The problem is the oil clubs would take them to CAS. UEFA cannot match the legal costs put in by these oil clubs, so the only thing they can do is a Compromise, along with a brown envelope.
Football Leaks: Manchester City accused of using shadow firms to flout rules
- Thread starter Damien
- Start date
It's the way that our sponsorship income isn't a million miles ahead of theirs, when we're the absolute best ever in history for rinsing the commercial scene that was the shocker.
Yep, it's as you were for the rest of this season, and then we'll push for a heavy punishment in the summer
Its the way of the world. It truly is
I don't understand what this is about? What rules are they bypassing? Someone please explain in simple English please.
A company is paying City 15m to be their sponsor, while City's owner is paying said company 12m to sponsor City.
I get that, but my questions still remains, what is the rule on sponsorship? Do I need sponsors? Why does City's owner need someone to sponsor them at all?
Google FIFA Fair Play rules and work your way back.
What?! Really?! So firms around the globe aren’t queuing up to give a League One-sized club with no fans and no history hundreds of millions of pounds in sponsorship?
In other news, water is wet
In other news, water is wet
Financial Fair Play rules (FFP). Clubs are only allowed to lose so much money, the idea being that it would stop clubs from being reckless, spending money they can't afford and it would help prevent teams going bankrupt. Others say it helps the established big clubs stay on top as to become good, smaller clubs have to spend a lot and initially lose a lot of money before making it back by being successful.
If you say you have more sponsorship money than you really do because the owner is secretly paying a chunk of it like City have been accused of here, it allows you to spend more on transfer fees or wages etc. without going over the limit when it comes to FFP.
Because Financial fair play rules prevents their owners just putting a huge chunk of their own personal wealth into the club, they are only allowed to spend a percentage of money that the club itself makes with only a certain amount of loss allowed each season (if any). If you then invent sponsors then you can claim the club has a greater amount of legitimate income and therefore is not making as great a loss as it would look like they were otherwise.
PS: possibly somebody more financially minded might correct some parts of this if wrong.
City fans are like Donald Trump supporters. Anything that doesn't fit with their narrative they just put their fingers in their ears screaming 'fake news'.
Completely oblivious to corruption going on around them, nor do they give a shit. To be fair, do you blame them? They're like a homeless drug addict that won the lottery without buying a ticket.
Completely oblivious to corruption going on around them, nor do they give a shit. To be fair, do you blame them? They're like a homeless drug addict that won the lottery without buying a ticket.
Boot them out of The Champions League. Just don’t, don’t deduct points in the PL, not this season any way.
Thank you. Simple and to the point explanation. Should we then take a closer look at this Puma deal?
It does look mighty suspicious, given how many kits City sell.
There's plenty of 'corruption' in football, and I can guarantee there's far more egregious goings-on than City circumnavigating in an underhand manner a set of rules which may well not even be compatible with EU law and are designed to maintain the status quo. It seems a little strange how worked up people seem to get over this.
Yeah i bet they will be.
What nobody wants to talk about is how FFP has stopped other football fans getting the same euphoria as we have had.
But hey, as long as that means that the United's, Liverpool's of European football can be protected by FFP then that's ok is it?
Let's not forget the real reason as to why FFP.
A corrupt system whose rules changed so City would fail FFP, and changed again so Liverpool went unpunished.
Yeah that shows them!
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And yet here you are to tell us how unimportant it is.
It was not brought in to restrict the likes of city and PSG. It was brought in to stop clubs becoming financially fragile by spending beyond their means.
However, unnatural spending, which bares no relation to normal football finances, inflates the market. This then results in clubs without their own oil reserves, stretching themselves financially, if they wish to compete.
Tough to class this doping as cheating, but there has to be a ceiling, to allow a level of competitiveness.
Yet you and your lot spent years arguing this was all above board..now it's unimportant.
I wonder what's changed?
People still believe this? Whether you agree with UEFA's FFP or not, that is not why it was brought in. Here's Platini himself admitting that it was because clubs put pressure on him because they did not want to have to dip into their own pockets to compete with the likes of City & PSG:
Thank god we have ex-Chelsea fans on here to tell us this fraud isn't really an issue.
I think there's two separate issues and it's on the second issue that City fans have a different opinion to the majority of posters on here (although maybe not all given the oil money thread this week). They are: 1) did City cheat; 2) does it matter that City cheated?
1) Did City cheat? I think we can all agree yes. City have clearly more than bent the rules in a (failed) attempt to meet FFP. Most of this was already known, but the evidence lately makes this incontrovertible.
2) Does it matter that City cheated? I think this is more nuanced depending on what side you're on. Yes it matters that City cheated, and yes we should be punished (although note we were already punished for failing FFP anyway so the cheating was ultimately futile). But a lot of City fans, including me, disagree with the intent and implementation of FFP, based on what's pretty obvious was an attempt to protect the in situ elite clubs (see the Platini quote from Bobby Manc above), and I think that makes a lot of us fairly blase about a situation where we may be punished for trying to cheat rules that we fundamentally disagree with in the first place. We should've challenged the legal basis of FFP at the time, not cheated to meet the rules.
Won't that give Liverpool one title? Careful what you wish for..Kick them out of the CL, remove all of their titles and relegate them. Job done.
Good post.
As much as it may have come about from protecting elite clubs, if Platini is to be believed, it protects everyone. If PSG are allowed to keep spending £220m on players then it's not just the elite clubs that can't keep up, no one can.
Feel like this pretty much sums up all City fans opinion at the very least.
UEFA "Let's release those emails Der Speigel sent us. We can get a bigger cut."
club goes from relegation fodder to one of the best teams in Europe in less than 10 years and it was dodgy??? Shocker.
I could get on board with FFP if it was genuinely designed to stop clubs from going bankrupt. I believe that the original intention was indeed to focus on debt, but that was subverted. City failed FFP, but FFP hasn't protected City from bankruptcy.
The way that FFP has ultimately been designed does protect elite clubs more than others, because it ties spending to revenue (with no consideration of debt). The clubs with the most revenue (the elite clubs) are therefore able to spend more than everyone else in perpetuity, in theory. The only way City could ever have broken into the elite was outside investment. We did that. The same is still true for many clubs now, but the ability to use outside investment to do that has now been taken away by FFP. Is that fair? I think the biggest systemic problem football faces is not a few clubs going bankrupt, but the lack of competition across leagues with the big clubs getting bigger, and the smaller clubs left in the cold. I don't see how FFP addresses this, if anything it does the opposite.
I'm sure Barcelona fans are annoyed that PSG spent that money on Neymar. But I'm sure Southampton fans are probably annoyed that Liverpool have bought half their team. Are Southampton fans less annoyed because Liverpool's cash was "organic" and not "oil money"? Probably not, they've lost those players regardless.
Define "fair", I guess.
The aristocrats didn't emerge as fully formed super clubs (with huge world wide fan bases and - thus - the ability to generate revenue on the biggest scale) overnight.
FFP doesn't prevent owners from spending whatever they want on infrastructure. In theory you can buy a club and build it up, step by step, investing in various areas (on an unprecedented scale, if you're Mansour or the like) - and eventually get results, upsetting the aristocracy.
Easy? No. But is it unfair that climbing up to the level of clubs that have developed world wide followings (after many decades of producing successful/popular vintages) isnt easy?
Good post(s), by the way. I do agree with several of the points you make. But I don't think letting owners spend what they please on transfers/salaries is going to improve anything. Sugar daddyism, as a "model", is absurd. How would it ever help - say - Southampton unless they too were purchased by an oil rich owner... and then what? On to Newcastle, I suppose, or any other traditionally big club in England that would be one step further away from ever competing again.
Yea I think we by and large agree. Up until 2008, I had supported City for 18 years under the full assumption that I would never see City win a trophy due to the gap between us and the "big boys." There's a legacy of incompetence that was fully self-inflicted that went into that, but nonetheless that legacy left us too far behind. I'm sure there's now fans of Leeds or Villa or whoever that probably feel that same feeling now. I think the only way that City could've ever become an elite club in my lifetime is via sugar daddyism, which I agree is an absurd model. But I think it's an absurd model reacting to an absurdly lopsided competitive system. So attacking sugar daddy clubs is fine I guess, which is what FFP does, but I don't see how it helps to solve the broader systemic issue of how to make football more competitive. In fact, I think FFP does the opposite.
Defining "fair" is impossible. It's the same as trying to define what benefit the elite clubs should continue to gain from past success. Obviously a well run club should have a competitive advantage over poorly run clubs. How how well a club is run doesn't make or break success anymore. A club can be well run and never become an elite club. Much like I find it hard to believe now that United could ever be so poorly run as to become non-elite.
Nothing will happen because there's too much curroption in football!!!!
And yep english journalists will be quiet because they would lose their gifts.
And yep english journalists will be quiet because they would lose their gifts.
They should be relegated
Fifa/Uefa/FA will celebrate this news by doing the Poznan
I wouldn't think so, clubs can operate without the UEFA license in their national leagues, in fact many clubs from the smallest leagues fail to obtain it.
I've never heard about that Belgian case though, there may be some deep legal intricacies.
Penalty to Liverpool.
The fact that it's there and so blatant, like you don't need an investigation to make sense of it just screams for punishment. Which they won't get.
Plastic pointless club with a stadium (half) full of happy puppets. Hiding behind the big bad status quo argument is simply fecking embarrassing. United had a natural huge drop off. Real are having a shocker. Take our city and psg and a number of non status quo clubs could win the champions league this year. Liverpool would be winning a second title in 5 years. Who knows where certain influential City players might have ended up through the years. Shameless dirty cheating for no reason than to promote the owners propaganda. There is no noble football quest behind it or hard to stomach rule bending to upset the apple cart. It's clear organised ruthless cheating with zero consideration for the sport.
Plastic pointless club with a stadium (half) full of happy puppets. Hiding behind the big bad status quo argument is simply fecking embarrassing. United had a natural huge drop off. Real are having a shocker. Take our city and psg and a number of non status quo clubs could win the champions league this year. Liverpool would be winning a second title in 5 years. Who knows where certain influential City players might have ended up through the years. Shameless dirty cheating for no reason than to promote the owners propaganda. There is no noble football quest behind it or hard to stomach rule bending to upset the apple cart. It's clear organised ruthless cheating with zero consideration for the sport.
I mixed things up. Basically, there used to be clauses that prevented clubs from suing confederations and FIFA and even though these clauses don't exist anymore due to their illegal nature, clubs still respect it as a tradition. In the belgian case (FC Seraing) that was one of the surprising aspect, the fact that a club actually goes against FIFA.
I wish the press would get off man city's back as it's opening the door for Liverpool to win the league.