Villa Blogsville

EFL Chief Defends Financial Fair Play, Makes The Correct Point But Fails To Realise That’s Not What FFP Achieves

|

Football fans of all colours got bored watching Chelsea owner Roman Abramovic come in and buy the league with unregulated spending. He wasn’t the first as Jack Walker and Blackburn Rovers were accused of the same thing previously, it was just on a lower scale and not quite as long-lasting.

Since then we’ve had Manchester City and the oil billions, Manchester United’s owners leveraging the club for their own buy-in from memory (I could be wrong but Manchester FC didn’t come out of nowhere) and there are other stories of owners coming in and spending and making the top-flight no longer a fair playing place to be or attempting to do similar, to varying degrees of success, further down the pyramid. We tried it ourselves using Parachute Payments which are supposed to protect losses and staff and spent them on players.

That’s why Leicester City’s title win was such a story – it’s why Burnley getting into Europe last season was in the headlines. Why? It was refreshing, it created a change from the norm and what was expected.

But if FFP wants to be a step in the right direction, why in the hell was it proposed as it exists?

EFL Chief Executive Shaun Harvey was on a media tour in light of the QPR success and he told Sky Sports and others who were in attendance.

“I certainly think QPR have taken it seriously enough and I think Leicester and Bournemouth – whatever your view is on the settlements reached – it is money they would much rather have done something else with than pay it to the EFL. There is a seriousness. The big challenge we have got in the next six months is to communicate really clearly what can and cannot take place by clubs that breach these rules.”

Harvey justified the rules by stating that the EFL had ‘not lost’ a club to administration for five years – Coventry City was the last one – but he completely forgets the Aston Villa situation and the experiences of others and their situations and the role the EFL played in that.

We know our own summer and history – Dr Tony Xia was given a pass on the Fit and Proper Persons Test. He reportedly gave assurances and provided proof he had the cash to fund the club for a couple of seasons – despite changes in Chinese regulations.

When presented with a winding-up order from HMRC, he was factoring future transfer fees for quick cash to stay afloat. He was letting financial companies lay a charge on club-owned property for a cash boost.

The takeover saved us from the eventual administration – not FFP rules – even if it’s fair to say there were other considerations in that his cash flow dried up against his control.

FFP rules did not stop us potentially going to the wall and it hasn’t other clubs, a few years back Exeter City had a raft of games cancelled. Cash flow was an issue – FFP didn’t save them – better cash flow did, as it did us.

But the absolute, 100% thing Harvey gets right, is in his following comments.

“There is no doubt in the Championship in particular a lot of the clubs survive purely on the basis of owner funding. The vast majority are all making a loss. The level of the loss changes. What we have to be really careful about is making sure the owners of the clubs keep funding it.”

Fans of clubs in League One and League Two will make their mind up on how much he values them given those owners arguably contribute more in a real sense to keep a club afloat, even if the sums aren’t the same as Championship level clubs.

Harvey doesn’t seem to notice if you have £100 and give a tenner the effort and impact is more than having £1000 and giving £50 quid…but he spends his life on EFL expenses after all.

He makes the correct point but doesn’t seem to realise what he thinks he wants FFP to achieve, actively stops owners from doing it – funding the lot. Take a brief glance at the rules, an owner cannot 100% fund over revenue spending, an owner cannot 100% fund wages with the stipulations on wage growth in place. An owner cannot even left-field sponsor the stadium because they are constrained by FFP ‘fair market value’ judgments on such deals.

An owner categorically under the rules cannot say ‘there’s a £100million, it underwrites the lot, don’t spend a penny more’.

Share this article