Re: Re:
Prestwich_Blue said:
Keith Moon said:
Prestwich_Blue said:
In short, because it restricts competition. I believe that legal opinion given to our owners supports this.
Correct, a judicial challenge of the FFPR at ECJ will only have one outcome.
Not necessarily but it is wide open to challenge. This is an interesting article on the subject:
http://www.soccernomics-agency.com/?p=469
Thanks for posting the link to Prof Weatherill's article, PB, which I think demonstrates the obvious point that any discussion of FFPR on this thread must confine itself to the application of the regulations to City. Dealing in wide questions of principle is not the concern of Manchester City: showing that we are doing nothing that violates commercial law or the interests of football is the club's concern. As is usual, the Sheikh and his advisers are ten steps ahead of the rest! The club will have no difficulty in showing that what it has done is in no way akin to the "sugar daddy model" of developing and running a football club, but is, no more and no less, a model to make City competitive at the highest level. If UEFA's aim is to protect competition while protecting the long term "viability and sustainability of club football" then City have played it their way. If this aim is consistent with European law (which is highly questionable in the light of the Bosman ruling), despite it's restrictive intent, then City are exemplary in their attempt to conform with these rules. Any attempt to impose sanctions on City would show the rules are not intended to protect football, but the position of other clubs who owe their position to advantages provided by earlier "sugar daddies" (we know who you are..).
The Sheikh has invested in the club, not "doped" it - the evidence of this investment is observable to anyone visiting east Manchester, if only for a few minutes. It is clear on the pitch. He has actually paid off the club's debts, as evidenced by the latest accounts. The club is moving inexorably to balance the books - each year has seen the deficit halved. This is being achieved
not by injections of cash from the owner, though this seems to be his right under EU law, but by encouraging those revenue streams which are specifically "encouraged" by FFPR. The Etihad sponsorship deal is not a related party deal, (by European accounting standards) and the question of "market value" does not arise. Sale of intellectual property follows normal international practice. Our balance sheet shows conformity both to commercial law and to the more dubious letter of FFPR.
I suspect this is what City have been pointing out to M. Platini for three years, and pointing out that any attempt to impose sanctions on City would show that FFPR's avowed aims were a shabby cover for a corrupt attempt to protect a bunch of conspirators of whom he is mightily afraid. The whole edifice of FFPR would inevitably be compromised, a break away may well ensue...Much better not to make City a test case for a bunch of (more than) dubious principles.
