The Financial Fair Play (FFP) debate is never ending, for Premier League clubs especially, whilst UEFA also have rules hanging over any club that wants to take part in the various European competitions.
One thing is for sure.
As time has moved on, the “Fair” part of Financial Fair Play is now all but impossible to identify.
FFP has become such a key part of football conversation these days, it can feel like there was never a time when these “Rules” didn’t exist.
The Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules were introduced by UEFA and the Premier League in order to supposedly promote long-term sustainability and prevent clubs getting into severe financial difficulties, that could potentially result in bankruptcy.
The rules supposedly designed to stop clubs from spending more than they should realistically do. The alleged thinking behind it, was that if you tied spending by clubs to a formula connected to the revenues they generated, then “fairness” and “sensible financial decision making” would then be the result.
Those were the intentions, what we were told they were anyway.
Reality has proved something different…
It has been a bit like a game of musical chairs.
When the music stopped, you either had a seat (at the top table) or you didn’t.
The clubs that were already financial dominant had all the chairs. All of them had over a period of time built these huge power bases and revenues, due to spending enormous sums of money. With no rules, these clubs able to do whatever they wanted, their owners able to spend whatever they wanted.
The likes of Chelsea and Manchester City may grab all the headlines as clubs that have spent their way to success and their current positions amongst the financially dominant. However, this applies to pretty much all those lording it over the rest. Down the years they have all done this.
Liverpool as much as any other. They haven’t finished outside the top eight in England since 1962. Their owners used the Littlewoods fortunes to build them into such a financial super club in the 1960s, they have reaped the long-term benefits ever since.
Ever since professional football in England became a thing in the 1800s, owners of football clubs have used their money to gain an advantage, whether that was operating inside or outside the rules. In the days of the maximum wage for players, clubs would secretly pay them extra in order to attract and keep the best players.
Talking of secret payments…
Chelsea were recently found guilty of having made tens of millions of pounds of secret payments over many years, yet received no proper punishment, none at all really. Not a single point deducted, no ban on signing first team squad players, just a fine. The Premier League announced that the ‘punishment’ for rule breaking had been “Agreed” with Chelsea. I bet it was!
A shame that the likes of Forest, Leicester and Everton didn’t have the opportunity to “Agree” their punishments, rather than having points deducted. Or indeed the Newcastle United owners when faced with breaking PSR limits if only they could have paid a fine rather than having to sell Elliot Anderson and Yankuba Minteh.
What was that about Financial FAIR Play again?
Wild West
Even if you believed that those who came up with the Financial Fair Play (FFP) ideas, were doing it for the best of reasons, it has instead had the opposite effect. It has made things even more unfair, in terms of making it all but impossible for other clubs to challenge the established financial elite.
So much depends now on which clubs have the best accountants and lawyers.
So much depends now on which clubs can find the best way to bend the rules, to find accountancy loopholes that render the rules worse than useless.
Chelsea are the poster boys for this. When not breaking the rules and receiving no punishment, they are busy selling themselves their own women’s team and hotels in order to then be found not to have broken any rules. Even though in reality they are losing incredible amounts of money. In recent days we found out that Chelsea had established a new Premier League record, losing more than £262m in the 2024/25 season, beating Manchester City’s loss of over £197m in the 2010/11 PL season.
BBC Sport published the top ten losses in a season by Premier League clubs and that top ten was made up of Chelsea (4), Arsenal (1), Manchester City (1), Manchester United (3) and Everton (1).
Some familiar names there, nine of the ten biggest ever seasonal losses are by clubs amongst the financial elite.
Manchester United owe more than a billion pounds, the Chelsea owners have run up losses of more than a billion pounds since taking over from Abramovich less than four years ago. We all saw this past week, record £460m fees paid by Premier League clubs to agents this season, Chelsea setting a new Premier League record there as well with £65m given to agents, £27m more than Aston Villa who were second highest.
Indeed, the Chelsea owners know for sure now that their ill-conceived takeover has meant that they will lose billions in total by the time they eventually call time and accept their folly. What will happen to Chelsea as a club if their American owners (Todd Boehly pictured below) suddenly start selling everything off in order to limit how many billions they end up losing?
I thought the Financial Fair Play rules were supposed to ensure stability and stop club owners spending ridiculous amounts of money.
You then have Manchester City, able to afford the very best legal representation that makes you wonder if there will ever be a verdict announced on the 115+ serious Premier League charges, never mind any potential punishment. This has now dragged on years because of the lawyers they can afford, whilst we all await that verdict on the 115+ charges we see Manchester City continuing to spend staggering amounts of money on signings and wages in particular, allowing them to keep on winning trophy after trophy. Newcastle United knocked out of both domestic cup competitions by Manchester City this season. The competition rules even changing recently to help the likes of Man City have even more chance, Pep Guardiola able to buy both Semenyo and Guehi, these January signings allowed to play in one or both cup competitions despite having played for their previous clubs in the competition(s) already this season.
UEFA
UEFA did the same with their competitions years ago, players able to be bought for the later stages of the Champions League by the richest clubs, having already played for their previous clubs in the same competitions that season.
UEFA are as bad as the Premier League, they are literally in ‘league’ with the richest and most powerful clubs. Seeding based on the past. How much money you earn from participation in the Champions League for example, based on the past. There is no logical reason whatsoever, for clubs to be given more money from the central pot based on what they have and haven’t done in Europe in past seasons. Newcastle United will receive many millions less in this season’s Champions League, purely because they have been less involved and less successful in recent times than the likes of Chelsea, Man City, Arsenal, Liverpool and Tottenham (Arsenal and Liverpool then also getting further additional money due to getting beyond the last 16).
So UEFA talk about having Financial Fair Play and yet have their competitions set up so that the established financially dominant clubs that have already had the benefit of Champions League fortunes season after season, then also get more money than those clubs trying to break into that elite, even if they match them in that season’s competition. It doesn’t sound very “Fair” to me.
UEFA also have strict rules that don’t allow rich owners who control multiple clubs to have two or more of them competing in the same competition in any particular season. That is strict rules unless you know how to ignore them. Rich owners paying top dollar to lawyers who get the right paperwork in place, so that UEFA and everybody else can temporarily pretend that the Manchester City owners don’t also own and control Girona as well, which meant they both competed in the Champions League in the same season recently. The owners of Nottingham Forest and Brighton amongst those who have done the same in European competitions. Whereas the Crystal Palace owners missed the deadline to pretend they didn’t have ownership of two clubs and were demoted from the Europa League to the Conference League, whilst the Forest owners had met the UEFA deadline (in anticipation that Forest and Olympiakos were both going to be in this season’s Champions League) to pretend both clubs weren’t controlled by Marinakis. Forest rewarded by getting bumped up to the Europa League at Palace’s expense. Yes, all of this totally FAIR, nothing to be seen here.
FFP, PSR, SCR…
All of it is a nonsense.
Whether you call it FFP (Financial Fair Play), PSR (Profit and Sustainability Rules), SCR (Squad Cost Ratio), or whatever other acronym they want to come up with.
They are all just a pretence.
They simply look to preserve the status quo, to ensure the financially dominant clubs remain so AND nobody else is now allowed to compete properly with them.
Whatever system, whatever acronym, the reality remains. We are all just supposed to pretend that this is all fair, that it is for the overall good of football, bringing stability and so on.
My solution?
There is no perfect answer BUT what is for sure is that the current situation is a sham.
My suggestion for Premier League clubs is a simple one.
Why not have rules in place that allow all 20 Premier League clubs to spend exactly the same amount of money in a particular season?
What could be fairer than allowing every club to spend the same maximum amount of money on wages, transfer fees, whatever?
To allay fears of a club getting into financial trouble. If the owners wanted to spend more than they generate in revenues, the rules could be that the owners would need to put a certain amount of cash into an interest earning bank account that they couldn’t touch. Money that could then be used if things don’t go so well for a particular club.
As things currently stand, the rules make it all but impossible for an Aston Villa or Newcastle United to build season on season in order to financially compete long-term. There is a glass ceiling that the rules keep in place. Clubs like United and Villa qualify for the Champions League for example, then the next season it becomes all but impossible to properly compete in both. They can’t commit to the spending on wages and transfer fees that is needed over a period of seasons. Spend ambitiously if getting into the Champions League, the punishment is then immense if you don’t sustain the success on the pitch, even for a single season. Players needing to be sold, wage bill cut and so on. Plus of course always the possibility of outside punishment due to the Premier League and/or UEFA rules.
Indeed, even if the success on the pitch continues, it is still all but impossible to raise your revenues quickly enough in order to compete, whilst at the same time still staying within the rules that currently exist. The same when PSR changes to SCR for the 2026/27 Premier League season.
The more things change the more they stay the same. The rules mean that those clubs which are already financially dominant, then have the ability to still spend more again, compared to those trying to break into the elite.