Gary Neville is right. FFP is entirely the wrong way to assess and monitor financial stability. When people say it wasn't designed to stop investment by owners like Sheikh Mansour, that's EXACTLY what it does and appears to be designed to do. What it should be doing is making sure investment is responsible and sustainable. Just looking at the P&L account and adding back or subtracting a few miliion here and there simply doesn't come close to achieving that.
The classic example of FFP is that you can have a club that makes a great profit, say £30m, in one year, then the owner starts to run it irresponsibly and it just breaks even the next. Finally. in the third year, it makes a £30m loss. That club would pass FFP yet just a cursory glance at the trend of the bottom line should be ringing alarm bells.
The policy of FFP in itself wouldn’t stand up in any legitimate business or sector outside of football.
I think it is critical we get this case into an actual court and challenge the policy of FFP itself rather than ‘have we broke the FFP rules’ because ultimately that is what we are being charged with. We can get UEFA for diligence/policy and unfair process through CAS and likely see a reduced sentence, seeing as they don’t rule on FFP itself.
But that’s not the real fight. The real fight is as above and the part of the statement that refers to CAS as ‘the first instance’ gives me great confidence that we will do just that.
This whole mess is one last swing from a boxer who knows he is beaten.
If they win this case (UEFA), I will be genuinely done with this game. I would prefer to back in league one where non of their status quo bullshit will hurt us.
Conversley, if we have been bending rules, and I don’t mean against FFP, I mean in respect of our owners ultimately running an unprofessional model that isn’t sustainable in normal working conditions, then I’ll swallow that. We will deserve everything that comes to us.
But we all know it ain’t that and justice must surely fucking serve in this case because we deserve it.
It’s going to be a hell of a jaunt over the next year or 2 but I’m fucking certain we will win it.