FFP

[martyn ellis]

Interesting conversation here:

[ChicagoLion]

By not punishing Chelsea the Premier League is complicit in this corruption.
So how can anyone believe that this corruption is not endemic and just an isolated incident.

[LeeS]

So he fine isn’t even paid by Chelsea. It comes out of the fund for Ukrainian victims. This just gets better and better.

[Mellin]

You have to be kidding.

[Chris Harte]

Our former Chief Exec seems to be reading the room well...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/articles/cy9g9nq9vxlo

[Grande Pablo]

It's conditioning us all to fine C115y a pittance & let them get on with it.  Utter bollocks.

[Percy McCarthy]

The thing is, the Premier League are the clubs. I find it incredible that the other 19 clubs think the fine is adequate punishment.

[Toronto Villa]

The thing is, the Premier League are the clubs. I find it incredible that the other 19 clubs think the fine is adequate punishment.

It’s likely more that the other billionaires don’t want any limitations to what they can spend and vote against rules that might deny them that opportunity in the future.

[Toronto Villa]

The additional shit thing about the corrupt nature of the Chelsea punishment is if they got a 10 point penalty, and that would have been lenient, it would pretty much clear us for the CL in at worst 5th place.

[dave.woodhall]

The thing is, the Premier League are the clubs. I find it incredible that the other 19 clubs think the fine is adequate punishment.

Press barons never let their newspapers run stories about other press barons.

[nick harper]

Matthew Syed calling it out as it is in The Times..

Chelsea should have their titles annulled and trophies confiscated. We already knew that their success under Roman Abramovich was funded by money dubiously gained from the Russian people. Now we know that they were cheating on an industrial scale, with secret payments to players, staff and intermediaries that totalled £47.5million between 2011-18 — a period in which they won two Premier League titles, two FA Cups, the Champions League and the Europa League.
Martyn Ziegler, the usually mild-mannered chief sports reporter of this parish, described the cheating as “jaw-dropping”. Perhaps I might go further: it was cynical, calculated and crucial to the club's success. I noticed that some Chelsea supporters latched on to the finding that the payments wouldn't have breached Profitability and Sustainability Rules. Er, it was the fact that Chelsea cheated while other clubs refused to do so that enabled the club to sign some of the most influential players of the era. Not least Eden Hazard, whom Manchester United turned down after his agent demanded an illicit bung.

Hazard is one of seven players Chelsea made illicit payments to sign. He scored 85 goals in 245 appearances for the club

But I suppose one may ask: why would Chelsea obey anything as quaint as rules, anyway? Abramovich, we may remember, made his fortune in the “aluminium wars” after the fall of the Soviet Union. I remember going to the High Court in 2012 to watch his trial with Boris Berezovsky in a case that revolved around who owed what to whom.
It was on day two, however, that the geopolitical significance of the dispute emerged, almost by accident. Talking about the auction of Sibneft, the oil producer through which Abramovich amassed his billions, Jonathan Sumption — acting for the Chelsea owner — admitted the process “was easy to rig and was in fact rigged”.

The High Court battle between Abramovich and Berezovsky, pictured, exposed the dubious origins of the former Chelsea owner’s wealth.
Over the next few days, we learnt the full, scarcely believable story: in return for the mineral wealth of Russia at a fraction of its true price, Abramovich and his fellow oligarchs handed President Yeltsin, then trailing in the polls, a $100million loan and access to private TV channels. The stitch-up worked: a handful of men emerged with staggering riches, Yeltsin triumphed in the 1996 election, and his successor — Vladimir Putin — came to power with the state operating as a fully-fledged kleptocracy.
Meanwhile, the Russian people came close to mass starvation. The economist Paul Gregory described the Sibneft deal as “the largest single heist in corporate history”.
This was the cash that bankrolled the success of Chelsea during an era that many fans continue to call “golden” but most of the rest of us regard as among the most shameful in British sport. It had wider implications too. By allowing dubious cash into the UK, this nation was giving a green light to the oligarchs (and their political overlords) to plunder more wealth from the Russian people, safe in the knowledge that it could be recycled in Mayfair and Knightsbridge. Abramovich was perhaps the highest-profile beneficiary of the “London laundromat”, a man whose reputation was “sportswashed” by ownership of Chelsea. Nothing was more influential in holding together the complex web of quid pro quos that sustained Putin in power.

Yet now we learn that it wasn't enough for Abramovich's club to win with dubiously gotten money; they also broke the rules in brazen and premeditated fashion. I can't help thinking of Bruce Buck, the highly paid club chairman and most shameless of useful idiots; a man who was forever assuring journalists that Abramovich was a wonderful bloke. He even wrote a newspaper article eulogising his boss's “passion for the game” and how Chelsea “engages in hundreds of community activities”. I almost choked on my cornflakes at this self-serving guff.
Where are you now, Bruce? Did you know about this endemic cheating? Or were you asleep at the wheel?

And what of Buck's chairmanship of the Premier League audit and remuneration committee between 2014 and 2021, a tenure during which he argued for a £5million retirement payout for Richard Scudamore, the former executive chairman? At the very least, this arrangement offered the potential for a conflict of interest. I mean, the man running an organisation in charge of policing wrongdoing received a salary whose size was based on the recommendation of a man whose club was involved in industrial-scale cheating.
The whole thing stinks. Not just the way the Premier League turned a blind eye to Abramovich's presence in the game, but also how they have compounded the sin with a pitifully inadequate sanction (they received a fine of £10.75million; an FA investigation is yet to report) while smaller clubs like Nottingham Forest and Everton get whacked with a points deduction for inadvertently breaching spending limits by a few quid. It's yet another case of one rule for the big clubs, another for everyone else.


It's almost comical that the Premier League attempted to justify the meagre punishment by saying that Chelsea's new owners “co-operated” with the investigation. The implication of this risible excuse is that clubs can engage in fraud to their heart's content so long as they transfer ownership afterwards. This is not natural justice; it's a cheat's charter.
Besides, if the Premier League wanted to avoid handing a points deduction to the new owners, why not cancel the historical titles won by Chelsea (and organise open-top bus parades for the real winners)? This would at least show that cheating has consequences.
I know that some may call this an “anti-Chelsea column” but that (perhaps deliberately) obscures the truth. The identity of the club is irrelevant. The scandal is the way a ruthless and manipulative businessman, in effect, laundered his money and reputation while being assisted by a cast list of useful idiots.

It is a profoundly shaming episode for the game and, indeed, for Chelsea fans who chanted Abramovich's name. It is also shaming for the Premier League, which, with this derisory sanction, has made a mockery of its own rules.

[Chap]

We need more of this.

[DC1874]

Spot on, my advice to Nas and Wes moving forwards is "F*ck the rules" and simply pay for endless legal challenges whilst they invest seriously in their own asset i.e. AVFC - if we get serious investment in what Unai is doing we will be a permanent fixture of the cabal come the end of the decade.

[ChicagoLion]

You would think that clubs will now use the lack of sanction against Chelsea as a precedent.

[Dave]

Spot on, my advice to Nas and Wes moving forwards is "F*ck the rules" and simply pay for endless legal challenges whilst they invest seriously in their own asset i.e. AVFC - if we get serious investment in what Unai is doing we will be a permanent fixture of the cabal come the end of the decade.

Doesn't that plan immediately fall apart when UEFA shrug their shoulders and say "fine, we'll give your spot in next seasons Champions League to the team that hasn't deliberately and openly broken the rules"?