Only just read that but have to agree. Perfect post that sums the situation up perfectly.
If Mansour, Abramovich, the Qatari owner at PSG, had taken over the clubs and ran them into the ground and made them collapse as clubs like Portsmouth did would UEFA have done anything whatsoever? Not a chance, doesn't concern them. It's only because they are proving successful and threatening the elite teams that FFP has been brought in. It's absolutely laughable listening to interviews with Platini where he cites Rangers and Portsmouth as examples for bringing FFP in.
I actually don't necessarily disagree with the basic point, (as made in Arruda's big post above) but you haven't even understood the
argument behind the bankruptcy side of things.
No-one's worried that the sugar-daddy owners are going to run their
own clubs into the ground, which is what you're suggesting. The concern is that the skyrocketing transfer fees and, more importantly, wages which players are demanding as a result of this effectively random injection of huge sums of money into the sport, is forcing smaller clubs to push themselves far beyond the boundaries of fiscal responsibility in order to compete. That is
exactly what happened to Portsmouth - they tried to win a trophy, but were only able to do so through expenditure horribly beyond their means which ultimately brought about the financial collapse of the club.
The commercial giants - Bayern, Madrid, United - have just about been able to keep up thanks to booming incomes. But what the unregulated system does is create an ever-bigger divide between the top group, comprising those aforementioned commercially massive sides and the sugar-daddy clubs, and everyone else. Yes, it means that clubs can now jump the gap
if they win the lottery by attracting a super-rich owner. But it means that
without such an owner, there is even less chance of making the step up than there was before.
People often attack FFP by claiming that the traditional big clubs are themselves regularly spending £30m or more and paying wages of £150k a week to their mid-level players - the same sort of behaviour criticised from the super-rich owners. Smaller clubs cannot compete with this, they say, so all FFP is doing is blocking the one avenue currently open for an attempt to compete with those teams - super-rich owners willing to throw their money at the problem.
But this is obviously a fallacy. The inflated transfer fees and wages that the traditional giants are paying are a direct result of the inflation brought about by super-rich owners like Mansour and the Qatar group. If they had never been allowed, then the traditional giants would be paying £80k a week to their mid-level players and regularly spending £20m. There would be a gap between them and the rest, and trying to leap it would be very difficult, but it would be within the realms of possibility, even without a super-rich owner.
Part of the problem is that since the emergence of City, PSG etc, people have forgotten that this sort of step up to the top level used to take five years of concerted effort and small steps forward. A decade even. That's how it ought to be - a slow but perfectly viable climb up the ladder. People say 'a super-rich owner is the only way to compete with the big boys', but what they mean is that it's the only way to make the step up in three years or less. Clubs used to improve or decline slowly, through good or bad leadership, through years and years of hard work, through long-term strategy and vision. The system was stable. That stability meant mobility within that system was challenging and slow. But the way to improve mobility within a stable system is not to introduce mass instability. You have to improve the system, not abandon it.
For me, those who think sugar-daddy owners are good for the game are essentially admitting defeat. It's lazy. It's like saying 'we can't be bothered to make the big changes needed to level the playing field whilst maintaining stability and encouraging fiscal responsibility. Instead, we're going to let the random whims of the super-rich destabilise the current system, and at least that way some clubs will be able to slip across the divide, even if they are no more deserving of it than any of their rivals. Anyone who
doesn't attract a rich owner for whatever reason is ten times more fecked than they were before, and they're also going to have to take silly risks if they want to offer their fans even a sniff of silverware. But at least we'll have the Citys and PSGs breaking up the ranks of the old firm.'
There are so many ways that the financial playing field could have been effectively and ethically levelled. An obvious approach, which has always appealed to me, is the balancing of TV money distribution against other commercial income. Effectively, a club like Manchester United with a massive income from sponsorship, advertising, merchandise sales etc, would receive a dramatically smaller slice of the TV money than a club like Wigan, with little to no brand value or corresponding commercial income. There's an appealing symmetry to that approach: you're balancing the historical success of the individual against the current success of the group. The sense of long-term meritocracy which is so crucial to the sport is maintained. The motivation to succeed in the long term is still there, and clubs still benefit from marketing themselves (which bring stable income and popularity to the sport). But the unfair advantage afforded by the
timing of historical success is balanced out by the fact that clubs making less money from that get more of the rewards of the current marketability of the group product, the Premier League. After all, it's the attractiveness of the League as a whole which makes it the most valuable in the world at the moment - Germany and Spain have better top teams, but the PL is significantly more marketable because of the relative evenness of the competition. And it's the smaller teams, the teams further down the table, which bring the competition, so they should be the ones reaping the financial reward. Otherwise you're essentially paying the likes of United, Chelsea, Arsenal etc
more because they lose more often to Wigan and West Brom than Madrid lose to Sociedad and Valladolid.
But this is just one hypothetical example of a potential solution - there are a multitude of ways it could be done if the desire was there.
So the tl:dr is this: FFP is very obviously not the answer to anything - it's a half-arsed sticking plaster on the out of control inflation caused by super-rich owners. But
not bringing in FFP is not a solution either. It's even marginally less of a solution. And 'super-rich owners are the only way for smaller clubs to compete' is not a valid argument against FFP. A valid argument against it would be: 'Why are you trying to save a burning building by shoring up the still-burning ceiling of the downstairs toilet. Go and fetch some fecking water!'
