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EPL 2019-20

Firemans4Horn

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Firemans4Horn

Firemans4Horn 18117

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Here you go

 

 

“When I was in government and we were making tax rules, I always said to my civil servants, ‘Be very creative because they, on the other side, will be even more creative’. Here, you have the same risk.”

Jean-Luc Dehaene knew what he was getting into when he agreed to become chairman of the panel overseeing UEFA’s new financial fair play (FFP) rules. The former Belgium prime minister and Club Brugge fan made that remark in 2011, shortly after European football’s governing body opened an investigation into Manchester City’s £400 million sponsorship deal with Etihad.

“The spirit in which clubs participate with these rules will be very important,” he added. “We will probably sanction those who have tried to find all kinds of ways to not respect them.”

Three years later, City and fellow petrodollar-fuelled disruptors Paris Saint-Germain begrudgingly accepted what are still the biggest financial penalties UEFA’s FFP police have dished out — fines of 60 million euros and two-year restrictions on spending and squad sizes.

Those penalties, and lesser sanctions for seven clubs from Bulgaria, Russia and Turkey, were announced on May 16, 2014, a day after Dehaene died following a fall while on holiday in France.

Fast forward to November 2018 and all was calm.

City and PSG had already banked 40 million euros each in UEFA prize money after complying with those 2014 “settlements” (reducing their actual fines to 20 million euros or £17 million). UEFA was under new management, following Michel Platini’s downfall, and FFP had been tweaked to give wealthy clubs a little more leeway in the transfer market.

Then, over four days, German magazine Der Spiegel published dozens of hacked emails between senior figures at City that painted a very different picture of just how compliant City had been.

While the finer details of FFP are complicated, the basic premise is simple: clubs should only spend as much as they earn.

What Der Spiegel laid out was an elaborate scheme — dubbed Operation Longbow, a reference to plucky England’s earlier triumphs in Europe — to hide how much money City’s owner Sheikh Mansour was funneling into the club, against the rules, artificially reducing the cost of running such a fabulous team in their accounts.

At face value, these emails, given to Der Spiegel by the self-styled whistleblowing platform Football Leaks, seemed to add up to a cynical attempt to dupe Dehaene and those who followed him. One email from the club’s lawyer Simon Cliff even appeared to reveal what City really thought of the Belgian’s death: “One down, six to go.”

The club, clearly stunned, took a few days to respond to the universally bleak global headlines but, once the noise had quietened, City came up with the kind of defence Pep Guardiola would love to be able to call upon: defiant, robust and uncompromising.

And it looks like they have won.

On Thursday, Sam Lee and I revealed that UEFA is set to announce next month that the Premier League champions will not be banned from Europe next season, the sanction that Dehaene described as the “atomic bomb”.

This has prompted, in true football fashion, a typically tribal and binary response.

Red or blue, Messi or Ronaldo, embarrassing climb-down or timely vindication: you pay your money, you take your choice.

For some, this will be the latest example of the rich getting away with it. They will accuse City of lawyering up and bullying a spineless UEFA into submission.

For others, this simply proves FFP was a flawed concept from the beginning and City’s good name has been traduced by stolen emails, selectively published and taken out of context.

Trying to find some middle ground between those two camps could make Brexit look as simple as cancelling a milk order.

But the more important question is what happens next and to answer that you need to return to what FFP was meant to do. Unfortunately, that is far from straightforward, too.

The official rationale was to tackle European club football’s mounting debts. UEFA had already introduced a licensing system to make sure clubs wanting to compete in its tournaments had settled all their debts to each other and the taxman but that did nothing about the IOUs they were writing to their owners. The governing body estimated that more than half of Europe’s top-flight clubs were living beyond their means and becoming increasingly indebted.

The problem was particularly acute in Eastern Europe but most of Serie A was in the same boat and Portsmouth had just proved that even a Premier League club could go bust if they were run badly enough. This was the basis of FFP’s central “break-even” rule.

This being the primary goal of FFP is of fundamental importance because it is the only way it would have ever stood up in court.

Limiting a company’s ability to invest what it wants, with all the knock-on effects that would have on the company’s employees and suppliers, is clearly a restriction of trade and therefore a major problem in an open market such as the European Union, where nearly all of the world’s top clubs operate.

But Platini and his former lieutenant (and now FIFA president) Gianni Infantino were able to persuade Brussels that this regulatory intervention was proportionate to the risks of unfettered speculation by reckless chancers.

And on this measure, FFP has worked. Really well. Debt is down, the turnover-to-spending ratio is much improved, and the galloping inflation of fees and wages has been slowed. FFP was always about more than that, though, and this is where we get back to those binary choices.

Was it also a well-intentioned attempt to increase the competitive balance in Europe by diminishing the impact of huge budgets? Or was it Platini, the former Juve star, frantically pulling up the rope ladder to the elite club’s escape helicopter before more oligarchs and sovereign wealth funds could make things too crowded?

In many ways, how you answer this question does not really matter anymore, as FFP has failed in both regards.

The competitive balance remains as skewed towards the rich as ever, arguably more so. And City and PSG did clamber aboard, proving that it is not too late for a new entrant with cash in the attic (or sand dunes) to gatecrash the party.

This means FFP, which is already at least FFP 2.0, in its current guise, is dead. UEFA cannot pretend otherwise anymore.

The signs have been there for some time. Earlier this year, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) agreed with PSG that UEFA had taken too long to decide it would proceed with another FFP case against the French club. This just highlighted how complicated proving overspending had become for the governing body.

This summer, AC Milan, a two-time FFP offender, did a deal with UEFA to serve a one-year ban from the Europa League one season early, so they could continue to overspend in a bid to qualify for the Champions League next season, which would increase their turnover enough to make the FFP equation work. Genius!

Then last month, just to underline things for those who were not paying attention, Jeep agreed to rip up its shirt sponsorship contract with Juventus two seasons early, and sign a new deal, giving the Italian champions more than twice as much money a year as before.

This was presented as a reflection of the club’s…erm, new success — with the fact that Jeep and Juve share an owner in the Agnelli family brushed over as a complete coincidence.

City’s lawyers, of course, have been paying attention. They have made careful notes of how elastic FFP appears to have become and how hard it seems to be for UEFA — or anyone else, for that matter — to decide what it is the going rate for a shirt sponsorship or stadium naming-rights deal these days.

And, as Dehaene predicted, City have always presented the FFP watchdogs with lots of “creative” problems.

Realising that expenditure in infrastructure, youth development and women’s football was exempt from the break-even calculation, the club took full advantage of the blank canvas in post-industrial east Manchester, built a campus and got into urban redevelopment with the city council. Any income from that investment does count towards the FFP equation.

Furthermore, City’s Abu Dhabi-owners started buying up clubs around the world, bringing six of them under the City Football Group umbrella and sharing central costs throughout the group. These outposts have also helped City scout and develop new talent, while giving the club a commercial presence in growing football markets such as China, Japan and the US.

But perhaps the key bit of creativity has been provided by Guardiola and co. The club does not record many losses now, on the field, at Companies House, or in court.

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RamjetFDO
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OMG OMG OMG OMG!!!!

Dertyberd
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Fucking City fans. 

Firemans4Horn
Firemans4Horn

Arlo White liked one of my tweets. I feel like that’s a top 5 moment of quarantine for me. 

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WBT

WBT 20638

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1 hour ago, Captain Ron said:

Well shit. 
 

So tell me, is this year 1 or would that be next year? I just want to know when he will get fired: 21-22 or 22-23?

It seems to be accelerating.  I would guess he doesn't make it through next year.  How many more chances does he get?  After ManU I thought he might have to go back to Italy.

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Goo Punch

Goo Punch 4275

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10 hours ago, mdmost said:

North London Derby will be must watch again.  

i want us to hire Pochettino so badly now. what could be better than beating spurs/finishing higher than spurs/winning trophies all with their former boss while they're languishing under Jose. plus, just about anyone would be better than unai emery, so there's that too.

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406W30th

406W30th 1111

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47 minutes ago, Goo Punch said:

i want us to hire Pochettino so badly now. what could be better than beating spurs/finishing higher than spurs/winning trophies all with their former boss while they're languishing under Jose. plus, just about anyone would be better than unai emery, so there's that too.

Does not compute

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MoJames

MoJames 8244

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Frank Lampard on Jose Mourinho - December 21, 2019

"Jose Mourinho is the Tottenham manager," Lampard told Sky Sports.

"When he decided to go to a direct competitor then love stories are over."

"I feel that when a manager leaves another club and manages a direct opponent, he is not going there for a holiday, he is going there to try and beat his club - the one everyone considers the club of his heart, but not any more," Lampard told BBC Sport.

 

lol - link

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Goo Punch

Goo Punch 4275

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35 minutes ago, Longhornfan1024 said:

He was talking about Poch, you dolt.  

Lmao, as if Poch was the reason Spurs didn't win trophies. As if that's something new that started when he got hired. What a joke. Best coach they've had in my lifetime, gave them their top 3 ever finishes in the Premier League (the last 3 seasons no less! lmao), and took them to Champions League final like four or five months ago. Fucking epitome of Spursy. 

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Longhornfan1024

Longhornfan1024 1707

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5 minutes ago, Goo Punch said:

Lmao, as if Poch was the reason Spurs didn't win trophies. As if that's something new that started when he got hired. What a joke. Best coach they've had in my lifetime, gave them their top 3 ever finishes in the Premier League (the last 3 seasons no less! lmao), and took them to Champions League final like four or five months ago. Fucking epitome of Spursy. 

Are you trying to make some point here?  

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Longhornfan1024

Longhornfan1024 1707

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3 minutes ago, Goo Punch said:

lol, what's not to get? jesus, and you're out here calling someone else a dolt. hilarious. 

It's sad, really.  Someone makes a joke post.  In your quest to be offended by anything that could possibly be offensive, you completely misread the post.  Someone points out that you misread the post.  Then you make an argument against the joke post that is completely irrelevant to the conversation.  406 didn't argue that Poch isn't the best manager Tottenham has had.  He made a very obvious joke about winning trophies.  What's not to get is that your response made no sense in the context of the conversation.  I don't know what your damage is, but it seems to prevent you from just saying "lol, yeah, I misread the post."  Instead you have to go off on a non-sequitur in an effort to defend yourself from a clear fuck up that you made.     

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Captain Ron

Captain Ron 12885

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3 hours ago, Cheeseweasel said:

Drama is back on the menu, boys

 

Serious question for Spurs fans: how does this make you feel?

 

This is shit for so many reasons. My two primary:

1. Mou is a douche and garbage human. You just need to look at the Chelsea team doctor issue to see why you don't want his name attached to your team.

2. Nothing in his coaching/style says he at all is a good fit for this team. And if anything a core of talent might be lost due to him fellating his own ego.

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idigTexas

idigTexas 2289

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56 minutes ago, MoJames said:

Frank Lampard on Jose Mourinho - December 21, 2019

"Jose Mourinho is the Tottenham manager," Lampard told Sky Sports.

"When he decided to go to a direct competitor then love stories are over."

"I feel that when a manager leaves another club and manages a direct opponent, he is not going there for a holiday, he is going there to try and beat his club - the one everyone considers the club of his heart, but not any more," Lampard told BBC Sport.

 

lol - link

Why would he need to go back to the future to say that?

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