Money! Everyone loves money. Small pieces of paper that skyrocket in value depending on what they have printed on them and having lots of 0s on your bank statement, what's not to love?
Football, now football really loves money. Football is to money like Jesus is to Christians and Lynx is to teenage boys, the thing.
Except, except money is undergoing a bit of a rebrand in football. It is a dirty word, one to be loathed, detested, despised says walking, living, breathing, shrugging French strereotype and failed Blatter challenger Michel Platini.
Michel wants to balance up football, to make clubs live within their means and cut their cloth accordingly - leaving the powers that currently be, be the powers that be forevermore with their already paid-for, cash mountain generating massive stadiums and even larger reputations but unintended consequences and all that.
But poor old Michel is finding the love of dough is rather hard to overcome with football bigwigs (probably) literally being dragged kicking and screaming and greasily sliding to the Financial Fair Play table.
But yet, hurrah, results! Arab embassiesManchester City and Paris St-Germain being fined - the equivalent of stealing from my Kilner jar of pennies but a start nonetheless.
But oh no, hang on, where is this cash going to go? To help grassroots football? To subsidise matchday tickets? To readdress the balance between the haves and have nots of domestic football?
Nope, it is going into a great big massive pot to be distributed out among last year's Champions League and Europa League entrants, apparently.
That's right, the European Club Association has decided the £50m pot would best off be split among themselves - basically the same decision a conference of toddlers would make when deciding what to do with a box of Jelly Babies and Skittles.
So, the likes of Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea (as well as Wigan, Hull and Swansea) will receive a slice of around £212,000 to immediately piss away on paying Falcao for one set of weekdays. Glorious.
It is like making a really amazing cream cake and then screwing it all up right at the very end after being forced to substitute fresh cream for sour cream but still keeping the jam.
Some sense appears to reign back here in fair and honest Blighty with QPR's potential £40m FFP fine which would go to charity "rather than the other clubs under an agreement with the Premier League over its solidarity payments" though no word yet if the Premier League intends to apply for charity status in the near future.
The whole problem seems to be different bodies having jurisdictions over their own respective areas whether it be the Premier League, the Football League, UEFA and the ECA with ad-hoc compromises being formulated under the guise of having a 'flexible' system which most certainly wasn't thought up on the hoof and rushed through.
A laudable idea that doesn't quite work in practice, much like Euro 2016 expect for the laudable bit.
No comments:
Post a Comment