By Tony Attwood
- Yes we managed to celebrate last night. And oh how we celebrated!
- Arsenal have been poor all season.
When a club looks to buy a new player there are a number of issues that the club considers – issues that the simplistic “Arsenal need a new centre forward” type comments and articles tend not to consider.
Of course some such rules have been in place for a while and Arsenal have navigated these quite well, compared with many clubs that have found themselves with charges against them and points deductions. Others are still wriggling their way in and around the arguments – Leicester City being a case in point where they are now facing an appeal.
And next season it gets much more complicated. PSR regulations remain in place, and there are then new rules on top of that which we have touched on already: the Squad Cost Rules (SCR) and Top to Bottom Anchoring Rules (TBA).
Squad Cost Rules mean that spending on players can’t be more than 85% of revenue – although that revenue can include money made from sales of players.
Top to Bottom Anchoring Rules aim to ensure that the amount of spending of all clubs is linked to the expenditure of the wealthiest and least wealthy clubs to ensure there is some sort of ‘competitive balance’ in the league.
Current PSR rules remain in place too.
Now when I read all the tittle tattle about who Arsenal are going to sign, I don’t see any comment on how this proposed purchasing of players fits in with these rules. The commentaries are in fact written as if no rule changes are happening at all – and that is nonsense for the new rules will apply.
We might also note that we still don’t have any result from the Manchester City case which seems to suggest that the League and the club have reached a deadlock, probably meaning that Manchester City are again threatening to sue the League, and the rest of the League clubs are in discussion about resigning from the League en masse and forming a new league without ManC.
This would cause consternation in Uefa, which is dependent on the entry of English clubs into all of its competitions for the current level of interest and payments to be maintained. Yes of course there can be interest in games between one of the big three in Spain with one of the top two in Germany, but nothing like the interest generated when a Premier League club is involved.
In short if the clubs in the Premier League resigned and set up a new league without Manchester City in it, most of the other participants in Uefa’s competitions would not stand for the expulsion of PL clubs, no more than they would accept the competitions without Real Mardrid and Barcelona involved.
At the same time the owners of ManC are not used to anything other than issuing decrees and seeing them obeyed. They simply don’t understand how any group could stand up against them.
But a sign of the changing landscape came when Barcelona were told they had to pay a €500,000 fine when they were shocked to find they had actually lost yet another appeal (this one against a UEFA ruling), which accused Barcelona of “wilfully and consciously misreporting income in an attempt to adhere to European soccer’s financial regulations.”
In that particular case, Barcelona argued that money it received as part-payment for future broadcasts (some of which were really a long way in the future) can’t be counted as income for the current season. Barcelona took this money so they could make themselves look solvent. Uefa said that even by Barcelona standards that was pushing matters a bit too far – indeed in no business can you count money for future events as part of current income. Trouble is, Barce did, and have spent it.
Barcelona of course, rather like Manchester City, will never accept that they can be wrong and so they went to the Court of Arbitration in Sport who in the past have bent the knee to ManC, but this time even the CAS said this was a step too far and Barca were fined half a million euros just for the offence of “intentionally misreporting income with a major impact on its break-even results.” And they still have the task of making the accounts balance.
That doesn’t mean ManC feels they have to change their stance – they still seem to believe they can get away with anything, as the 115 breaches of the rules cases show. But it does suggest Uefa is upping its game a bit and isn’t going to let the clubs that are in effect financially bigger than the whole of Uefa, get away with it. Their fear is that if they do, all the other clubs will simply pack up and leave and form a new Uefa where financial rules are upheld.
Arsenal, fortunately, are not so stupid, and are keen to keep within existing and new rules, which means that whereas in the past, 97% of transfer rumours have been mindless gibberish, the remaining 3% might now also be unattainable because of Squad Cost Rules, Profit and Sustainability Rules and Top to Bottom Anchoring Rules.
But that leaves most of the media in chaos: if they can’t report fantasy transfers, what are they going to write and talk about?
