- Some clubs just threaten others; Arsenal find new brilliance within
- A move toward a new style of club financing and a fair approach to football
By Tony Attwood
In England there tends to be a view that suggests that football happens in England, and we sort out the rules. Other countries play the game but, well, they are not really up to controlling how things work.
Which is why the statement from the Uefa Financial Control Board concerning the mis-doings of Paris St Germain have not really made the headlines in much of the English press. And that is a shame since the report says, “This is not a minor compliance issue. This is an allegation of systematic, multi-year financial misconduct involving state-linked channels, false accounting, and the active involvement of league officials who were supposed to oversee the competition.”
The official goes on to note that, “The documents suggest that domestic matches were postponed not only for sporting reasons, but as part of a broader pattern that protected the club’s ability to compete in Europe while masking the true cost of its operations.”
That is of course a very, very serious allegation. But it gets worse since “Rival clubs have already contacted us demanding that titles and Champions League places from the last decade be reviewed. They believe they were competing against a club that was not operating under the same rules.”
So as we can see things are starting to escalate, although you won’t read much about it in the UK press. But the official making the statement then adds, “What makes this particularly serious is the claim that internal compliance files and communications were deliberately suppressed for years. The fact that these materials were ultimately handed over by a former player’s legal team shows how difficult it was to get to the truth through normal channels.”
So we are being told this is not a routine case, but a significant matter that will take months to resolve. If found guilty, PSG with their untold billions of dollars in reserve will not face the normal fines imposed on clubs, but rather could be in line for anything from a deduction of points to the exclusion from Europe in future years.
Now all this has been carefully ignored by most of the UK media,where we have just been looking at ManC. But the fact is that punishments handed out to PSG will be a marker – a guidance as to what can happen to ManC in the months to come.
The point here is that PSG and Manc are owned by Gulf states, and have been accused of breaking Uefa’s financial fair play rules in 2014. So while the English papers on focus on Manc, Europe is looking at ManC and PSG each breaking the rules.
According to Uefa from 2011 to 2013, PSG’s deficit was €218m and Manc’s €188m. Each club then signed a settlement agreement which limited to a financial penalty of €20m each, agreed restrictions on future spending and fines for any further contraventions.
But then in 2020, Manc were suspended for “overstating its sponsorship revenue”. This however was overturned on appeal (and Uefa have a lot of explaining to do over that one since the failure of that case was a total cock up by Uefa.)
PSG and ManC seemed to us to portray this as a victory, and appeared to make the two clubs think they could run rings round everyone, with no one else watching.
But the report from the independent commission on ManC from 2009/10 to 2017/18 showed the League accusing Manc of filing “misstated accounts”. And people started to note that PSG chair, Nasser-al-Khelaifi, and the Manc chair Khaldoon-al-Mubarak, each held very senior positions in their nations’ sovereign wealth fund!!!
Perhaps that was a coincidence. Anyway PSG, were fined €10m by Uefa in 2022 for not compliance and with €50m suspended. Meanwhile al-Khelaifi’s made a speech to the general assembly of European Football Clubs stressing the importance of good governance!!
However Der Spiegel then suggested that Infantino helped ensure that PSG and Man City avoided more sanctions in 2014 by wording the reports in a way that looked strong but actually were designed to help lessen ManC sanctions! Then the head of Uefa’s investigatory chamber, Brian Quinn, a former senior official at the Bank of England, resigned as he considered the statements too lenient.
So gradually we see the web is disentangling. Of course this blog can only report what is said in European papers, but it is perhaps sad that the English media are not digging as far as the Uefa Financial Control Board’s statement noted above: which added, “This is not a minor compliance issue. This is an allegation of systematic, multi-year financial misconduct involving state-linked channels, false accounting, and the active involvement of league officials who were supposed to oversee the competition.”
And it is a bit odd that our media don’t quite put it like this, muchy of the time.
