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Feb 02, 2014 09:15
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Opinion
by IanHolloway
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Ian Holloway feels Financial Fair Play must go further to solve fundamental problems with the game
Scandalous: The Glazers have heaped debt onto Manchester United Scandalous: The Glazers have heaped debt onto Manchester United
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Manchester City's latest accounts showed that last year they spent £639,000 a day on wages.
That, quite simply, is obscene .
But the bottom line is that I would rather someone like Sheikh Mansour owned my football club than somebody like Malcolm Glazer.
City fans are living the dream because the Sheikh was bitten by the billionaires’ bug to own a Premier League club. And, to be fair to him, he has put his money where his mouth is by investing about a billion quid transforming a club which had fallen on hard times into a major force.
The contrast with what has been happening across town on the Red side of Manchester could not be more stark. Thanks to Mr Glazer and his family, one of the biggest clubs in the world has been loaded with debts that are calculated in hundreds of millions.
And what’s been going on at Old Trafford is where the real scandal lies .
UEFA president Michel Platini has made it his mission to bring in Financial Fair Play regulations, which force clubs in Europe to spend within their means.
It sounds like an admirable cause.
Ian Walton
Must do more: Platini is banging the Financial Fair Play drum but there must be checks on owners
You only have to see how a great old club like Portsmouth was taken to the brink of extinction. And less than two years after lifting the FA Cup, they entered administration.
But that terrible tale of woe suggests that the issue Platini and his cronies should address is the suitability of certain individuals to own a football club.
Why should Sheikh Mansour be prevented from investing his own personal fortune into City while the Glazer family are allowed use the cash generated by United’s vast support to buy the club for them?
The truth is that current FFP regulations are flawed because one Manchester club can fail the test, despite being debt-free, while their rivals pass with flying colours, despite being £389m in the red.
City announced an annual loss of £52m last week. The year before that it was £100m and the previous 12 months saw losses of almost £200m.
It is mind-boggling to people struggling to put food on the table during these harsh economic times. But let’s not kid ourselves that FFP has been designed for any other reason than to protect the status quo.
Money man: Sheikh Mansour has ploughed millions into City
Clubs have always been motivated by greed.
The gap between the haves and the have-nots widened first with the advent of the Premier League and the TV money that came with it, and then when the European Cup morphed into the Champions League.
The rewards for finishing top-four made some clubs untouchable. Clubs that came close to breaking into that group would have their best players snatched by offers they couldn’t afford to refuse. Those are the conditions that made the game ripe for businessmen who wanted a cut of the huge finances.
And when Sheikh Mansour decided that he fancied a piece of the action he knew the only way to smash the closed-shop of the top four was to use his own wealth to beat Chelsea, United and Arsenal at their own game.
If UEFA are serious about safeguarding the game with rules and regulations, they should concentrate their efforts on making sure that the men buying into football are doing it for the right reasons. If an individual wants to load debts on to the club he has bought then that’s his prerogative.
But Monsieur Platini should make sure these people give legally binding and cast-iron guarantees that they have the financial clout to make sure clubs don’t go to the wall.
Otherwise what stops unscrupulous individuals from buying football clubs with money they haven’t got?
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