Those examples are players already at the club signing contracts though, no? Not a FFP fudge.
There are tons of ways to work around FFP though. A lot of these people writing about it seem to have only marginal understanding of all the elements. They pick and choose aspects of strategy and say “THAT” is how Chelsea is handling FFP.
The longer contracts do allow you to amortize the original fee of the player over different periods … if you wanted to do that in every case. Americans have a ton of experience with Cap manipulation. It is its own finance specialty.
Longer contracts offer bigger financial commitments to players, but they give you more flexibility, but not just for FFP. It gives you leeway on when and how you structure re-signings: this near blackmail system of counting down the last 18 months and the drama involved is weird.
You can shift money around to specific years. Say three years from now you have cap (FFP) room you weren’t expecting and you shift some future salary on some contracts into that year with yet another timely re-sign.
Anyway, there are other factors in FFP like the hardship allowances. The tiered structure of the financial penalties teams are supposed to be afforded before other punishments are engaged (here we call that luxury tax… and good teams pay it). There are offsets that are supposed to be built in based on infrastructure investment, investment in women’s football, charities, etc.
Enzo would not have fallen under youth investment, but several of the players we’ve signed do in the figures that keep getting released.
Then there is the basic economics of how the money hits and doesn’t hit.
They believe they are in line now and they haven’t even moved anyone yet, and they have tons of assets
I wrote about this before as a hypothetical: But it would be easy to create immediate FFP room just by essentially moving CHO on as a direct counter weight to Mudryk. You would get a full, immediate accounting of the sale money, and significant savings to FFP on wages. I don’t think they want to do that, but it’s just an example.
Again, when you HAVE money, manipulating money is easy. It’s when you try to manipulate things to try to hide the fact you DONT have money that things get difficult.