BluessinceHydeRoad
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- 26 Mar 2012
- Messages
- 2,562
As many of the posters are hinting we are seeing more and more clearly that, hidden by the verbose, legalistic phraseology in which clause after clause of FFP is couched, lies the truly farcical reality of these "regulations". UEFA was never a body which had the credibility or authority or right to regulate the financial activity of football clubs, those "officials" who laid down its aims and objectives (the true ones never to be revealed to anyone) were a bunch of dishonest, self-seeking rip-off merchants and those drafted in to draw up their regulations were chosen carefully to ensure their loyalty to the plan. What emerged was not a code of law or anything like it but a scheme with one target and only one, and it had nothing to do with financial stability. I was not surprised when, in 2013 and '14 I did not read the opinion of one single serious legal analyst who thought that these regulations could withstand a challenge in court, but they have limped on painfully and irrelevantly, as debt in the game and particularly the debt carried by Europe's "biggest" (and smallest!) clubs grows and grows, as UEFA grits its teeth and takes up the cudgels to try and restore financial stability to a club with no debt and burgeoning revenues by showing a fierce determination to punish it a second time for something it had only done the first time because of sharp practice by UEFA. But then a real crisis comes along, a truly existential crisis that has paragons of virtue such as Liverpool! and Spurs! reaching for the smelling salts and begging for state aid. Not the benefit of FFP but the state aid that is not allowed under any circumstances. And FFP's role in steadying the ship? None! The regulations are to be "relaxed" when we see just how far they've failed in fact to guarantee the financial stability of the clubs. Thus after buggering about with them in 2009, tinkering with them in 2015 and "relaxing" them at some unspecified time in the future, it is to be hoped that City's challenges in court are sufficient to consign them to the only place for which they are fit - the dustbin. This might lead to the exit of all those criminals who have seized control of UEFA and City, not Trump, will actually and in reality, have "drained the swamp".