by tmesis »
29 Aug 2021 16:54
Elm Park Kid Dirk Gently tidus_mi2 This is the conclusion I come to with FFP.
3) So yeah, allow owners to bankroll a club as long as the direct costs are against the owner, as long as they keep the expenditure against the club at an acceptable level and can show the club isn't going to crash and burn if they walk away, any investment should be allowed.
Just as long as item 3) means that they put the money into the club with no strings attached - i.e. they don't convert it into share or don't add it onto the club as debt, soft or hard. Otherwise all they're doing is storing up problems for later owners - and potentially making the club unsaleable. They'd also need to setup a bond or similar to guarantee the same level of payments for the duration of any contracts - otherwise you have a potential Gretna on your hands.
What's to stop them taking money back out of the club? They could do this in a million different ways: dividends, paying themselves/family large salaries, free sponsorship to their own companies, moving assets such as stadiums/training grounds out of the club etc. There's no way really that the EFL could monitor and stop them all.
It seems to me that a lot of people have this misconception that there is a clear/strong divide between the club and the owners. There isn't really - the Dai's own RFC the same way that someone might own an ice cream van. You can take the strongest, most financially stable club in the world and completely bankrupt it in a few days if you want to. The same way that you can take a profitable, brand new ice cream van and set it on fire.
I believe there are some laws against that kind of thing, but in any case, it makes it more difficult. Anything that can be done to stop owners loading clubs with debt in a promotion gamble should be stopped.
The tricky part is how you deal with clubs getting in debt through relegation, specifically from the premier league. Maybe parachute payments should only be conditional on reducing the wage bill. If a club gambles on an instant return, they get nothing in the event of failure.
FFP isn't about keeping the big clubs big. It's an agreement between owners that they won't engage in some kind of expensive arms race against each other where they need to each pile in more and more money to keep up.
I'm sure internationally it was about stopping oil billionaires outspending the previous big spenders. Unfortunately, while they owners think overspending should be curbed, they all seem to think their overspending is fine, and you get almost useless FFP rules like in the championship.
The biggest problem is that the rules punish clubs when they are already massively in trouble, and do little to stop clubs getting into trouble in the first place.