PL charge City for alleged breaches of financial rules

[dadnlad]

super league is the long term vision all along

destroy the weak from within and strong form super league
no choice left as is need of football

 

[Coatigan]

Is there a popular professional team sport without financial controls?

There's a reason that football, cricket, rugby, baseball, basketball, fomula 1, NFL, Hockey etc. all have cost controls , and it's because sport isn't actually that fun to watch when it devolves into a competition of who spends the most. It's only a minority view on here only because we're one of the 5 highest spending clubs in the world and the assumption is that because of our owners we'd win any financial arms race.


If someone doesn't want to have limitations on the amount they invest, they can buy a football club in a league that has no restrictions, or a team in a sport without them. The argument was only slightly convincing when owners who had invested in clubs pre-2011 were made to sign up to financial controls, but that argument was pretty quickly lost whn they all agreed to it (for self serving purposes) instead of challenging the introduction of controls in the subsequent 15 years.

You have kind of generalised an already broad question. And while that is fair and I don't disagree with your view, I find your inability to resist throwing in a dismissive disecting of the forum and it's failures a bit unnecessary.

This is not a personal thing, I say the same for anyone that mocks entire threads or comes onto a specific topic to be amused at others' interest in that topic.

I don't think your assumption above is entirely teue, I've seen plenty arguing they would welcome a newcastle, everton, villa etc spending big as a challenge to the league. And when arguing that view, most often it is done on the ffp as is, rather than as a wide concept of spending.

 

[cheekybids]

Sorry, are you really pretending these things didn't happen betwee 1960 and 2011? They did.

As for the PL investigation "lacking credibility" - according to who? City fans. No one else thinks they lack credibility and more importantly no one fucking knows because no one has seen any of the evidence for or against the case.

So again I go back to the point that there is not a single popular team sport int he world without some sort of financial control, and that's for the very simple reason that sport is less entertaining when you make the financial bar to success so high that only 10% of the clubs competing can actually win.

No not just according to City fans but according to the City exec team that have faced these accusations before & prevailed.

If the premier league felt there was a chance that 3 or 4 serious charges would succeed they wouldn’t have come up with 115 & creating years of delays.

 

[KS55]

Well Remember football had spending controls into the 60's.

Are you telling me you've not heard a million FOCs on here tell everyone how much better the football league was when teams came and went at the top of the table and United/Liverpool didn't dominate the top of the table for 40 years? It's not a coincidence that competitiveness decreased rapidly as soon as clubs' spending became unregulated.

We know from decades of data that the biggest predictor of league position at the end of the season is how much is spent. We all see for ourselves every year how the major compeititons boil down to 3/4 clubs in the world who can spend enough to compete, and the number is shrinking every decade.

There's only 4 relevant countries in European football these days because unless you're from a TV market with 30m+ people, you can't afford to compete.

Why is that better than a level playing field again? Because we're one of the lucky few? How quickly people forget...

That’s. not quite right. The biggest predictor is wages not transfer costs. The reason is obvious.

 

[halfcenturyup]

Apologies because it’s almost definitely been answered before but I can’t find it; what were we actually found guilty on in the CAS verdict in respect to the 2-1 vote? Was this for an aspect of the charges or the whole charge itself?

Pretty much everything found in the club's favour was 2-1 with UEFA's German voting against (presumably as it wasn't declared). The few things found in favour of UEFA (some procedural stuff and non-compliance) were unanimous, iirc.

 

[Rhapsody in Blue]

Wrong thread

 

[KS55]

And it has done a lot of good since its introduction, hasn't it?

Not like we have:

Chelsea effectively asset stripped (sale of hotel) to meet arbitrary target;

Everton forced into a sale to 777 Partners and an increased chance of ultimate insolvency;

Clubs at the bottom threatening to sue one another for alleged rule-breaking;

A 6 year investigation into the audited accounts of a leading club and accusations of accounting fraud which appear to have limited evidential credibility; and

Continually changing rules to prevent aspirational clubs competing at the top.

Is there anything else I'm missing?

Everton execs have no faith in the system.

 

[KS55]

There's a more fundamental issue involved here. Getting back to basics, why can't an owner spend his/her/their own legally acquired money how they wish on their business?

Where the PL & UEFA should step in is if the owner loans money to the club & it's on the books as a repayable debt, or commercially borrows the money & levies the debt against the club, & it's at an unsustainable level which the club can't repay without the owner's wealth keeping the club afloat.

If the owner stands for this debt personally, what's the issue? What the PL & UEFA should also do is ensure annually that total club debt (outside of long-term infrastructure costs like a mortgage, but including repayment costs) shouldn't be more than 25% - 30% of the club's gross annual turnover.

This approach would encourage football investment & grow the brands involved, whilst protecting clubs against reckless, profligate owners willing to gamble a club's existence in pursuit of success.

What the PL & UEFA are doing isn't protecting the clubs from themselves or reckless owners, they're protecting the elite cartel clubs from outside competition, whilst stifling investment from ambitious, but responsible owners.

What flummoxes me is why the clubs in the chasing pack can't see the sense & nonsense in any of this? It's not like City haven't been warning them for the last decade...

Doesnt answer my point, though, which was about the process not the rules.

 

[KS55]

Well Remember football had spending controls into the 60's.

Are you telling me you've not heard a million FOCs on here tell everyone how much better the football league was when teams came and went at the top of the table and United/Liverpool didn't dominate the top of the table for 40 years? It's not a coincidence that competitiveness decreased rapidly as soon as clubs' spending became unregulated.

We know from decades of data that the biggest predictor of league position at the end of the season is how much is spent. We all see for ourselves every year how the major compeititons boil down to 3/4 clubs in the world who can spend enough to compete, and the number is shrinking every decade.

There's only 4 relevant countries in European football these days because unless you're from a TV market with 30m+ people, you can't afford to compete.

Why is that better than a level playing field again? Because we're one of the lucky few? How quickly people forget...

The control up to the 1960s was the maximum wage and the retain and transfer system, the illegality of which rather illustrates that, unless the rules genuinely create better competition and protect the clubs financially, they are fundamentally flawed.

 

[spider blue]

And it has done a lot of good since its introduction, hasn't it?

Not like we have:

Chelsea effectively asset stripped (sale of hotel) to meet arbitrary target;

Everton forced into a sale to 777 Partners and an increased chance of ultimate insolvency;

Clubs at the bottom threatening to sue one another for alleged rule-breaking;

A 6 year investigation into the audited accounts of a leading club and accusations of accounting fraud which appear to have limited evidential credibility; and

Continually changing rules to prevent aspirational clubs competing at the top.

Is there anything else I'm missing?

I think you’ve summed it up perfectly.