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Pav,

I'm not, I'm pointing out that what you are suggesting has ruined football has been about since its very inception, so why all of a sudden do you think football has been ruined? Were fans of other clubs saying the same about Chapmans Arsenal? Or when James Gibson was putting money into United and turned them from a yoyo club into the start of the Busby era?

The fact is those clubs got successful by the same means you are decrying now, not by a fanciful notion of fair play and doing things the right way, as it has never existed at the top echelons of football.

I saw my own club effectively run into the ground by an English owner after the changes in match day revenue altered our income, the club turned into a plc (too slowly compared to everyone else) and all of the debt shifted from those owners onto the club, culminating in us spiralling down the divisions and took 20 years to recover from. This is what happened when owners were told the right way to do it - they still circumvented the existing rules to set up the PLCs so they could load their back pockets whilst threatening the safety of the club as a going entity.

I've already said I am in favour of FFP, but it is pretty clear it is not very well understood what is permissable and what isn't. As a City fan, I should be over the moon with it as we can still spend on infrastructure and have already converted the money into assets on the P&L accounts through the purchase of players, we will be fine in the future.

What I do have an issue with is though how they have set it up and the limits they have put on it, particularly in the football league, and people that think it was put into place to stop something from happening that was happening anyway. The main purpose of FFP is to protect clubs and it has not gone far enough for my liking as clubs are still not protected and owners can still heap loans on them as they are not looking at the balance sheet.

The oligarchs have not ruined football anymore than it was before, they have made it harder for your own club and that is why you have a problem with them. Thats exactly how people felt about Arsenal in the 20s thoug..

The oligarchs have not ruined football anymore than it was before, they have made it harder for your own club and that is why you have a problem with them.

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Yup, they've ruined football

Ok, so I have to concede both yours and Darren's point that it's impossible to remove club bias from this debate, yes it sucks we haven't had that level of investment. That disappointment is tinged with relief though that we didn't do a Leeds. We have spent but we've had to pay the vast majority of it off over time, we're still servicing our debts while posting profits in our accounts.

I'm not going to speak about the levels of investment back in the day before I was around but surely it wasn't at the kind of levels we've seen from Chelsea, City, Monaco etc.?

"The main purpose of FFP is to protect clubs and it has not gone far enough for my liking as clubs are still not protected and owners can still heap loans on them as they are not looking at the balance sheet. "

Is that really true? If so i'll have to take back some of my previous comments and agree FFP is not fit for purpose!

"I'm not going to speak about the levels of investment back in the day before I was around but surely it wasn't at the kind of levels we've seen from Chelsea, City, Monaco etc.? "

At the time, some of them were actually far greater than anything that has happened at Chelsea, ourselves or Monaco, history has a way of forgetting things though and losing context - inflation makes it sound like nothing in comparison!

In terms of FFP, the original purpose and why it was started to be drafted was to protect clubs and try and stop the Portsmouths and Leeds from happening, also to ensure that clubs paid their debts to other clubs (which is why the first fines and punishments were for this last year). To achieve that, they put a limit on the amount of losses clubs can make each year on the Profit and Loss account, on a declining scale for each year of the monitoring period.

As they still want investment in the game, they allowed any investment in infrastructure and youth to be written off, as well as any player wages or amortisation from players who joined the club in or previous to 2010.

Due to amortisation, just looking at the P&L account, we are now fine as the players are all on there as assets. Although we spent 90 million in the summer for example, we were actually cost neutral on the P&L account due to players leaving or their contracts ending.

For me, it either doesn't go far enough in terms of protecting levels of debt clubs can incur in those areas that are exempt, and for the clubs that have not had that investment, they are now going to seriously struggle to raise their revenue enough to compete with those at the top.

I said a while back in the thread, the biggest thing for me they should have sorted is the fit and proper persons test. How on earth they can be implementing FFP in the football league, which most clubs are realising just isn't going to work and will get challenged next year in the courts I imagine, and yet still allow someone done in the courts in Italy to take over Leeds....god knows!

When Danny Fizsman put £50 million into arsenal to fund players like bergkamp and propel them to the title,when you consider £50 million was 2 1/2 times arsenals turnover at the time (City and Everton turned over £12 million that year to put the amount into perspective) is it really any different to what sheikh mansour and Abramovich have done?

or the Hicks and Gillette route of Liverpool with loans up to the hilt in the noughties.
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Yes, of course. Liverpool fans protested against Hicks and Gillett because they were investing far too much money in our club. Are you being serious?

The club (ie the fans) were effectively being asked to pay again for assets that had already been paid for, purely so that Hicks and Gillett could pay off the loans they’d taken out to buy the club. They were mortgaging the club against their own debts. In return, we were getting the square root of fk all....or in other words, .H & G’s financial “expertise”, which was so valuable to us it eventually put ownership of the club into the hands of a bank that didn’t want it.

You’re seriously comparing that to what Mansour and Abramovich have done? We were paying 45m a year in interest rates, in return for fk all. To put that into perspective, our record signing during their ownership was Torres, who cost less than half of what we were paying annually in interest rates to pay off H & G’s debts.

It’s not remotely comparable, they were bleeding the club dry, not investing in it.

When Danny Fizsman put £50 million into arsenal to fund players like bergkamp and propel them to the title,when you consider £50 million was 2 1/2 times arsenals turnover at the time (City and Everton turned over £12 million that year to put the amount into perspective) is it really any different to what sheikh mansour and Abramovich have done?

This^^^^^

It's what you call an inconvenient truth for some of the hypocrites on this site.

Good post paul

is it really any different to what sheikh mansour and Abramovich have done?
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It depends. Did Fiszman write off the investment, or did he get a return on it? What were the club paying in interest rates for the loan, in the meantime?

What proportion of turnover is Mansour's investment in City? Are you saying it's not much more than 2 and half times? What's he charging in interest? (Or, if he's transferred the debt into equity, what's he getting in dividend payments?)

Apologies if this information has already been provided in the thread, I haven't read all of it, but my point is that the critical factor is not whether somebody has invested in a club, but whether they've done so at the going business-rate, and under the normal business terms. (Abramovich, for example, has already written off most of the loans he made to Chelsea over the past decade, , and that's clearly not normal business practice)

What Mansour and Abramovich have done is not unprecedented...Walker did it at Blackburn, and there are no doubt other examples in history, but I'm not wholly convinced by these Arsenal examples.. I read on that Andersred fella's website that United got done for it (in the 1920's , I think it was)...but here's the thing....they got done for it.

Wessie,

I'm comparing it as a form of bad investment, my point is that that model is awful! It is still a form if raising funds which is why i mentioned it in that one post, can you now read all of my others where I say how bad that is and how against it I am....?

"but I'm not wholly convinced by these Arsenal examples.."

I'm not convinced by the Fiszman one. The Borris example is definite though.

"What proportion of turnover is Mansour's investment in City? Are you saying it's not much more than 2 and half times? What's he charging in interest? (Or, if he's transferred the debt into equity, what's he getting in dividend payments?)"

He has transferred it to equity and nothing yet. It is not a short term investment for him though, so that question really needs to be asked in another few years.

As far as I'm aware Roman hasn't written off the debt. They are interest free loans made to club that can be called in at any time.

I'm no fan of Roman or Mansour, naturally, but they're much better owners than the majority of club owners out there.

And FFP is supposed to be protecting clubs from what happened to Liverpool but it seems there are ways around that, so it's not doing its job, and all its doing is maintaining the status of the super rich.

I'm sort of apathetic towards it, if I'm honest, as I'm cynical as to what measures it's going to take for club's breaching the rules.

But people are moaning about rich owners buying clubs because the clubs are gaining success from someone else's money, but stopping a City or a Chelsea becoming an elite club in Europe is nowhere near as bad as allowing the biggest clubs in Europe to almost (or potentially) cease to exist.

FFP is supposed to be protecting clubs from what happened to Liverpool
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No it isn't.
FFP doesn't address leveraged buy-outs at all. It's designed to restrict investment to what can be
sustained by a normal (ish) business-model.

The point about Hicks and Gillett was that they were effectively investing fack all, so FFP wouldn't have stopped them. What they were doing was "promising" to invest after the cub had paid off the debts they incurred buying it, which to my mind is a scam, (and which plenty of United fans don't like, either), but it's perfectly legal, and FFP won't do anything to address it.

The Glazers bought United as a leveraged buy-out, and won't be affected by FFP...as I understand it, they're in favour of it. The main difference between the Glazer model and the H&G model is that United were raising enough revenues to pay the Glazers and continue investing in the team....but the fans are effectively still paying for the Glazers to buy it, and it's still perfectly legal.

I'm not even arguing that what Abramovich and Mansour have done is a bad thing. It's a perfectly valid argument that they've prevented the already-big clubs from monopolising it, which is what would have resulted from the formation of the Prermiership otherwise. And that was effectively forced by the big European clubs, whose revenues were outstripping the big English clubs.

Nor have City or Chelsea ever stopped Liverpool from winning the league (we never finished second to either of them). It's also raised the profile of the Premiership, and in Mansour's case, it's invested a lot of money in the environment around the football club, which you would have to be pretty churlish to resent.

All good things....the only thing I'm arguing is that investments like that are not 'normal' investments. In the business world, you don't see a lot of interest-free loans, and you don't see a lot of investments promising to pay you nothing back until 10 or 20 years' time, (when the business will....I promise, honestly.... be big enough to pay you back.
It just doesn't happen.

It's not possible to say that it's the same as earlier investments in Arsenal unless you know what the terms of those investments were, and nobody does. For all we know, they may have been very shrewd investments, and Fiszman and Borris might have made a huge profit on them.

As for FFP, time will tell if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but some attempt at restraint was inevitable, eventually. The culture of the USA is as Darwinian as it gets, but when it comes to sports, they regulate them heavily, in order to prevent clubs from buying success and blowing everybody else out of the water.

So if rampant capitalists like the Americans recognised the need to do it, it was only a matter of time before it came to football, following the huge influx of money since the formation of the Premiership. It may turn out to be the wrong measure, but some kind of measure was always going to come.

" The point about Hicks and Gillett was that they were effectively investing fack all, so FFP wouldn't have stopped them."

Which is exactly my issue with FFP Wessie had you read the rest of my posts.

Norris's investment was never designed to get money back. As for Mansours, we will have to wait and see, it is too early yet be has always maintained that is his aim, let's see in 10 years.

No I mean that it's supposed to protect clubs from going bust - so I keep hearing. But the fact that can still happen shows it's not doing enough to stop that, as is the case of H&G, because owners are still able to buy clubs in that way.

I know what you're saying, though, I guess the thing about football is that it isn't a normal business.

I have a sense of déjà by that we have had this conversation before...

Which is exactly my issue with FFP Wessie had you read the rest of my posts.
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Yes, fair enough, but I'm doing this in between a pretty busy workload, and I wasn't attacking your position in general, I was just debating some specific points. (I saw your point about the Leeds takeover, but the FA did try to stop it, and they were overruled legally. It would be equally hard to stop H & G, because what they did was nasty, but legal).

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Norris's investment was never designed to get money back.
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How do you know that? If it was designed to ensure domination on the pitch, it failed spectacularly, because they didn’t win the league for at least a decade after the investment.

Could that have been because they were busy paying back the stadium loan? I personally don’t know.

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I have a sense of déjà by that we have had this conversation before...
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A similar one, yes, but then somebody came in and got emotional about it, and I couldn’t be @rsed with that, so threw the towel in.

Wessie,

The Leeds one is interesting if it was a legal ruling, and slightly worrying (but unsurprising).

Regarding Norris, there's a chapter about him in a history of football finance book that I read a few years ago, very extravagant man. I think I remember, but don't quote me, he got done doing some under the table deal and so had to leave arsenal. He started massively investing after he got chapman and broke the rules around wages at the time to attract the best.

I'll have to read it again properly.

He started massively investing after he got chapman and broke the rules around wages at the time to attract the best.
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Yes, I know he got done eventually, but that was a long time after the stadium investment, I think. Don't know all that much about him, tbh, but if he got done, it's a cautionary tale

Indeed

Yes, yes they have.

A spectacular fail

Champions league squad restrictions...

Hmmm

Wonder who will be surplus to requirements