seem to forget that UEFA is an org of it's own ends and that a Super league would be a rival, specifically to it's CL tournament (which is amassive money spinner). They did everything for those traditional teams, and those teams betrayed them by negotiating with a rival behind their backs. Of course you would review.

If you are UEFA, it's perhaps reasonable that you can look to build around PSG, City and a few others, state to them they will not have the spending restrictions that will be in place in any potential super league and ultimately start building those up in the hope they wouldn't switch. It makes a lot of sense.
 
Does that include the Etisalat sponsorship that was time barred? And is Cities excuse for their obstructive behaviour a trustworthy and unbiased narrative and not used by their media team?

Not overly bothered about FFP and if a clubs owners want to pump billions in then I don't see why they shouldn't be able to as long as it's not leveraged on the club but I don't buy the "City were victims of a conspiracy and innocent of all wrongdoing" spiel.

The emails that got leaked to Der Spiel may not have been admissible but they were pretty damning.
Without getting into it because its all pointless now to be honest it was from the emails from Der Spiegel that the case totally collapsed.
Out of thousands of emails submitted only 6 were found to have any relevance and a number of these had been cut & pasted (you really couldn't make this stuff up) Regarding the time barred issues: City had already been penalised and fined for them previously. UEFA wanted (or tried) to reopen them.
Their own laws forbid them to do so. It was a complete slam dunk by the City legal team and they new it before they even went into
the court. The charges had no foundation or fact whatsoever. It was UEFA egged on by Liverpool & United (who both just happen to have representives on the UEFA board) who wanted to literally destroy City. The net result was that they destroyed themselves. I followed this in detail all the way through and UEFA never had a leg to stand on but pursued it out of spite and bitterness. I have a copy of the official outcome report of the case somewhere which explains it all in very fine detail. I'll try and dig it out The fact remains that City were completely exonerated on all charges. End of (even though it wasn't reported that way in the media - which really wasn't a big surprise to be truthful).
 
That is correct. My understanding of the case, which I said at the time and reiterated my thinking on about page 4 of this thread is it's exactly that.

Having read the judgement, while it's clear time frames was one aspect of it mentioned it was not the only asepct mentioned. I mean obviously if it's outside of time frames that has to be mentioned, but it was more that the foundartions of FFP have no precadent in European legislation on commercial enterprises. At no point did the court make the comment that the case was essentially sound, but they got times out, and had they have done, UEFA could have merely re-launched the proceedings and committed to meeting time frames knowing a court had established the principle they were in the right. Given the vendetta they have pursued in this, it would be highly likely they would have looked to bring cases again had they been given that approval. That they didn't, tells you everything.

Aside from that point of order, it is also worth stating, that even if that HAD of happened, it's still not a big win for UEFA. Legal judgements and precadents tend to start on the macro and the micro becomes secondary. There are aspects of Bosman's ruling where the micro didn't quite fit in, but culturally it is the macro that shapes and changes behavioiur. It's also worth saying, it wasn't for 3-4 years before you really started to feel the impact of the ruling. It's never the next day.

However even if it had just been the technicality, the next club charged will just say- Manchester City agreed a sponsorship that was the biggest in the league at the time, and a court has established any action against them has been deemed unlawful. That is now established as precadent and the default position of any court. You would have to be seen to not just be going beyond what Manchester City did, but so far beyond it that it was qualitatively worse and so much so that a decision could be overturned. Like being worse would not be enough. Being qualitatively worse may not be enough, as a judge may say- there's not enough to justify overturning the previous judgement. We can all argue about degrees here and what qualitaitvely worse would mean, but it would be reasnable at the cautious end to assume it wouuld say doubling the leagues highest sponsorship (where City I believe matched it). That sort of thing might be considered a big breach, and might therefore be considered a big enough that they would overturn the principle.

This is all best case scenario for UEFA/FFP as well. The alternative is that the court just views this as an issue of principle, and its not for courts to intervene on how much investment shareholders want to make, or it's not for a body to detirmine the true value on sponsorship deals- they are detirmined by what someone in the market is willing to pay. In that case, no value of sponsor money coming in, or investment would ever be too high.

As a final aside on this particular point, it's also worth saying, City did cut a lot of corners in this as well. From the outside it looked like an org going out of it's way to try and get charged. I don't know if that was the case, or whether there was a naivety/arrogance on their part. But essentially any basic attempt to comply with the rules also makes you look less chargeable than City (of that time). And City at that time were proven to be innocent. So I'm not sure there is a world going back to scenario 1, where you could be qualitatively more dismissive of UEFA's silly rules than City were. Essentially if you make a bit of an effortto follow the rules, legally you are water tight.

I also think the Covid stuff is the other big factor, but both on their own could have easily ended FFP. I also think in honesty, UEFA are seeing a changing of the guard. They are probably a bit worried about some of the abstract threats of a European Super League, that seem to be getting bandied about by some of the traditional teams, who are now skint, and seem to be making a turn. People seem to forget that UEFA is an org of it's own ends and that a Super league would be a rival, specifically to it's CL tournament (which is amassive money spinner). They did everything for those traditional teams, and those teams betrayed them by negotiating with a rival behind their backs. Of course you would review.

If you are UEFA, it's perhaps reasonable that you can look to build around PSG, City and a few others, state to them they will not have the spending restrictions that will be in place in any potential super league and ultimately start building those up in the hope they wouldn't switch. It makes a lot of sense.
You covered it better than I could - so thank you.
City stopped cooperating at all with UEFA and refused point blank to send them any more information due to the fact that every time they did it was leaked. So City in the end just said 'see you court' knowing full well that UEFA would try and use this as evidence of being guilty. However, they felt they had no other choice. That's why they didn't follow the rules. The relationship between City & UEFA at that time was rock bottom anyway, so they took what they thought was a calculated risk - obviously advised and approved by the legal team. The whole thing was a trumped up farce. They spent nearly seven years and millions and millions of Euros on legal fees trying to nail City to the cross whilst Barca & RM were racking up billions of Euros in debt. Also, just recently both Barca & RM have been found guilty by an EU court of receiveing state aid for the last 20 years and have been told that they have to pay it back, but you never hear a peep about it. Unbelievable Jeff!
 
FFP protected the bigger clubs more than it helped the smaller clubs, it won’t be missed
that's right, its slowed down the movement of clubs to a glacial pace, clubs at the top would have to have a series of say 5 or 6 disastrous seasons to fall out of the reckoning, possible (Arsenal) but unlikely, and clubs on the up would have to outperform the super sky 6 for 5 or 6 seasons without the financial backup to sustain it. Not a chance. FFP is a horrific fixing of the status quo.
 

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