A £197 million loss is hardly encouraging when you are in a battle against time to comply with financial fair play. There is little doubt that City can justifiably meet the requirements UEFA have laid out without imaginative accountancy, but can UEFA enforce their rules?
That will be City’s saving grace. This is a team embarking on the most worrying project in football’s history. If the club are successful in the years to come, they will render the game meaningless. What is the point of a game when all it takes to win is an unlimited reserve of finance? This is a team whose salaries for their last financial year outstripped their revenues alone. This is not sensible, this is complete madness. As Arsene Wenger calls it, financial doping.
But if they are successful, this devalues football entirely; reducing it solely to expenditure. For the sake of football, anyone else needs to win the Premier League title this, next and every year until the Sheikh leaves. Unlike Roman Abramovich at Chelsea, the City owners have little interest in the sport beyond what it can provide for them commercially. This is cynicism, using and abusing football for their own ends.
UEFA’s financial fair play rules dictate clubs must not make losses over a three year period. A grace period begins this year, where a £40 million loss is allowed between now and 2014. There is about as much chance of City complying with this as of Satan skating to work. But UEFA are now indicating that they will allow clubs to continue playing in Europe if they show they are moving towards self sufficiency. This looks like a get out of jail free clause for City.
It should not be though. As has been pointed out, City recently signed a sponsorship deal with Etihad which will increase their revenues substantially. Etihad are of course run by the half brother of the Man City owner – if this is not a conflict of interest then the earth is flat.
Such dealings should never be allowed, and City would have no chance of achieving such sponsorship without such personal links. It is wrong and must not be allowed by UEFA. It devalues everything great about the game. Players like Samir Nasri and Emmanuel Adebayor have been enticed to City by the money on offer. They have something to answer for themselves; as Arsenal’s owner put it earlier this season, they suffered a huge blow when Cesc Fabregas and Samir Nasri left this summer. One left for reasons not to do with money, and the other left for reasons entirely to do with money, he said.
That is what City have got and that is how they have got where they are. Offering all the riches the world has to offer to build a team which cannot be beaten if given a manager as good as Roberto Mancini, and then giving him the time he needs. But the City project is a travesty for football. All clubs face jealous onlookers when successful. Man Utd most prominently, but they at least generated their revenues through their own success. With United, though fans across the country may dislike them, there has always been a reluctant and grudging admiration and respect for what they have done. They earned it. City have earned nothing that they have got, and so there is no respect from the football world; only scorn. And the sooner it is over, the better.
