Game Over For Football Sugar Dadies + 60 Page Rept

The Times

Revealed: Michel Platini’s plan to end spending of Premier League giants

Matt Dickinson, Chief Sports Correspondent

Michel Platini’s plan to regulate football and curb its worst financial excesses has few outspoken opponents — after all, who wants to be seen to be championing outrageous transfer fees and spiralling player wages?

But as English clubs pore over the most significant changes to the game since the start of the Premier League era, they are approaching the new restrictions with ill-concealed concern.

The regulations, spelt out in a draft 60-page document www.timesonline.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00701/Club_Licensing_Disc_701933a.pdf seen by The Times, mark a massive cultural shift from a competition in which anything goes to one in which Roman Abramovich and Sheikh Mansour will be barred from splashing out on superstar players by Uefa inspectors.

No more Sheikh Mansour lavishing more than £400 million to secure a place in the Champions League unless he can square the outgoings with Manchester City’s income. No Mohamed Al Fayed propping up Fulham, or Randy Lerner at Aston Villa, unless their cash injections are beneath the limit — to become less than "10 million (£9 million) a year on average — that a sugar daddy can spend.

It is a world, according to Uefa, of “discipline and rationality”, and an end to inflated wages and £80 million transfers such as that which took Cristiano Ronaldo to Real Madrid. It will stop clubs such as Portsmouth going into administration by forcing them to live within their means. So far, so much common sense.

But while even the richest of club owners have talked of encouraging greater financial restraint, it is one thing to want to limit their losses — perhaps another to be told by Platini what they can, or rather cannot, spend in the quest for success.

English clubs are already voicing private concerns about whether regulation to this microscopic level will be possible. Their accountants and lawyers are scouring the complex rules for loopholes.

For example, Uefa has introduced safeguards to stop a rich owner “sponsoring” his team beyond a fair market price to inflate the club’s income but already some clubs are expressing doubts about how effectively this can be policed.

There are fair questions to be asked, too, about whether there will be undeserved victims such as Fulham or Wigan Athletic, where owners have been propping up their clubs to moderate levels without distorting the transfer market or the competition. Is break-even necessary for all or should those owners be allowed to indulge their interest?

Already the European Club Association (ECA), led by Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, has secured some concessions and continues to fight for more.

While eager not to be seen to be obstructing moves towards more moderation — particularly in the present financial climate — the Premier League has been defensive of those club benefactors who have helped to turn the competition into the most successful in the world.

“The idea of preventing what the likes of Dave Whelan, Jack Walker, Steve Gibson, Roman Abramovich and Sheikh Mansour have done to take their clubs on is not something that appeals to us,” a source said.

www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/article7078148.ece

Are UEFA under the impression that these people are 'sugar daddies' and putting in their own money?

The problem isn't that the Clubs have too much money and are spending it. It is that they have too little money, and are borrowing too much to keep up levels of expenditure they can't afford.

It doesn't matter whether these changes are actually made. If they expose the pretence that moneylenders are sugar daddies, and that money which will line the investors' pockets short term is really money being spent to line the Clubs' pockets long-term, then some good will come of it.

But I don't hold out much hope of that just yet, judging by the indulgent tone of this article.

They are not propping up the Clubs. The Clubs are propping up their share price.

But the share price will prove to be yet another fiction if there are no buyers. And if every Club is borrowing frenziedly, because it can only 'compete' by spending money it hasn't got, how long before the money runs out?

And what happens then?

If borrowing is no longer an option, unrealistic wages will be no longer an option. The top players will leave, and the game's audience will have to decide whether it wants to watch vastly inferior teams with enormous debts, at inflated prices.

Surely it is already happening. At Fulham, where the enormous sums Fayed has spent have taken Fulham nowhere near the level where they could compete with Liverpool, United and Real Madrid, the Clubs he named when Fulham were one of the biggest spenders.

And QPR? Struggling to compete in the lower reaches of the second tier, despite the supposed advantage of having several millionaires and two billionaires over the last three or four years.

Spending borrowed money has a profound psychological effect. It enables those without talent to live as if they have it. But there is a cost. And the cost is all the harder to live with if you never had any talent in the first place.

That is what is really wrong with all this. By breaking the link between talent, success and profits, and by abandoning achievement in favour of 'ambition' (saying you will be successful when you aren't), the prospect that the bubble of will burst is potentially quite terrifying.

But as Alan Sugar discovered years ago, the chairman, shareholders and investors will go on riding this particular roller coaster until there's nothing left.

Why should they care? It isn't their money.

Or even professional status.

This isn't professional. The Clubs aren't businesses, they're incapable of making a profit.

And I wonder whether any of it is really football.