Last week we had the kind of news story break which under normal circumstances I’d have been all over and lamenting from the rooftops. UEFA is proposing to abolish the current regulations on Financial Fair Play, citing the global health emergency as the proof that it cannot work in its current form.
This, of course, has nothing to do with a number of clubs from top leagues winning cases against them and others, like Barcelona, reeling and in debt.
Closer to home, there are those of us who have been saying for a while that European FFP regulations are what would finally stop the Ibrox club from over-spending. We can consider that avenue closed, and you know why it isn’t a big deal?
Because if it was going to happen it already would have.
This week, Sevco issued more equity confetti and nobody blinked. “We are debt free” is the continual boast; that club has posted losses in every year of its existence and only the perverse spectacle of their directors continuing to fund it from their pockets stops it all from coming down.
Ibrox is playing its usual game of financial sleight of hand.
As long as they can find mugs to keep on funding the circus over there nobody is going to interfere. I make no bones about it; if Ibrox’s directors are content to finance the fantasies of the Peepul out of their own pockets then so be it.
More fool them, I say, and we’re just going to have to live with it.
I am more sanguine about the news of FFP’s imminent demise than I would have been a year ago and certainly less shocked than I would have been 18 months back. But a lot has changed in that time and what’s become apparent is that FFP did not work and it was never going to be applied to Ibrox, not whilst the SFA were signing off on the accounts each year.
And at the top of the game, it had become a travesty.
Too many clubs knew how to game the system; others ignored the system and waited for the court cases. A handful of clubs suffered severe penalties with a handful even banned from playing in Europe; that sanction is apparently one of the ones that’s coming off the table. It was rarely used anyway and never on a club from the major leagues; I suspect it would never have been used on one of them.
When these regulations were introduced, most of us believed they would be a force for good in the game. Some even said that they would reign in the spending of the elite teams; the elite teams have never had more money or control over how the game develops. The coming changes to the Champions League are an unpardonable disgrace designed to benefit a handful of teams at the top. By their very nature, they will make other leagues ever more lopsided.
European football has begun its slow death. National associations are fragmenting because a handful of clubs command vast resources whilst the rest barely scrape by. The super-clubs will continue to leave the rest behind, and that’s the depressing reality of it and UEFA has caved in each and every time they have raised their voices to demand more.
I no longer care what UEFA does. It has become a thoroughly compromised organisation, like the SFA. Financial fair play guidelines have not altered the trajectory of the sport one bit.
Right here in our own backyard a club has posted losses in the last decade which have to be in the high eight figures, if not the low nines. Nobody in Nyon has batted an eyelid any more than the SFA and the clubs here have.
The likes of Aberdeen are just getting ploughed under by this mammoth act of financial doping and as was all too predictable it’s even caught up with us, we who have sat and done nothing although Ibrox’s plans and their policies were quite clear, as were the consequences for Celtic of letting them go on unchecked.
It’s why Lawwell, by far the guiltiest of allowing this, could not have survived this campaign.
UEFA claims that it will replace the current system with something better, but better for who exactly? The same people who always benefit, those at the top.
The new regulations will be in relation to wage spending, probably as a ratio of earnings. What a joke that is. English clubs, earning major money from the TV markets will laugh at that and transfer fees will skyrocket ever higher.
Others might be tempted to “learn” from Rangers and create weird and wonderful ways of remunerating players as long as it’s not through actual earnings … as long as they declare it all to the tax-man they won’t even have broken the rules.
All in all, it’s a farce but when you look at what we’re up against here it’s clear that it always was. Financial Fair Play is the biggest joke in the game, and it became clear a while ago that it was largely at the expense of clubs like Celtic.
Is it possible to miss a system that you never saw in action? Is it possible to mourn the end of something who’s effect you never noticed? Can you be sorry to see something go when things had gone on as if it was never really here to begin with?