UEFA's Financial Fair Play: The Usual Suspects Have Their Say

A Double-Glazed Ceiling

Chelsea posted losses of £47 million last year. Under UEFA’s new financial regulations, this figure would be outlawed. Yet according to Martin Samuel in the Daily Mail, the club’s owner, Roman Abramovich, is a great fan of Michel Platini’s new law because it reinforces his position. “Now he is the right side of it,” Samuel writes, “he wants the glass ceiling double-glazed and re-inforced.” This is just one of several points that Samuel appears to have overlooked.

The reaction to UEFA’s financial fair play proposals has been as predictable as it is depressing. The regulations are designed to prevent clubs from spending more money than they earn, yet the opposition, a mix of free-marketeers and journalists, seems determined to attack them without having read or understood the core principles. Their arguments are characterised by a mixture of arrogance and ignorance.

A central criticism is that the rules will entrench the current elite, freezing the existing, uneven playing field “for the next 200 years,” according to Samuel’s scientific analysis. There is a sliver of logic here. The European Club Association successfully lobbied for the implementation to be delayed until 2012, allowing clubs a window to adjust their finances. This, critics maintain, gives Manchester City a chance to spend its way into the Champions League before the door is shut. It is no secret that City’s owner Sheikh Mansour and Chelsea’s Abramovich were lobbyists for stricter financial controls, perhaps to pull up the ladder behind them.

But no one at UEFA is claiming the regulations will create a perfectly level playing field. Short of a complete reset of European football, inequalities will always exist. Manchester will always be a bigger city than Stoke, and Villa Park will always be a bigger ground than Craven Cottage. The Champions League itself is the number one generator of inequality. The new rules are not a cure for football’s structural imbalances.

The Price of a Fairytale

Another popular argument centres on Fulham’s recent run to the Europa League final, a journey supposedly made possible by owner Mohamed Fayed’s £200 million in loans. Oliver Kay, writing in The Times, suggests such fairytales would be impossible under the new regime. “Under financial fair play, there would be no repeat of the Portsmouth situation,” he concedes, “but nor would there be the kind of fairytale enjoyed by Fulham’s supporters this season.”

This presents a false choice. Kay’s argument implies that the potential for a club to go under is a price worth paying for a mid-ranking team to have a brief European adventure. Outside of certain postcodes in Southampton, it is hard to believe there is widespread support for that position. Besides, the regulations would not have stopped Fayed from bankrolling Fulham into the Premier League in the first place, nor would they prevent him from investing his millions in a new 40,000-capacity stadium to boost revenues and make European qualification a sustainable goal.

Finding the Loopholes

Fans, perhaps correctly, assume that wealthy owners will immediately seek to circumvent the rules. A popular theory involves inflated sponsorship deals, such as Abramovich sponsoring Chelsea’s shoelaces for £50 million a year. “Is there anything in the new rules that will stop this?” one fan asked on the BBC website. The short answer is yes.

The regulations require clubs to prove that any such sponsorship arrangement represents “fair value.” Judgements on these matters will be made by a new UEFA club financial control panel, to be run by the former Belgian prime minister Jean-Luc Dehaene. Deciding whether £50 million is a fair price for shoelace sponsorship will be one of the panel’s easier tasks. You suspect they will also be prepared for a scenario where Sheikh Mansour attempts to circumvent the rules by “gifting an oilfield to Manchester City.” The idea that UEFA is simply saying clubs cannot be propped up by a benefactor is also wide of the mark; reckless overspending is not being outlawed entirely. UEFA is merely stating that clubs in breach of the rules will not be invited to participate in its competitions.

Of course, for some, the problem is not the detail of the rules but the man behind them. Platini is dismissed as a self-important hypocrite, an idiot surveying European football from the VIP areas of its great cathedrals. This is the tone of the opposition. Samuel links the regulations to France being awarded the 2016 European Championships, suggesting a grand conspiracy. “French football gets a total government-financed refit just as UEFA is introducing strict financial controls,” he explains, as if this somehow invalidates the principle of clubs living within their means. If England are awarded the 2018 World Cup, it will be their third major tournament in 52 years. Over that same period, France has hosted three. The conspiracy seems less clear on closer inspection.

This is the standard of the debate. One online commentator managed to confuse UEFA with FIFA, blame “Mr. Seb” for a supposed anti-English bias in the Champions League draw, and predict the formation of a breakaway European super league, all in one breathless tirade against financial common sense. “Such a depth of knowledge without the need for evidence,” as Kay ironically wrote of Platini, seems a fitting description for the opposition itself.