Sport

If FFP was really meant to curtail Manchester City it has failed

Kenny Archer

Kenny Archer

Kenny is the deputy sports editor and a Liverpool FC fan.

Manchester City forward Sergio Aguero, left, celebrates with his teammates after scoring his side's opening goal during the first leg, round of sixteen, Champions League soccer match between Schalke 04 and Manchester City at Veltins Arena in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, Wednesday Feb. 20, 2019. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner).
Manchester City forward Sergio Aguero, left, celebrates with his teammates after scoring his side's opening goal during the first leg, round of sixteen, Champions League soccer match between Schalke 04 and Manchester City at Veltins Arena in Gelsenkir Manchester City forward Sergio Aguero, left, celebrates with his teammates after scoring his side's opening goal during the first leg, round of sixteen, Champions League soccer match between Schalke 04 and Manchester City at Veltins Arena in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, Wednesday Feb. 20, 2019. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner).

FOR a few days, at least until Monday night’s mayhem at Stamford Bridge, the most-talked about TLA (three-letter acronym) in soccer was no longer VAR but FFP: Financial Fair Play.

Uefa’s decision to ban Manchester City from the next two Champions League isn’t actually about breaching FFP but for alleged accountancy fraud – cooking the books and then covering that up.

Basically, the claim is that City signed up to the competition rules but then wilfully broke them.

If the Court of Arbitration for Sport accepts City’s stout denial of that version of events, though, then FFP may well be finished.

City and their fans can legitimately gripe about one particular TLA: PSG (Paris Saint-Germain), whose income and spending surely merits similar scrutiny.

Amidst all the furore and four-letter words, the real questions to answer are these:

How has FFP really curtailed City in any meaningful way?

and

How much do they want to spend?

Of course there are questions to be asked about FFP, not least in relation to its purpose.

There’s serious debate about how clubs ‘should’ be funded.

Without financial injections/ ‘financial doping’, however you want to term it, the argument goes that the traditional big guns will always have an inherent advantage.

Certainly Manchester United’s 2019 commercial income of £280m was still much higher than that of City (£230m), even though the latter have been a much more attractive proposition on the pitch in recent years.

The Red Devils’ worldwide appeal remains much greater than that of their Manchester rivals (hence all those official noodle, tyre, and toenail clipper partners) and the FFP argument is that City are only catching up due to some dubious ‘sponsorship’ deals.

However, regular success on the pitch can pay off in other ways too, certainly in the short-term: City’s £253m broadcast revenue for 2019 was larger than United’s (£241m). Liverpool’s was largest of all the English clubs, at nearly £264m, but only thanks to winning the Champions League.

Irony alert: Deloitte noted of City that their ‘revenue grew from £503.5m to £538.2m (7%), driven predominantly by increased distributions from UEFA for Champions League participation and performance’.

Some make the argument that FFP ‘stops money going into football’.

That’s simply untrue. Money can be spent on stadia and other facilities, youth development and club academies, community projects, women’s football – in other words, all the methods by which you might build a stable and successful club. Perhaps even a self-sufficient one. City have been spending heavily on all those aspects.

FFP also appears to have contributed to more sensible spending. Back in 2011 top flight clubs in Europe were heading towards collective losses of £1.5bn; within six years there was cumulative profit of £500m, a turnaround of almost £2bn.

The references to Manchester United’s debt are red herrings.

Even after their downturn in fortunes on the pitch over recent years, the Old Trafford outfit is immensely profitable. It still has the biggest revenue of all the English clubs, third highest in the world behind only Barcelona and Real Madrid. What has been happening is that the owners, the Glazers, are draining ManU, declining to pay down the debt, preferring to take sizeable dividends themselves.

There is an ongoing power struggle between City and Uefa at the highest echelon of European football.

Bizarrely, City fans still, somehow, see their club as a plucky underdog battling against the big guns.

That’s the same Manchester City who are fixtures in the Champions League, currently involved in their ninth consecutive campaign in the competition. The English club closest in that regard isn’t the one you might expect - Spurs involved for a fourth season in a row.

The same Manchester City who are regulars in the top 10 of the Deloitte Football Money League (DFML). Indeed they were in the top 20 even in the mid-2000s, before their UAE takeover. They were fifth for three recent years in a row before slipping down to sixth in 2019.

If FFP really was designed to stop City flexing their financial muscles then it’s been a complete failure.

Yes, Uefa fined City £49m in 2014 for FFP breaches – but £32m of that was suspended, and £17m would just about buy one-third of a full-back at the Etihad.

The CIES Football Observatory records that, over the past decade, the greatest transfer spend (in millions of euro) was by…Manchester City, at E1,638m.

They’re closely followed by Barcelona (1525), then Chelsea (1428), PSG (1392)

Juventus (1272), Man U (1265), Real Madrid (1236), Atletico Madrid (1110), Liverpool (1075), and Inter (968). Arsenal (830), Spurs (763), and Everton (752) are all in the top 20, as are Bayern Munich, on (727).

Unsurprisingly, City are top of the decade’s net spend league too, with a deficit (again in millions of euro), of 1091.

Net spend matters because City, like the ‘big boys’ of Barca, Real Madrid, and Man U, generally only sell a player when they want to (and even Old Trafford couldn’t keep Cristiano Ronaldo).

Interestingly, next on CIES’s net spend list are PSG (901), then Man U (833), Barca (720), Milan (439), Real (425), Juve (414), Chelsea (395), Inter (391), and Arsenal (366). Bayern (309), Everton (297), and even West Ham (291) are all apparently above Liverpool (285).

City’s wage bill, even if you accept their official figures and ignore claims about dodgy image rights funding, is consistently huge too, right up there in terms of world sport, not just soccer.

Let me repeat what I’ve often said: City have spent a lot but they’ve spent it very well, and Pep Guardiola is a great manager who has them playing brilliant football.

Yet the message that Manchester City are sending out seems to be this: you have to let us spend as much as we want, spend more and more and more, until we win the Champions League.

Arguably PSG are saying the same (in French).

The way the world has gone, with the elevation of computer game culture and the ‘money matters most’ mindset, many might shrug and say ‘OK’, ‘So what?’

Maybe ‘sugar daddies’ should be allowed, even if that contributes to an unsustainable arms race, putting the financial safety and future of some clubs at severe risk.

Yet do we really want a scenario where trophies simply go to those who write the biggest cheques?

If Uefa were to succeed in banning City from the Champions League, for even a season, then they would have genuine cause for complaint.

Up to now, though, City only have themselves to blame – not Uefa, not FFP - for failing to win the big one despite splashing out more big ones than anyone else.