FFP

[robleflaneur]

Count Bin Face is right - Croissants are too expensive - doesn't mean I think he should be mayor of London

Croissants from a boulangerie are about €1.20 here. How much are they in Lahndahn?

At the work cafe they’re the same-ish price but clearly mass produced at a factory somewhere and obviously not as rich in butter or as fluffy as the real deal. Also if you get them about 10 mins after arrival they’re already off and crispy.

All of these issues are the same in London except they cost about five quid.

75p in Lidl and brilliant.

[Percy McCarthy]

BREAKING: However, it’s expected a separate proposal from Aston Villa to increase the amount of money clubs can lose under PSR rules over a three-year period from £105m to £135m will get the go-ahead.

- talkSPORT sources understand

Doesn't really make sense to me but... okay.

The owners want to push to the limit of allowable losses, that puts the limit up £30m. Excellent news if true.

[cdbearsfan]

Yeah I understand it, I just don't get the logic behind it. Sure, inflation means that you spend more money, but it should also increase your income, too. So no real reason to increase the allowable nett total.

As you say, could be good for us and I'm not moaning about it. Just curious as to the justification behind it.

[Percy McCarthy]

Yeah I understand it, I just don't get the logic behind it. Sure, inflation means that you spend more money, but it should also increase your income, too. So no real reason to increase the allowable nett total.

As you say, could be good for us and I'm not moaning about it. Just curious as to the justification behind it.

Ah, gotcha. To be honest, the only thing that ever matters to me are the three words in your post that say ‘good for us’. Selfish I know.

[jwarry]

Very good article from Mathew Syed in The Times today

Hypocritical City’s only motive was sportswashing but league cheered them in

Panicking powerbrokers now realise the scale of their error – unless these cuckoo owners are expelled from the nest, English football’s whole ecosystem faces collapse
Did they suppose the document would never leak? Did they not count on the brilliant investigative reporters at Times Sport, the best in the business? Did they hope that their perversion of the words of John Stuart Mill, in his wonderful tome On Liberty, would never see the light of day? Or do they no longer care about how they look, knowing that a proportion of Manchester City fans will take to social media to defend the indefensible, turning tribal allegiance into an advanced form of cognitive dissonance?
“The tyranny of the majority” is the breathtaking claim of City. They argue that their freedom to make money has been limited by the Premier League’s rules on sponsorship deals, which forbid related companies (such as Etihad Airways sponsoring a team backed by Abu Dhabi) from offering cash above the commercial rate determined by an independent assessor. They say they are being persecuted, held back by a cartel of legacy clubs that want to monopolise success at their expense.
I am guessing that all fans will see through this comedy gold. City have won the past four Premier League titles and more than 57 per cent of the available domestic trophies over the past seven years. According to my former colleague Tony Evans, this makes them the most dominant side in top-flight history: more dominant than Liverpool in the Seventies and Eighties (41 per cent), more dominant than Manchester United in the Nineties (33 per cent).
Indeed, they are almost as dominant as the emirate of Abu Dhabi, which understands the concept of tyranny quite well having engaged in human rights abuses of a kind that led Amnesty International to question its treatment of immigrant workers and to condemn the arbitrary detention of 26 prisoners of conscience.

But dominance is, as Einstein might have said, a relative term. City want more money than they have at present, more dominance than they enjoy now, more freedom to spend on players (their bench is worth more than the first teams of most of their rivals) so that they can win, what, 40 league titles in a row? That would indeed turn the Premier League from what many regard as a fairly enjoyable competition into a tyranny of the minority.

And this is why the story revealed by my colleague Matt Lawton will cause the scales to fall from the eyes of all but the most biased of observers. The motive of City’s owners is not principally about football, the Premier League or, indeed, Manchester. As many warned from the outset, this was always a scheme of sportswashing, a strategy of furthering the interests of a microstate in the Middle East. It is in effect leveraging the soft power of football, its cultural cachet, to launder its reputation. This is why it is furious about quaint rules on spending limits thwarting the kind of power that, back home, is untrammelled.

And let us be clear about what all this means. An emirate, whose government is autocratic and therefore not subject to the full rule of law, is paying for a squad of eye-wateringly expensive lawyers to pursue a case in British courts that directly violates British interests. For whatever one thinks about what the Premier League has become, there is no doubt that its success has benefited the UK, not just in terms of the estimated contribution to the economy of £8billion in 2021-22, but also through a tax contribution of £4.2billion and thousands of jobs.

Yet what would happen if the spending taps were allowed to be turned full tilt by removing restraints related to “associated partners”? That’s right: what remains of competitive balance would be destroyed, decimating the league’s prestige and appeal.

Remember a few years ago when leaked emails showed that Khaldoon al-Mubarak, the City chairman, “would rather spend 30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue them for the next ten years”. Isn’t it funny that such people love the rule of law abroad — seeing it as a vehicle for outspending counterparties on expensive litigation — almost as much as they fear it at home? It’s as though City have ditched any pretence to care about anything except the geopolitical interests of their owners. What’s certain is that the Premier League can no longer cope with multiple City lawsuits and has had to hire outside help. In this case, as in so many others, the rule of law is morphing into something quite different: the rule of lawyers.

In some ways you almost feel like saying to football’s now panicking powerbrokers: it serves you right. These people welcomed Roman Abramovich, then stood wide-eyed while state actors entered the game too. They surely cannot be too surprised that the logical endpoint for this greed and connivance is that the blue-ribband event of English football is now fighting for its survival. When you sup with Mephistopheles, you can’t complain when the old fella returns to claim his side of the bargain.

But the dominant sense today is the shameless hypocrisy of the owners of City. They said that they were investing in City because they cared about regenerating the area. They now say that unless they get their own way, they are likely to stop community funding. They said that the commercial deals were within the rules; they now say that the rules are illegal. They said that competitive balance was important for English football; they now want to destroy it. They said they were happy with the democratic ethos of Premier League decision-making; now they hilariously say it’s oppressive.
I suspect at least some City fans are uncomfortable with this brazenness and may even be belatedly reassessing the true motives of the club’s owners. What’s now clear is that cuckoos have been let into the Premier League nest. Unless they are properly confronted or ejected, they could now threaten the whole ecosystem of English football.

[lovejoy]

Yeah I understand it, I just don't get the logic behind it. Sure, inflation means that you spend more money, but it should also increase your income, too. So no real reason to increase the allowable nett total.

As you say, could be good for us and I'm not moaning about it. Just curious as to the justification behind it.

But if you are loss making the absolute value of your costs are higher so, assuming inflation is the same on costs and income, your losses will increase.

[Baldy]

Thanks jwarry, great article.

Man City*

[Beard82]

I don't see any way out of this.  It suggests that whatever sanctions Man City faced were significant enough to cause great concern at the club.  So we're kind of at the brink.

I don't see how the PL and Man City both survive in the medium term.  Surely it's got to be one or the other.

Basically City are saying we're not abiding by the rules, or we'll sue you.  Which means the whole league a joke and the PL is basically mortally wounded.  Or Man City get thrown out.

Bloody typical, the Villa finally become good again, only for the English football to collapse.

[Percy McCarthy]

I don't see any way out of this.  It suggests that whatever sanctions Man City faced were significant enough to cause great concern at the club.  So we're kind of at the brink.

I don't see how the PL and Man City both survive in the medium term.  Surely it's got to be one or the other.

Basically City are saying we're not abiding by the rules, or we'll sue you.  Which means the whole league a joke and the PL is basically mortally wounded.  Or Man City get thrown out.

Bloody typical, the Villa finally become good again, only for the English football to collapse.

The lengths they’ll all go to to stop us.

[Dogtanian]

The problem is that I'm not sure anyone at the Premier League or FA have enough balls to say bollocks to them, see you later.

You are right, this is a fundamental attack on their right to govern football in England. They have to stand up and fight to the death...

Unfortunately they have a history of chasing the money like a horny hound following a bitch in heat.

[PaulWinch again]

The frustration is that these rules are in place, and all clubs were party to them being put in place. Citeh must fail and be severely punished for this or it’s basically fucked. It’s of the Premier League’s making, but they need to do their all to stop this now or it’ll ultimately collapse.

[Beard82]

Thats the problem, what will happen is there will be some agreement that means Man City are let off or effectively let off.

[PaulWinch again]

Also there’s a whole vast landscape of middle ground between thinking the current rules need updating a bit and opening this up to allow an autocratic state to throw completely uncontrolled wealth at their aims. Citeh need to be dealt with.

[PaulWinch again]

Thats the problem, what will happen is there will be some agreement that means Man City are let off or effectively let off.

Can’t be done though, or it’s essentially the same outcome and the rules are meaningless.

[chrisw1]

Surely they have to be kicked out, for good?  I know it's easier said than done, but otherwise the already hopelessly skewed league is doomed.