Conn is kind of right on one point. In the EFL, owners are only required to fund additional wages above the limit for one season, whereas contracts run for multiple years. But as with UEFA's version of FFP, the EFL one totally misses the mark if you're looking for an effective financial monitoring process.
Owner investment is not in itself dangerous as long as it's part of a controlled and managed process, that seeks to achieve financial sustainability. It's certainly better than debt, which has to be repaid at some point.
Chelsea owe Abramovich's Fordstam holding company about the same as Sheikh Mansour has invested in City, which is just under £1.5bn. If he walked away from Chelsea that sum would have to be repaid to him within 18 months. If Sheikh Mansour sold City, he'd take 77% of the proceeds.
United may well be profitable but there's a covenant as part of their debt arrangement that they have to achieve a given level of profitability otherwise their debt is repayable on demand. So they could still return a profit yet fall foul of that covenant, something which FFP would never flag up.
Prior to ADUG taking over, we recorded relatively small losses, which when allowable expenditure was added back, would probably have seen us achieve break-even under current FFP rules. Yet cashflow was negative, meaning John Wardle & David Makin has to lend us money to meet our commitments. That's something else the current version of FFP would never flag up yet it's an absolutely key danger signal.
He's the misguided one if he's saying that FFP would have prevented a Bury/Leeds/Portsmouth scenario. There's no guarantee of that at all as there is no version of FFP operated currently, in the EFL, the PL of UEFA, that would do that as none of these look at the range of factors necessary to be confident that you could achieve that.
