Two very interesting pieces of news came out of UEFA’s headquarters today. The first of which was the unanimous approval of “The UEFA Club Licensing and Financial Fair Play Regulations,” which was backed by every stakeholder in European football. What this means is that - after the three year phased implementation - clubs wishing to compete in UEFA European competition must be able to meet the following conditions:
- Break-even requirement - clubs must not spend more than they generate over a period of time
- No overdues payable during the season - towards other clubs, employees and/or social/tax authorities
- Provision of future financial information - to ensure clubs can meet their future obligations
It’s worth noting that there will be no limit on how much debt a club can have, although the resulting interest payments will be included and must be covered by the clubs income. So the £716m debt that Manchester United find themselves with will be fine, but the interest payments will go against them, bearing in mind that only the £80m transfer fee for Cristiano Ronaldo saved them from making a loss last season - the eventual profit was just £6.4m. It also spells trouble for teams like Manchester City, who have recouped hardly any of the £170m that they spent on new talent over the past year. In fact, a lot of clubs need to sharpen up financially, after it was reported that over half of UEFA’s 732 licensed clubs operate annually at a loss.
Any clubs not adhering to these rules will not be eligible to compete in any of UEFA’s competitions. A great idea in my opinion.
Second up was the announcement that there will be a further two years of experimenting with additional assistant referees (silly name to start with) behind each goal, starting with next seasons Champions League and Euro 2012 qualifiers. Now I believe - and most managers would agree with me - that this has already been experimented with enough and the conclusion is that it offers nothing. The AAR’s missed a number of key incidents in and around the penalty area during last seasons Europa League, the exact reason why they are there in the first place. I believe they are only being used to stall the call for video/goal line technology, as FIFA president Sepp Blatter hides nothing in his opposal to the calls. The amount of sports that now contain the use of video technology, how is it not that the biggest sport in the world refuses to include something that would in no doubt help the game. When at Fulham Chris Coleman had a monitor in the dugout that could review an incident from a number of angles just 30 seconds after it had happened. I agree that a few things would need ironing out, but come on Blatter, it can’t be that hard.
AAR’s = silly name and a poor idea.
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