Okay, I've just sent this on to a Dipper fan who's had this weird obsession with us and FFP, like it would be life changing or something.
I've borrowed liberally from here, no plagiarism or credit on my part for lots of this, but it's a good summation to spread and share around, or look at from layman's terms if you aren't keeping up to speed:
Just having a dig around ffp sanctions this morning. They are pretty much non existant tbh.
A few points on it to justify this:
On the reduction of our CL squad size:
Having read the regulations
<a class="postlink" href="http://www.uefa.com/MultimediaFiles/Dow" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.uefa.com/MultimediaFiles/Dow</a> ... WNLOAD.pdf
Specifically parts 18-12 and 18-08
Basically it's pro rata'd down
25 -8 HG
24-7
23-6
22-5
21-4
So essentially they've done us a favour here, as we would have struggled to come up with 8 HG players within a 25 man squad, however 4 within a 21 man squad is within our existing squad. (this doesn't include academy kids who go on your "B" list, and Karim Rekik will go on this(in the dutch world cup squad after a great season at PSV) and Marcos Lopes will stay in here(3 goals last year in the senior team in league and FA Cup).
The fine:
It's kind of to our advantage. By accepting it, FIFA change us from being monitored on an average over the 3 years to monitoring us on a year by year basis. This essentially wipes all the big money transfers from 2012 off our FFP monitoring going forward.
The fine itself is prize money won from UEFA for Champions League and they basically hold from paying it. However, and this is both big and stupid, you can declare it in your revenue going forward against FFP, so on paper its still your money.
If City hit the agreed figures the actual fine is only something like 16m, with the rest of the fine being released back to the club if we hit the agreed figures.
The salary cap:
Again, looks like it wont affect us. 60million plus what ever we make from sales. Looks like the 3 players City are tying up will cost 30mil at most(Sagna free/Fernando and either Mangala or a lad from Roma). Not to mention its only for 12 months, so there's nothing stopping City taking a player on loan for 12 months with an agreement to buy at the end of it(not that I can see us doing it,unless its a player for player swap).
Wage cap:
With Barry & Lescott off the books this month, we're well in line with it, plus a lot of the new deals have the lads coming down from 150,000 per week or whatever to 80,000 per week with huge incentives..so another non issue.
The key thing was UEFA only had a problem with the selling of services to New York City,City's womens team and Melbourne, but came back giving the Etihad deal a clean bill of health..so there's nothing stopping City re-negotiating this now that the related party nonsense on it has been cleared via ffp.
In City's statement it was announced that we've actually broken even this year(well will do by end of may which is the end of the financial period), so it looks like 2012 was the only issue, and by accepting the fine the aggregate from 2012 now wont carry over onto 2013's aggregate.
So at the end of it all UEFA look like they've given City a load of punishments, but City have come out of it pretty much unaffected if the claim in the City statement that we broke even this year is accurate. With the BT money, we'll be in major profit country going forwards, so this was the worst that can happen to us as long as we stay in the Champs league for the next couple of years.
Meanwhile, good luck to anyone that has had to invest last year or this year to break in or stay in(United/Spurs...Liverpool were quite frugal, but the Dalglish era would have killed you had you been in CL this season). United and Spurs cannot buy a squad to get into the CL AND make FFP...so they are screwed eitherway in their efforts. Looks like Liverpool got in just at the right time, as from next season the cartel doors will well and truly close once that BT deal starts giving money to ensure Champs league teams meet FFP.
Anyways, in the time it took me to jot this down, Sheikh Mansour has made 16M interest..fine paid :-)