Manchester City are facing a possible Champions League ban as UEFA gets touh on Financial Fair Play.
Reports from the Football Leaks website has turned attention on the issue with claims that City have called in favours from sponsors to balance the books to comply with UEFA.
Four years ago City were fined £49m and had their squad number capped for breaking FFP rules but have continued to be among the biggest spenders in the game despite having much smaller ‘gate money’ and merchandising deals that the traditional giants of the game.
FFP was brought in to try and ensure that clubs remained viable with some sort of level playing field rather than allow clubs to overspend and ignore tax issues to pick up UEFA prize money.
Scottish football has refused to implement any sort of FFP with the SFA refusing to reveal the result of investigations into the 2011 UEFA licence issued to the old Rangers club despite having an overdue bill of £2.8m owed to HMRC.
Andrew Dickson, Dave King and Alastair Johnston were all involved in that licence application and are part of the management of the tribute act.
Today the Daily Mail reports:
Manchester City are facing a Champions League ban for alleged breaches of Financial Fair Play regulations.
The English champions were the subject of a series of stunning revelations made by the Football Leaks hackers last month, not least with regard to inflated sponsorship deals seemingly designed to beat UEFA’s FFP system.
Among the reports, based on documents seized by Football Leaks, was a claim that City’s holding company paid £59.5million of Etihad’s annual sponsorship deal, with only £8m coming from the airline.
On Monday, UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin confirmed that what he described as ‘a concrete case’ was being investigated.
City were fined £49m and had their squad capped for failing FFP rules four years ago. A senior UEFA source said that, if they are found guilty of financial cheating, ‘sporting sanctions’ would need to follow, not least because the ‘integrity of UEFA’ was at stake.
Following recent auditing UEFA have imposed extra FFP checks on Albania, Serbia and Kazakhstan after clubs in breach of FFP were nominated for UEFA competitions.
A number of fans on social media questioned the licence issued by the SFA to the Ibrox tribute act despite running up continued losses with their current Europa League place achieved on the back of losses of £14.7m from turnover of £32.7m.
Last week King told the Court of Session that several shareholding groups were involved in organised crime and money laundering.
