Platini: No Ban For Failing FFP This Time Around

[Blue Since 76]

Now being reported only nine clubs have been in breach of FFP PSG is one but others not named as yet.

Would be funny if we weren't one. How many papers could we sue?

[Bluedj]

Now being reported only nine clubs have been in breach of FFP PSG is one but others not named as yet.

Would be funny if we weren't one. How many papers could we sue?

Like !!

[dazby]

Sueing newspapers could be a lucrative income stream.

Get on it Bergerstain.

[Beefymcfc]

It can't be just 9, there were umpteen more than that before the rules came in. If it is 9 then it'll show that UEFA have bought the rest off in favour of looking after their lucrative partners.

[BlueinBosnia]

It can't be just 9, there were umpteen more than that before the rules came in. If it is 9 then it'll show that UEFA have bought the rest off in favour of looking after their lucrative partners.

There were something like 76 'being looked into'. Obviously some of those will be from small leagues; some of whom will have not bothered to apply for a UEFA License this year, some of whom will have failed at earlier hurdles to obtain a UEFA License for other problems, some of whom have no chance whatsoever to compete in UEFA competitions next season, and some of whom will have gone totally bankrupt.

Then after those there are clubs who will miss out on European football next season, and clubs who have clarified their situation with regard to FFP, and have been found to not be in the wrong.

Narrowing it down to 9 from 76 doesn't seem too ridiculous a statistic to me, looking at it from this angle.

[Beefymcfc]

It can't be just 9, there were umpteen more than that before the rules came in. If it is 9 then it'll show that UEFA have bought the rest off in favour of looking after their lucrative partners.

There were something like 76 'being looked into'. Obviously some of those will be from small leagues; some of whom will have not bothered to apply for a UEFA License this year, some of whom will have failed at earlier hurdles to obtain a UEFA License for other problems, some of whom have no chance whatsoever to compete in UEFA competitions next season, and some of whom will have gone totally bankrupt.

Then after those there are clubs who will miss out on European football next season, and clubs who have clarified their situation with regard to FFP, and have been found to not be in the wrong.

Narrowing it down to 9 from 76 doesn't seem too ridiculous a statistic to me, looking at it from this angle.

I don't know mate, how many teams are there altogether when you consider the qualifying rounds in the Europa and CL, there must be hundreds.

I've still not seen anything concrete on our sanctions, just hear-say and rumour that's being thrown out byt the media. A few weeks ago they were saying we'd failed and were going to be banned then it was dumbed down a little to millions of pounds fine and now we're somewhere near player cuts or a slap on the wrist. Just shows what crap the media will peddle to sell a back page.

[Dameerto]

You wont see anything (other than speculation) on what we're facing until either a settlement is reached or they impose their sanctions on us. We're as tight lipped as ever, even UEFA seems to be relatively leakless (which is a surprise).

[BlueinBosnia]

It can't be just 9, there were umpteen more than that before the rules came in. If it is 9 then it'll show that UEFA have bought the rest off in favour of looking after their lucrative partners.

There were something like 76 'being looked into'. Obviously some of those will be from small leagues; some of whom will have not bothered to apply for a UEFA License this year, some of whom will have failed at earlier hurdles to obtain a UEFA License for other problems, some of whom have no chance whatsoever to compete in UEFA competitions next season, and some of whom will have gone totally bankrupt.

Then after those there are clubs who will miss out on European football next season, and clubs who have clarified their situation with regard to FFP, and have been found to not be in the wrong.

Narrowing it down to 9 from 76 doesn't seem too ridiculous a statistic to me, looking at it from this angle.

I don't know mate, how many teams are there altogether when you consider the qualifying rounds in the Europa and CL, there must be hundreds.

It's around 250. You have to add to that 'potential contenders', too, which varies hugely from league-to-league (I assume, for instance, Bradford, in League Two, would have applied for a UEFA license last season, while in the Bosnian Prem a lot of teams simply don't bother, leading to the 9th-placed team getting a Europa League spot through their league position last season). When you include all these teams, I think the numbers must be considerably over 1,000. Team ownership laws vary from country-to-country, and I think the legal structure in some countries (Germany, for instance) makes it impossible for their clubs not to comply with FFP. Overall, the 76 out of over 1,000, down to 76 out of a lower number, down to 'around 20' out of considerably under 250 who could still potentially qualify for European competition that also qualified last year (and therefore are subjected to FFP rules), down to 9, once things have been further clarified, makes sense.

[patrickblue]

Nice article by Ian Herbert in the Independent.

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/foot ... 24796.html

The days of paying a ‘City Price’ for foreign players are over at the Etihad and in their place is a club structure to be admired

Ian Herbert Tuesday 06 May 2014





When The Independent published a gentle editorial praising the managerial press conference debut of Ryan Giggs a few weeks ago, it provoked the type of abuse in my direction from Manchester City fans which I’ve written about in this space once before as a phenomenon. It had not entirely abated at the weekend. “Knob” one City fan tweeted me to say on Sunday, when you might have imagined he would have had better things to do, like celebrate the prospect of a domestic title.


But it’s in weeks like this that you realise where some of it is coming from. The prospect of winning the league will be clouded, probably on Friday, by a detailed picture of Uefa’s sanctions against City for breaching Financial Fair Play regulations. City will most probably – and quite ludicrously – be bracketed with Paris Saint-Germain, the team which has viewed FFP with contempt and made no attempt to comply with its strictures. There will be the same mildly racist inference that has existed about City ever since Abu Dhabi investment arrived five years ago: that this club is all about Arabs with money spending their stash in a wild and profligate way.

Well, they certainly did spend wildly for a time. Delivering a modest club to the big stage involves vast front-end investment in the squad. The players who can take you to the top just don’t fancy a team who only claim they can get there. Hence the madness. Nabbing Gareth Barry ahead of a bitterly disappointed Rafael Benitez and Liverpool, by getting him into a cab from Dubai to join up with the Manchester City squad in Abu Dhabi. Putting up with the sneering first response of Yaya Touré’s agent – “why should he leave Barcelona for you” – during the initial meeting at a hotel in Rome. And saying “yes” to Roberto Mancini’s demands for a vast backroom staff (including the man they called “the butler”) at the critical meeting on Sardinia, when there was urgent need for someone to take things on from Mark Hughes. The salaries that City paid back in those days provide a taste of what Manchester United face in the next three months. “Every agent knows you have a patchy squad and are desperate,” says one who saw that period up close at City.

But the last of the players for whom the club paid what was grimly known as a “City Price” in wages – Carlos Tevez, Emmanuel Adebayor, Wayne Bridge and Gareth Barry – are gone or on the point of going, reducing the breathtaking most recent £233m wage figure which included hefty pay-offs for Mancini and his entourage. That leaves City on course to break even at the end of this year, having halved their losses from £189.9m (2011), to £97.9m (2012) and £51.6m (2013.) Yes, there is wealth, City did win the lottery in 2009 and have bought success, but the spending this summer – on Eliaquim Mangala, Fernando and Bacary Sagna they hope – will be the squad refinements they always wanted to move towards.

The black and whites of FFP don’t tell us anything about the philosophy behind the spending. Football remains a deeply unreconstructed business world in many ways: a world so ridiculous that one of its greatest clubs, Manchester United, were last week waiting on the result of the Champions League semi-final between Real Madrid and Bayern Munich to decide if the losing manager might perhaps fancy the role of spending £150m and rebuilding the entire structure after the Sir Alex Ferguson era. And because neither Carlo Ancelotti nor Pep Guardiola was available, they will go now with a manager who has a diametrically different personality to either of those, in Louis van Gaal. Where is the philosophy in that?

The comments City chief executive Ferran Soriano made at a Dubai seminar three months ago came to light last week, and though his observations on Van Gaal’s autocratic management style grabbed attention, his thoughts on managerial recruitment – incredibly relevant to United – were the more significant. “Before you decide how to manage your team, decide what you need,” Soriano said. “Do you need to be more direct? Do you need to delegate more? Do you need to be more of a coach?” City’s decision to appoint Manuel Pellegrini was based on the decision that they needed the latter, because that is how to exact optimum commitment from the complex dynamics of the dressing room. “In the competitive environment of football, just a bit less commitment means losing,” as Soriano put it.

It’s a personal view that Pellegrini’s uncommunicative nature in press conferences is more of a problem than City realise. He, more than anyone, could articulate the fact that City have taught old school British football a few things, while investing more on infrastructure and player development than any other club in this country. And that they have put in place the talent identification and player acquisition systems that means City are no longer at the mercy of agents – power-brokers in a sport which just can’t get to grips with learning its own business properly. Tony Pulis, current flavour of the month, left no infrastructure behind at Stoke and is not interested in developing young players. One of Crystal Palace’s best, Johnny Williams, is out on loan at Ipswich.

City’s reluctance to explain in fine detail some of the income figures which Uefa is scrutinising, has been a source of suspicion – to me and others. The £22.45m they say they have earned by selling intellectual property is puzzling, though my understanding is that the figure includes the “sale” of a raft of expertise, including know-how to other clubs which want to replicate elements of City’s Etihad Campus, which brings Academy and first team together from next summer. Creating an area where young players work and live, for example, has taken three years to develop.

The hope that this will help City develop a supply-line of young talent is tempered by a knowledge that such an achievement will take far longer than the five years they have already been committing to it. City’s young players reached last week’s Under-21 Premier League semi-final, losing on penalties to Chelsea, but it is actually the Under-12s and Under-14s where the future might lie. “No one ever believes it until you do it,” one insider says of the view that City are only about paying foreign signings to deliver success.

There will be more talk this week of Arabs and petrodollars and inconspicuous wealth and more succinct 140-character abuse will flow back in response. But behind all that, a significant story about a way of doing football business is going on.

[Saul Goodman]

Good read. Thanks for that

[Ted Hughes]

It's the tone of some of his articles & his willingness to jump on some of the negative aspects which he himself has mentioned in that piece, which has brought the 'knob' kind of responses.

If he is willing to look beyond the usual bullshit & try to understand what we are doing then that's fair enough & I'm sure he will get less criticism.

Well done to City fans for pulling him up on the other bollocks & making him think about it.

[Socrates]

Thanks Patrickblue, after not being the friendliest to us a couple of years back it is good to see the Herbert gets it...

[patrickblue]

Just said on Talkshite that we've rejected whatever sanctions they were trying to impose on us. Not sure if they are just rehashing the stuff that's been reported earlier in the week, because I can't see any mention anywhere else. but they definitely said we'd rejected it, not that we just hadn't accepted yet.

[gillie]

Retweeted by Standing Alone
Get French Football ‏@GFN_France 26m
L'Equipe: PSG FFP punishments:
1) Wage Bill Restrictions
2) €60m fine
3) #UCL squad size limit (21)
4) Transfer controls #PSG #FFP
They seem a bit harsh to me virtually denying any chance to compete at CL level.

[Ted Hughes]

I'm not having that.

I don't believe UEFA would try to fine someone 60 mil. What club would accept a 60 mil fine ? It would basically guarantee a court case. Also, what would be the point of them entering the Champions League at all ?

[pepsi_dave]

Just been announced on sky news that we have been hit with a £50M fine and will have to have a reduced CL squad of 21 players next season. That 21 man squad cannot have their total wage bill increased beyond its current collective wage.

http://news.sky.com/story/1256043/man-c ... ance-rules

[john@staustell]

Just been announced on sky news that we have been hit with a £50M fine and will have to have a reduced CL squad of 21 players next season. That 21 man squad cannot have their total wage bill increased beyond its current collective wage.

Which they wont know what it is.

[Original Dub]

Scumbags

[pepsi_dave]

Seems a strange one, that's how it was worded by the chap sky news just had on, well not word for word, but that's how it sounded. Unless it's meant that after we name a 21 man squad, when we get the chance to chop and change a couple of players in that squad in January, it's at this point that we cannot increase the already set wage bill.

I also don't understand how a £50 million fine is justified. Milking it for all they can aren't they?

The 21 man squad won't hurt us that much I don't believe. It's just case of riding out this season.

[john@staustell]

Seems a strange one, that's how it was worded by the chap sky news just had on, well not word for word, but that's how it sounded. Unless it's meant that after we name a 21 man squad, when we get the chance to chop and change a couple of players in that squad in January, it's at this point that we cannot increase the already set wage bill.

I also don't understand how a £50 million fine is justified. Milking it for all they can aren't they?

The 21 man squad won't hurt us that much I don't believe. It's just case of riding out this season.

21 is plenty for the CL!