A while back, someone made a post about how European leagues should emulate American leagues by implementing salary caps. Implement drafts! Spend as little as possible so that owners can earn as much as possible. Heck, teams cannot even get relegated in the US, ffs. I am very much against this model, as it benefits the owners more than anyone else. The owners maximize profit while knowing that however poorly they perform on the field, they cannot get regulated. Nothing ever changes.
I see European FFP in a similar negative fashion. Nothing ever changes because regulation makes change difficult. Football is a business and business owners should be allowed to spend their way to success (or to failure). Let clubs enjoy the benefits of their business decisions or suffer the consequences of poor ones. Either way, clubs aren’t better off by having a governing body telling them how they should spend their money. At the end of the day, the EPL is a better league because of foreign investment. Setting unnecessary spending caps and implementing unnecessary regulations protects legacy clubs and their respective owners, and maintains the status quo. It makes it harder for smaller clubs to challenge the status quo. And it makes leagues less competitive. More boring.
Note that I am not against regulation. But there needs to be common sense. Regulation should promote competition and work towards making the league wealthier. Think Tebas. How does he make LL better?
Hmm what else? I am gonna take flack for this opinion, but here goes: I don’t follow EPL FFP closely, but whenever I read about it in the news, it seems that non-western foreign owned clubs are the ones getting targeted. Why isn’t the governing body scrutinizing Chelsea, United, Arsenal or Liverpool? Maybe it is, but we aren’t reading about 115 charges against United, and it has spent just as much as City over the last 10 years. Surely accounting errors exist in their books too! Right? Right! One owner is American. The other is ME. Money is money, tho. Regardless of source, it has the same effect.
We saw it against Chelsea too! Abramovich was forced to sell despite having nothing to do with the invasion of Ukraine. Not only was he forced to sell but also had/has to donate the money to Ukraine. He wanted to donate to Ukraine AND Russia, but EPL regulators said no! Now… did he get rich in an honest manner? No, but it isn’t the EPL’s job to scrutinize how owners got rich 30 years ago! If so, let’s do a deep dive into all EPL owners business dealings. Let’s punish every single one, for I am sure that if we look closely enough, we will find dirt on every single one of them. See how this goes?
This type of unscrupulous behavior works for the English FFP because no one cares about fairness when the alleged bad guy is being treated unfairly.
Point is, English FFP is dishonest and political too. Not just Spanish FFP.
Now… I don’t twerk for oil owned clubs. But it’s an old money vs new rich kind of situation. Fans of United, for example, inherit the status and money whereas City won the lottery. Either way, regardless of source, they spend similarly and enrich the league and its competition.
City may have won the lottery, but it is still a well oiled machine. 🤭 Smart and competent people throughout the club hierarchy. The club is run very well, and few speak about this fact. Contrast this with United!
And I like that United has a lot of competition. 😁