At last the media catch up: football is in more than a crisis

 

 

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By Tony Attwood

Football has been in crisis for so long, that football in crisis is not a story any more.   After all, there has been the question raised each summer about football’s future, while most of the time we get transfer tales and questions of who is going to win the league this time around.

Actually most publications have stopped asking the last question,, since it is by and large taken that the answer is Manchester City, given that they have used their phenomenal wealth to buy a multitude of players and set themselves up alongside an array of feeder clubs owned by the same people who own Manchester City.   

Worse, this summer Uefa gave up all real attempts at regularising football by agreeing that clubs under the same ownership can play against each other in European competitions this coming season.

Thus Leipzig can play Salzburg; Manchester City can play Girona; Manchester United can play Nice.  

But there is a fraction of light at the end of the proverbial tunnel for although it has taken years to get to the point, at last the Guardian raises the issue concerning “how football has got itself into a position where so many traditional clubs are in such dire financial straits that they think being taken over by a superclub is the only solution. Football is by far the most popular game in the world; what does that say about Uefa’s regulation that, with all the money there is sloshing about the game, so many are facing ruin?”

The problem is that is only the question, and having asked it, it is most likely that other outlets won’t take up the point, or if they do, will say it is all right really since special measures are in place to ensure fair play.

As to why this is happening as it is, this is because once Manchester City got away with setting up the City Group, it was inevitable that we would see a growing influence of the City Group over those always ready-to-oblige organisations, Fifa and Uefa

Furthermore, having tested the water vis a vis the Court of Arbitration in Sport,  in 2020, Manchester City knew that was a turning point, and sailed ahead regardless of all other regulation  For it was at that moment that the Court overruled Uefa’s ban on Manchester City for serious breaches of the Financial Fair Play rules between 2012 and 2016, not on the ground that the club had done nothing wrong, but on the grounds that Uefa were too late in presenting the matter to the court.

Now that was an extraordinary thing to happen: how could a body as huge as Uefa and with the resources of Uefa, simply not get its act together in time?  So the finding – one of the most bizarre in the history of football – was that Manchester City failed “to cooperate with Uefa” but Uefa had gone beyond the time limit for bringing the appeal.

It would be misleading to say that why Uefa allowed this to happen has been debated ever since – hardly anyone has taken it up.  In fact the media just seems to have taken that ruling to mean Man City can do anything they like, and a slippery slope was revealed.

And so now we have the absurd spectacle of Uefa granting dispensation to clubs who at least partially share ownership (Leipzig and Salzburg; Manchester City and Girona; Manchester United and Nice) to compete in the same competition.

It is quite obvious that a game between any of those pairings is not going to be a full-on match, just as it is clear that in the coming months and years more and more pairings of this nature will arise.

And of course that won’t just be worries about what happens when two linked teams play each other, for we will also now have to face the potential shenanigans with financial fair play and profit and sustainability regulations being manipulated to the benefit of the groups.

We have previously mentioned, Savinho who was signed by the City Group club  Troyes in 2023 and then loaned to the City Group club Girona for a season before this summer being sold to the (obviously City Group club)  Manchester City. 

How can anybody even begin to set a fair value for that transfer?   Of course that won’t happen and thus there is no way to ensure that one club is not overpaying to help out a group member or that that another group member is not giving yet another group member a cheap deal that would not be available to an outsider?

It’s a mess and Uefa have allowed it to develop after they kowtowed over the issue of Manchester City in the Court of Arbitration and Sport.

And if it were the only problem facing football that would be bad enough, but we haven’t even dug into the FA, Uefa, Fifan and PGMO.   It really is a bit of a shambles.  But then, that’s football.