UEFA Changing Angle Of Attack With Revised Fair Play Rules

With many clubs reeling from the financial fallout of the pandemic and competitive inequality growing despite existing fair play rules, UEFA will on Thursday unveil changes in its tactics for levelling European football's economic playing field. After months of discussions, UEFA is expected to adopt an overhaul of the Financial Fair Play (FFP) system introduced in 2010 to stop clubs piling up debts in their pursuit of trophies. The focus will change from requiring clubs to balance their books to curbing spending on salaries, transfer fees and agent commissions.

The change of approach could make clubs more attractive to potential investors by putting a fixed limit on costs, Raffaele Poli, head of the CIES soccer observatory in Neuchatel, told AFP.

"You can inject new money, but you mustn't burn it all in recruitment and salaries," he said.

"Even the big clubs are victims of this salary inflation, while feeding it."

In 12 years, FFP has persuaded many clubs to clean up their accounts, but its limitations have become clear.

Super-rich owners who are not interested in profits, led by state-held Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain, have found ways to inflate the income of their clubs.

On the other hand, as the Covid pandemic cost European football about seven billion euros over two seasons, FFP left poorer clubs with little room to manoeuvre.

To avoid a wave of bankruptcies, UEFA relaxed its deficit rules in 2020, and then announced an overhaul of FFP.

The plan combines strategies used by North American sports.

The biggest of those, the National Football League, has only 32 clubs, all in the United States, and negotiates with a single player union.

UEFA, on the other hand, has 55 member countries with well over 1,000