If we are to believe various English media, new rules will be introduced in the short term in the field of Financial Fair Play. European football association UEFA plans to unveil the new ideas at a meeting next month, it sounds like. It is expected that in the future a new form will be looked at where clubs are held to a salary cap based on their turnover.
The Financial Fair Play rules were created in 2009 to prevent clubs from spending more money than they earn. UEFA’s priority was to eradicate financial abuses in European club football with the introduction of stricter controls, a Financial Fair Play system. Since then, all clubs must abide by the new rules and not just clubs with a turnover of more than fifty million, as UEFA initially proposed. The turnover criterion has therefore been deleted; from now on, all teams must comply with UEFA’s Financial Fair Play rules from 2015.
However, UEFA’s regulations have recently been met with increasing resistance, partly due to the power of a number of wealthy clubs. UEFA has already announced at an earlier stage that it is looking critically at the regulations in response to the corona crisis. The union would now like to focus on the high expenditure on salaries and transfer fees. For this, use must be made of, among other things, a salary limit, as is already the case in LaLiga. Under the rules of the Spanish football league, no Spanish club may exceed a salary limit set by the league itself. In the case of Barcelona, that was 348 million euros last season. For that reason, the club had to let Lionel Messi go.
The Times knows that clubs that participate in European tournaments such as the Champions League, Europa League and Conference League will soon be allowed to spend a maximum percentage of their turnover on salaries. If clubs break that limit, tax has to be paid. That money is then divided among the other clubs that play in Europe. Clubs with wealthy owners such as Paris Saint-Germain and Manchester City would therefore have to settle for those extra tax expenditures before offering hefty transfer fees or salaries.
President Nasser Al-Khelaïfi indicated on Wednesday during the presentation of Messi as a player of Paris Saint-Germain that the club has always adhered to the Financial Fair Play rules. “Let me make it very clear. I was waiting for that question. We have followed the Financial Fair Play rules since day one. We will always comply with that. Before we do something, we always look at it without our commercial department. When you see that we get Leo, you know that we have the capacity to do that,” said the owner of the French top club.
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