- Football’s unfaced issues: international breaks and continuing child abuse in clubs.
- How the transfer market is going for the top seven clubs
One of the problems with covering the inner workings of English football is the self-censorship that most of the English media applies when it writes about football, as a result of which many important issues that affect the very core of football are simply never discussed.
The most obvious example of this is the way the workings of PGMO are never debated, and thus the various approaches of referees, the sudden change in the pattern of results during the matches played in front of empty stadia, and other such evidence of oddities in refereeing, rarely sees the light of day.
Then again the constant stream of transfer stories in the media, of which only around 3% ever actually happen, show us that a media interest in a totally fanciful world.
And yet it is the merging of this background of fantasy transfer tales with the manoeuvring of the clubs as they try to come to terms with the financial fair play regulations that gives us perhaps the most interesting story this summer. .
And of course, when it comes to transfers and money, Manchester City and the City Group of clubs seems always to be at the heart of the affair. There is of course little mention of such matters and little or no discussion so far on the way a player is moved from one City Group club to another City Group club and then on to another, with transfer fees that simply look designed to accommodate the English financial controls, rather than anything else. But it has happened and it is out there. And even if England is silent, it is being talked about a lot in Europe. Here’s just one example.
The point is that when you have several clubs in a group and one needs to spend money to reduce profits, and has space in its FFP profile to do so, and then you have another which if it receives money will pay no tax on it because it has been making a loss, you have room for manipulation for both football and taxation regulations.
Now I repeat I can’t prove any of this – this blog is primarily a fans’ forum and we don’t have the capital to do investigative journalism, All we can do is to say, where a group of clubs exists and they can move players across countries as they wish, then the opportunity for clubs to reduce their FFP and/or tax situation is greatly enhanced.
So in this case a third division club receives around £40m to help its finances as National move Savinho to Manchester City. And while the English media make nothing much of it, in Europe the statement is that this “gives us the perfect example of how a ménage à trois works.”
For the clubs involved are Troyes (a City Group club in France), Girona (a City group club in Spain) and Manchester City (a… well you know who they are.)
Troyes has just been relegated for the second successive season and will play next season in the Third Division. And that despite having bought Savinho for 6.5 million euros. The declining club, seemingly abandoned by its owners, didn’t even play Savinho but loaned him to their fellow moneymen at Girona where he got 41 games as Girona, who came sixth in the second division in 2022. Theywill play in the Champions League in 2024/5.
And given what Savinho did for City Group club Girona, people are saying isn’t that £40m rather cheap? And how come three of the four clubs the player has played for are all City Group clubs?
In fact the suggestion across Europe as revealed in the Swiss press is that Man C “absolutely had to avoid unnecessary expenses and post-Brexit regulations,” which “do not allow the signing of more than three foreign players under the age of 21 per transfer period.”
So the Group got around the regulations and successfully transferred money from the uber-rich Man C to Girona and Troyes while avoiding Uefa and PL regulations. Better still, if Man City find they have spent too much according to FFP regulations, they can sell the player on the open market (or to another City Group club not troubled by FFP), probably for a £60m profit by the end of this coming season, and thus remove their FFP problems at a stroke.
Do this with enough players and a) you have a flourishing team that will regularly win the league, and b) you can do it all within FFP regulations while c) you stop anyone really noticing by simultaneously launching a massive legal action against the rest of the league, which if won, would shred the very basis of the Premier League into nothingness.
Of course maybe it is all totally innocent and all of the City Group clubs act completely independently and perhaps didn’t realise that each of the clubs they dealt with were part of the same group. That might be true, as obviously I can’t prove anything said here, not least because it simply comes from the papers. And the fact that the English media don’t have much to say is undoubtedly because it involves foreign clubs and they aren’t really of interest to English readers.
