UEFA FFP investigation - CAS decision to be announced Monday, 13th July 9.30am BST

[dario2739]

not posted on this thread for for a few days ive just been soaking it up, i cant see anything other than CAS chucking this out, its bizare how UEFA are dealing with this,UEFA are like a little kid that cant have his own way so the only way is to tantrum,infact they are that unpredictable i wouldnt be surprised if the ban and fine was withdrawn before any CAS review

Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely

 

[Parisian]

Octagon going of their twitter feed seem very fond of everything LFC

Yup. Very fond of LFC. Very critical of City mostly, PSG a bit and laughing about MUFC. He isn't hiding his love for LFC but it is his personal account. Can't be used to tarnish his job as a professional, even though OctagonUK has both UEFA and LFC as clients though.

I had pointed out to another poster here that while looking at this account, you could debunk their assessment of fair value.



He can't believe the deal between OL and Emirates is at fair value. But it actually is since those parties aren't related. If he had to do an audit, he would prolly say that this deal is worth 10 M.

So, how can we take as face "value" their fair value market on our sponsorships ?

And here today, he is contradicting the estimation of the value of Everton shirt by another firm.

Is it to say that they can't really value a sponsoring ?

 

[Claytop]

Remember when a few people on here still said Conn was alright, really shown himself up in these last few days as a piss poor journalist who doesn't know half of what he thinks he does. Deserves to be lumped in the rest of them.

 

[Fame Monster]

I've read it in the past and I am familiar with the accounting standard that is based.

Etihad are not a related party.

This bit could be important because Khaldoon is a member of the EC:
"In considering each possible related party relationship, attention is directed to the substance of the relationship and not merely the legal form. The following are not related parties: a) Two entities simply because they have a director or other member of key management personnel in common or because a member of key management personnel of one entity has significant influence over the other entity."

Very significantly, Mansour is not a member of the EC.

I thought as much but I'm not an accountant so didn't want to jump to conclusions.

So along with the many procedural arguments we could make, our main substantive argument could simply be that it doesn't matter where Etihad got their money from, they are not a related party because there is nobody at City who exerts significant control over Etihad?

 

[Churchlawtonblue]

FWIW I just want to us to win the appeal at CAS.
I'm trusting the owners have got overwhelming and compelling assurances from different and independent legal sources that this will be the case and that there's virtually no risk.
I'm not interested in us taking on UEFA on FFP.
It's risky, will likely take ages and there's no guarantee of success.
But maybe this is the real agenda.

My thoughts exactly Len.

 

[Deleted member 77198]

Its not only the 2014 settlement agreement they screwed us over.

Back in 2012 we were speaking to them regularly to gain reassurance about what we were doing to be able to take advantage of that Annex XI wages get-out. In told that not once but three times, we were assured that we were on the right path to be able to do that.

What the dodgy fuckers didn't tell us is that they were planning to change the way they calculated that while thing, which they did after it was too late.

So we've had two lots of assurances from them now, where they've got what they want and screwed us. Why would we take anything they said about "assurances" remotely seriously? We've been bitten twice now.

Ive been thinking about that today. Moving goalposts after telling us we were compliant, has happened more than once.

 

[BlueMoonz1977]

Yeah i've posted that previously – basically Qatar have UEFA and FIFA by the balls, and they rolled over and let them tickle their bellies... the corruptions is barely hidden, you only have to scratch the surface - unfortunately, Martin Samuel seems a lone voice in putting the truth across.

"One in particular stood out: a huge agreement with the Qatar Tourism Authority for a nebulous concept known as “nation branding” that was booked as P.S.G.’s highest sponsorship deal, more than 100 million euros ($111 million) per season.

To assess the value of P.S.G.’s sponsorships, Leterme, the UEFA financial investigator, commissioned the sports marketing company Octagon Worldwide to analyze the agreements. He also told P.S.G. it could hire a different firm to conduct its own analysis.

The Octagon version returned a verdict that valued the Qatar tourism agreement, a sponsorship that had hardly any visibility, at less than 5 million euros; P.S.G. said its analysis, conducted for the club by Nielsen, came back with a figure close to the amount claimed by P.S.G. Rather than request a third study, Leterme determined, to the consternation of members of his investigative committee, that the Nielsen figures should be used.

When those higher figures were used as the basis to clear P.S.G., Cunha Rodrigues was incredulous. “The chief investigator took into account the value most favorable to the club as derived from the Nielsen report, and did not give any reasons the fair values reached in the Octagon report should be disregarded,” he wrote. Cunha Rodrigues noted that in some calculations submitted by Leterme, the investigator had increased P.S.G.’s sponsorship income even higher than the figures proposed by Nielsen."


Considering how at the time wqe are led to believe that Bein Sports secured a deal with UEFA, the it would seem that Yves Leterme is not a savoury character

 

[spiny]

A good article in the guardian of all places
https://www.theguardian.com/footbal...wo-year-ban-may-be-seismic-not-least-for-uefa

Errr, it reads like more of the same to me.

Just more spin. City are dammed what ever they do in most media.
We have not been found guilty of anything by any independant organisation nor in the courts. The matter is in hand and ongoing.

As Mario famously said "Why Always Me?" That is a another fundamental question that City are posing.

UEFA is the Union of European Football Associations and as such meant to an inclusive, neutral representative body of its members. The issue for City is with certain individuals and the interests they represent within the organisation pursuing their own agenda rather than UEFA per se. It is a structural problem. The public interest and that of football would be better served if the media focussed on these people, their motives, drivers and their impact on football.

 

[M18CTID]

Glad you pulled him up on that piece of disinformation. I saw it but was busy at work and intended to come back later but it had slipped my mind.

Meanwhile, here's my lengthy opinion of David Conn and his work that appeared about 1200 pages back on this very thread in June 2019. I like to think that the events of this week are proving me right.

[Conn] turned up to interview Franny for a north west business publication and said that the experience left him knowing that he'd been "talking to a businessman", as if it was the most pejorative label that could possibly be attached to an interviewee. What disgraceful temerity from Franny. Someone arrives to interview you for a business magazine and you talk about business. Conn's description of the episode sounds laughably juvenile.

He's knowledgeable but not to the degree a lot of people think. He has nothing like the level of insight that someone such as Stefan from the 93:20 pod does, but then Stefan is CEO of a public company and also their senior in-house lawyer, with a track record of having advised the boards of top football clubs in his past. Conn qualified as a solicitor but left the profession immediately after doing so. As someone who's supervised newly qualified solicitors and has been one, I can tell you that their ability to navigate complex legal issues such as this is really not all that. He's probably the most knowledgeable current British journalist about business issues in sport, but very much in an 'in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is King' kind of way.

I gave my view of this latest piece by Conn in this thread last night, and at quite some length. It's possible he may be right, but if he is, it seems a senseless move from City's point of view. Yet if he's made any attempt to discern why City may be more confident of their case than he is, or what arguments we may put forward that distinguish the case from the precedent he refers to in his article, there's absolutely no sign of it. He may well have asked for a view from a sports law expert before writing, but the problem with that is that to get the right answers, you need to ask the right questions. I don't think I can be confident that he has.

More generally, Conn has shifted away from his usual subject matter when started out, which had a focus on exposing wrongdoing and sharp practices in the game. Then, he wrote for The Independent and produced two excellent books. In those days, I thought he was very good - and sometimes better than that. However, for reasons far beyond the tone, I loathe the specious, holier-than-thou role he's espoused over several years in The Guardian as a self-appointed conscience of modern football. Beyond some half-baked fan ownership nonsense, never does he put forward any constructive ideas for improvement amid his dreary whinges about the state of the modern game.

Moreover, there's no room for nuance. Almost every observation is refracted through the lens of Conn's own beliefs, often in a way that's simply sophomoric. Thus, we were treated to his eccentric observation in a Guardian column that, given the flaws in the PL's current model, "fan-owned Real Madrid" are an exemplar of moral rectitude in the modern game. We have his unabashed, uncritical adoration of a FC United, an outfit whose main asset - which translates into enormous media and political goodwill - is an identity they've leeched off one of the world's most famous clubs. And when he discusses why football was ethically superior in a bygone golden age (that never actually existed), he's egregious in the way he's blind (wilfully or otherwise) to the many drawbacks of the past and improvements in the modern age.

All these faults were fully evident in Richer Than God, which I'm glad I borrowed as opposed to shelling out my own cash on it. Like so many of his articles, the book merely served as an exercise in Conn trying to substantiate his simplistic philosophy by taking liberties with the facts and rational analysis. I find it all the more difficult to sympathise with that modus operandi given that I consider the philosophy in question to amount to little more than vapid, hand-wringing bullshit.

So sorry, those who profess admiration for him. You admire Conn if you want to. But put me down in the 'not a fan' camp.​

Going off what I've seen from him these past few days, that's a fantastic summary.

 

[Parisian]

"One in particular stood out: a huge agreement with the Qatar Tourism Authority for a nebulous concept known as “nation branding” that was booked as P.S.G.’s highest sponsorship deal, more than 100 million euros ($111 million) per season.

To assess the value of P.S.G.’s sponsorships, Leterme, the UEFA financial investigator, commissioned the sports marketing company Octagon Worldwide to analyze the agreements. He also told P.S.G. it could hire a different firm to conduct its own analysis.

The Octagon version returned a verdict that valued the Qatar tourism agreement, a sponsorship that had hardly any visibility, at less than 5 million euros; P.S.G. said its analysis, conducted for the club by Nielsen, came back with a figure close to the amount claimed by P.S.G. Rather than request a third study, Leterme determined, to the consternation of members of his investigative committee, that the Nielsen figures should be used.

When those higher figures were used as the basis to clear P.S.G., Cunha Rodrigues was incredulous. “The chief investigator took into account the value most favorable to the club as derived from the Nielsen report, and did not give any reasons the fair values reached in the Octagon report should be disregarded,” he wrote. Cunha Rodrigues noted that in some calculations submitted by Leterme, the investigator had increased P.S.G.’s sponsorship income even higher than the figures proposed by Nielsen."


Considering how at the time wqe are led to believe that Bein Sports secured a deal with UEFA, the it would seem that Yves Leterme is not a savoury character

Cunha Rodrigues is the hardline guy. Why do you think your ban jumped from the 1 year asked by Leterme to suddenly 2 years ?

Of course. The whole thing is a playground where are confronted different lobbies.

In PSG probe, PSG were cleared, initially by the investigation chamber, of any wrongdoing by a very splitted decision 4 versus 3. However, there are some hardliners in this institution (or maybe they have been lobbied efficiently by the cartel) like Leterme or that portuguese european judge Jose Narciso da Cunha Rodrigues. It was him that decided to still send our case to the adjudicatory chamber for review. At the time, i remember that some guy in our parisian forum was saying that this judge is relentless in what he sees as a protection of european football that needs regulation.

I'm happy City is showing their anger and determination.

Btw, regarding the press leaks, i really don't think it is some kind of schemes. There used to be a lot of leaks in regards of PSG case that dragged for more than a year (and you have prolly heard more than one statement in the press in the whole year while UEFA couldn't make their decision known in the meantime).
We were not fussed about the leaks, but we (fans + club) were pretty unhappy that the UEFA was not communicating those decisions by themselves. Because, the club can defend himself when a decision is officially put out, not when there is only speculation. And since they were pushing back their decision every time, PSG couldn't predict the budget allowed for their window market. So, we thought it was their way to keep a sword of Damocles to prevent us from being competitive on the market (indirect sanction).

If it only goes to CAS, UEFA has nothing to lose, really. They do the same with PSG, Milan etc. They try and will try again. Nevertheless, City has no need to go all the way if CAS rules in their favor. Thus, their FFP scheme can still survive this incident with City.

Seems like i was right.