Kinkybyname
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- 17 Jul 2022
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- Manchester City
Martin Samuel
Asterisks next to the roll call of league champions? All for it. Start in 2013-14 and go from there.
A "This league was won," the asterisk would indicate, "under protectionist regulations known as Financial Fair Play (FFP). These prevented owners investing fully in their businesses, making the established elite clubs stronger and weakening their smaller opponents. The clubs that stood to gain the most helped to shape these rules in which limits were placed on ambition and the potential for competition." Obviously, the asterisks would have to start a little earlier for the Champions League, where FFP has been running since 2011-12.
Not the asterisks you imagined? You may support one of the clubs whose followers are most obsessed with caveats, FFP and the need for clubs to grow organically. Not their clubs, of course. Those giant, established clubs did their organic growing ? and some that was heavily reliant on owner investment, too ? when there were no financial controls beyond those governing all businesses, which is as it should be. It's just these other clubs that need to be controlled. Manchester City, obviously, but Leicester City, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Everton and all the rest getting ideas above their station. They need to be told how to run their businesses, until such a time as the "big six" want to break free again and join Real Madrid and friends because, let's face it, nobody wants to watch the smaller clubs because they're not competitive enough.
Manchester United versus Wolves is no match for Manchester United versus Barcelona. Yet why is that? Last week, the Wolves head coach, Julen Lopetegui, emerged from a meeting with Jeff Shi, the owner, very disheartened. Wolves are now safe in 13th place but it wasn't so long ago that they feared relegation. Lopetegui arrived with a fire to put out but had good reason to believe if he succeeded, this was a club with ambition. Wolves have finished in the top half of the table in three of the four previous seasons and a strong and smart relationship with the agent, Jorge Mendes, has allowed them to mine young talent, particularly from Portugal. But not this summer. "I know now there are some Financial Fair Play problems that I didn't know before," Lopetegui said. "I hope we will solve this issue because it is very difficult to compete in the Premier League without investment."
Indeed. Ask Leicester, staring at relegation seven seasons after winning the league. There is now a fear that Wolves could lose their head coach over what he regards as broken promises. As for Leicester, it's such a shame when bad things happen to good exceptions. Leicester were the poster club for those who claimed FFP wouldn't only deliver the prizes to the established order each season. Yet last summer those same rules meant selling their best defender, Wesley Fofana, to Chelsea and rejecting the manager's request for a muchneeded rebuild.
So now Leicester are likely to be relegated. Do most modern Premier League owners have the funds to finance investment in their project? Yes. Are they allowed? No. Because they cannot grow in any significant way, they must sit, ripe for plunder, as their best players are taken away piecemeal, as has happened at Southampton. And everyone knows it. The summer after Leicester delivered the greatest title win in history, they lost two players to Chelsea, who had finished tenth. And nobody was surprised. Of course Chelsea were the better long-term bet. Where were Leicester actually going, a club of that size and limited potential? FFP had them firmly in hand, in a way Chelsea were not, and never will be.
The irony being that the original targets of FFP were Roman Abramovich and Chelsea. Yet by the time the rules were in place, Chelsea had their feet under the table and were so cosy that Abramovich actually supported regulations as a way of keeping out an even bigger threat: City. The former Uefa president, Michel Platini, used to dumbly cite
Abramovich's backing for FFP as evidence that his big idea was working. It didn't occur to him that Abramovich saw its protectionist worth the moment he got inside the castle before the drawbridge went up. In the first season of Uefa's FFP rules, the Champions League was won by Chelsea; and in its second season as a Premier League framework, the title went their way, too.
Abramovich was suddenly a supporter of a system that would prevent another owner investing as he had. This is why, find a poster, or caller, enraged by City's regulatory rule breaches and it tends to be a follower of one of the clubs that got to sculpt the rules and are now deeply disappointed by how it is turning out. The rest, those who would like to step across the VIP cordon occasionally but find they can't, tend to see all the Super League wannabes as the same. Why would a fan of Wolves back a system that could place the club where Leicester are now in one year's time, and also cost them a very good manager?
The reaction to City's latest title win is revealing because it tends to split on straight lines. City fans on one side, obviously. Yet a lot of those whose clubs sit outside that Champions League scramble are no admirers of FFP or the established elite either. They see it as a carve-up, too. Why would a supporter of Newcastle United get behind a system that submits any sponsorship with a Saudi Arabian company to stringent related-party regulations, yet allows Manchester United to mine the wealth of the same nation carefree? Why would fans of Everton or Leeds United, clubs that are seeking investment, champion regulations that would lessen the impact if any could be found? Even the Manchester United stalwart Gary Neville now says he is uncomfortable with rules that are tantamount to restraint of trade.
"I've got a real problem with FFP, I've had it for a long time," he said this week. "It was driven through by the established elite so that clubs like City, clubs like Chelsea, couldn't compete with them ? basically they can always pat them on the head and say 'stay down there'. I think a new Jack Walker [the former Blackburn Rovers owner] in any town should be able to drive their team. I like the idea that Sunderland could one day compete for the Champions League and compete for the Premier League title, but under FFP you're only allowed to spend the money that your revenue allows, so you'll always be down there."
Quite why he wants a government regulator to enforce more of that red tape who knows, but that's long been my argument against FFP, too. Indeed, it's always been my argument since first denouncing it in a Times column on June 30, 2008, more than a month before Sheikh Mansour's unexpected takeover of City, and before the term Financial Fair Play had even been minted. Back then, it was just a twinkle in Karl-Heinz Rummenigge and Bayern Munich's eye. Turned out rather well for them since, you may note.
What's it been like, swimming against the FFP tide for 15 years? A bit like that Family Guy scene where Peter tells them all he did not care for The Godfather. "It insists upon itself," he explains. As does FFP. Everyone discusses it now as if billionaires showing a financial profit is a fabulous new trophy. So it has worked, this sleight of hand, this gaming of the system. Now people think football is more accountancy than artistry or athleticism and they want the asterisk to go against the name of the English team that plays the best football, possibly ever.
The alleged inaccurate reporting of finances is supposed to trump any beauty we have seen. And doesn't that cut to the heart of the modern game? After all, how many times do fans leave the stadium with spotless accountancy the only light in a bleak horizon? "Well, we might have been stuffed by Middlesbrough again, lads, but what about the accurate reporting of our finances, eh? If you excuse me, I must rush home to craft a giant flag for when our accountants come by on an open-top bus."
And the sums should add up, of course, as they must in any business. Yet in no other field has owner investment, the type that sparks the ignition of invention and success, been imbued with a scent of criminality. So if City have done wrong, they will be punished, and those are the rules of the game. But those rules and where the asterisks go: let's just say I beg to differ.
