If you can’t beat them, sue them. That is the latest plan. Arsenal, Liverpool and Chelsea may use UEFA small print to derail Manchester City, if they fail to do it on the pitch.
Were City to fail UEFA’s financial fair play regulations, there is room to plea bargain, to promise to make good, to affect change by a certain time, and remain in the Champions League.
Yet if that happened, there is also a 10-day period in which other clubs can challenge the decision.
The suggestion is now that the English clubs would gang up on City and try to force UEFA to reconsider. Manchester United would be part of this too, no doubt, if they were in any position to contemplate Champions League football next season.
So let’s start with what is not Manchester City’s fault. It is not Manchester City’s fault that Arsenal, with immense financial resources, chose to recruit one player in the transfer window: Kim Kallstrom, a 31-year-old loan deal from Spartak Moscow, who turned up seriously injured. It is not Manchester City’s fault that Chelsea had to sell last year’s player of the season, Juan Mata, to Manchester United for £37million.
It is not Manchester City’s fault that Liverpool have failed to win the title in the modern era, despite spending significant money on players ranging from Phil Babb to Stan Collymore, Emile Heskey, Djibril Cisse, Fernando Torres, Luis Suarez and Andy Carroll — all of whom have been club-record signings since the formation of the Premier League, and about two of whom have lived up to expectations.
Finally, it is not Manchester City’s fault that, due to the arbitrary and misapplied nature of UEFA’s financial regulations, an expansion project that would have proceeded steadily had to be hiked up to ramming speed to get inside the fortress before the established elite raised the drawbridge.
In every other aspect, City are attempting to build from the roots up: academies, facilities, local regeneration. They are giving more back to the area of east Manchester than they have ever taken out.
The reason hundreds of millions had to be spent on players, however, was that Michel Platini came up with a plan for greater financial responsibility and then executed it so poorly that any team beyond the upper echelon was likely to remain so for ever.
City had to smash their way in or risk exclusion. This was Platini’s doing, not City’s choice; just as it is to please UEFA that balance sheets now have to be so expertly constructed.
Football club accountants must be more creative than coaches these days. The current complaints centre around vague calculations in Manchester City’s latest figures — image and intellectual property rights have been sold to an unnamed party for close to £50m, allowing the club to cut its losses by almost half - but they are unlikely to be any more brilliantly conceived than Chelsea’s profit of £1.4m to June 2012, with Roman Abramovich also converting £166.6m in loans to equity.
If it wasn’t so unjust it would almost be comic that Chelsea are among the most vocal objectors to City’s business strategy. Financial fair play was introduced as a way of stopping Abramovich, and other new money investors, buying up the prizes.
Having hijacked the idea and manoeuvred Platini into turning it into an elite-club protection scheme, to hear his minions pontificate on FFP compliance is a bit like watching the Corleone family trying to go legit, but without the inevitable bloodbath.
Last week, without naming names of course, because everyone knew whom he was talking about anyway, Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho spoke of investigating the clubs who are complying with FFP in what he termed a ‘dodgy’ way. ‘If I was a journalist interested in football, it would be something interesting to do,’ he said.
So let’s get interesting.
In the eight seasons prior to that profit in 2012, Chelsea lost £630m. In 2009, Abramovich wrote off £710m in loans he had given the club since 2003 (this does not include the £166.6m figure converted to equity last year). Since 2012, Chelsea have lost another £49.4m, compared to Manchester City’s £51m. Maybe they sold the good accountant to Manchester United, too.
And do you know what? It shouldn’t matter. As long as a very wealthy man is giving his money to a football club — and not placing it in jeopardy, or holding it to ransom with loans — what is the problem?
This is money from outside football coming into football. It creates competition and trickle-down benefits and, as no investor wants to be putting in forever, in time they all try to run the business for a profit anyway.
It wasn’t fair when UEFA were moaning about Abramovich either. Indeed, the only reason Chelsea’s losses are of interest now is their hypocrisy in attacking City for doing exactly what Abramovich did, except with the good fortune of not having UEFA on his back at the time.
Abramovich threw money at Chelsea because he wanted to — City bought players because they had to. There’s the difference.
Now, remind us all again, Jose, what’s dodgy?
