Financial Fair Play, yes, no, maybe? Málaga, Man C & the rest « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager
By Tony Attwood
If you have read any of my ramblings on the FFP issue you’ll know I did hope that it might have an impact. I was encouraged by Chelsea pulling back on expenditure, until last January when they went wild. I have been discouraged by the way Man City is spending its billions on anything that moves. And by the fact that having had to put up with two billionaire clubs, we now have two more – PSG and Málaga Club de Fútbol
Malaga were sold to Qatari Sheik Abdullah bin Nasser Al-Thani for around ed €25 million fee last year as part of the Qatar build up to its world cup bid.
They have the former Real Madrid coach Manuel Pellegrini in charge and keep signing new players including Diego Buonanotte from River Plate and Joris Mathijsen from Hamburg, plus Van Nistelrooy, Julio Baptista, Sergio Sánchez, Toulalan, Joaquín, Monreal. There is talk of Wesley Sneijder joining the party.
So that now gives the oilmen three clubs, one in France, on in England and one in Spain, each rivalling Chelsea who seem rather miffed that they came up with the idea of financial match fixing first.
But it seems that it is not all over as Manchester C have thrown down a challenge to Uefa by claiming that Etihad Airways, the airline owned by the Abu Dhabi government, is buying the naming rights to the City of Manchester stadium, built incidentally with money that came from the taxpayers of the UK. The club is claiming that they will get £100m for the deal, and that the money cannot be seen as illicit under the FFP, but is rather simply an earning – just as Arsenal’s money from the Emirates is.
Arsène Wenger has said the arrangement threatened not only FFP legislation but the credibility of the European game’s governing body – which just about sums it up. He called the situation “Platini’s big test” – and there’s no doubt he’s right. If Manchester C get away with this, then Qatar will do the same in France and Spain.
“It raises the real question about the credibility of the financial fair play,” Mr Wenger said. “That is what this is all about. They give us the message that they can get around it by doing what they want. It means financial fair play will not come in. It is as simple as that. I can understand how they do it but it raises the real question. The difficulty and the credibility of the financial fair play is at stake.
“Plus, if the financial fair play is to have a chance, the sponsorship has to be at the market price. It cannot be doubled, tripled or quadrupled because that means it is better that we don’t do it and we leave everybody free. That can be defended as well, but if they bring the rules in they have to be respected.”
Arsenal’s deal over the Emirates in 2004 was valued at £90m over 15 years with £48m via shirt sponsorship, and naming rights worth £2.8m a year. Mr Wenger, with his regular dry wit said, “We must have done a bad deal.”
Uefa say that they are aware of the City situation and that their experts “will make assessments of fair value of any sponsorship deals using benchmarks.”
Mr Wenger remains hopeful however. “It looks to me that Platini is very strongly determined on this,” he said. “He is not stupid. He knows that some clubs will try to get around that and, at the moment, I believe they are studying, behind closed doors, how they can really strongly check it. That is where the financial fair play is at stake.”
Uefa will begin assessing club accounts in 2013-14 season, looking at the previous two seasons to ensure no one made a loss of over €45m. Manchester C figures showed a £121m loss and the next set are expected to be worse.
There’s no doubt that with four clubs now spending wildly UEFA’s job has just got harder. They might have taken on just Chelsea – but four across three countries is harder.
The FFP rules require that sponsorship deals must be pitched at market rates – so technically Manchester C have to show that they could have got a similar deal from anyone else. This is simply unlikely since it is widely accepted that naming rights on existing grounds have little impact. We call Arsenal’s home the Emirates (well I don’t but many do). But what do you call Newcastle’s ground? It isn’t St James Park, but that’s what we all call it, despite the naming rights deal. Rights deals on existing property are not profitable or popular for this very reason.
And there’s another problem – although Manchester C’s next figures will be worse than the last, they are overall slowing down the expenditure unless Manchester U who have spent £50m plus and mucked around pretending they were trying to buy Nasri (which they were not, but a lot of the little children’s supporters groups believed every word of the tale).
The betting, I guess, is that FFP will give us nothing, as some readers here suggested previously. Looks like you were right guys, and Arsenal will have to be even more clever to take on these multi-billion pound clubs.
Unless of course you have invented an anti-gravity machine that will make oil more or less pointless. Now that really would put the cat among the whatnots – especially if you used your anti-grav billions to finance Arsenal.
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