Everyone has their own tricks in their villages. For Manchester City, this may be a hack.
Editor’s note: This article comes from the emperor who understands the ball, the author Ned and Yu Ze, the original title “ Behind the crazy buying and buying, which nerve does Manchester City step on in UEFA? “, authorized to forward.
At 2:30 am on February 15, 2020, Beijing time, when most Chinese fans were still sleeping, European football exploded a thunder. UEFA officially announced: “Manchester City has been suspended for two seasons for violating the Financial Fairness Act.
What exactly is a fiscal fairness bill? How did all this happen? This article is a collaboration between Ned and Yu Ze to reveal the things behind the Manchester City ban.
[What is the fiscal fairness bill, can I eat it? 】
Sir Allen Suge, who sold Tottenham to Levi in 2001, once said, “Owning a football club is like drinking plum juice and eating figs.” He feels that running a club is like a bottomless pit. Rijin fights for gold while spending money, and in the end there is no money left.
As a Premier League upstream team, Tottenham will also express such emotions. The survival status of other clubs can be imagined. A 2008 report showed that only eight of the top leagues of the 53 member states of UEFA have achieved profit, and more than 50% of the teams have been losing money for many years. Many clubs rely on their bosses to burn their money, but this rice bug life will have two directions.
A. The boss continued to burn, and an ATM was standing behind the team.
B. Boss has enough to burn the fire. The withdrawal of capital, the team followed.
(Picture) An Ying’s former glory
In 2008, more than 660 top league clubs in Europe lost a total of 600 million euros. An 郅, Malaga and other team owners have successively started the “run to run really exciting” model, and more and more clubs are on the verge of bankruptcy protection. In order to make football leagues all over Europe move to a healthier business model, UEFA issued the Financial Fair Play (hereinafter referred to as FFP) in September 2009, and it was officially implemented in 2011.
FFP manual spreads more than 90 pages, the core of which is balance of payments. The bill stipulates that for the three seasons starting from the 2011-12 season, the cumulative loss per club shall not exceed 45 million euros. For the next three years, starting from the 2015-16 season, the upper limit of losses will be reduced to 30 million euros.
The reason why the loss of a single season is not examined is that the profit level of a single season may be affected by many factors. So FFP left the club three years to adjust itself, “the cumulative loss in three seasons does not exceed 30 million euros”.
In short, the original intention of FFP is not to limit your spending, but to prevent you from going bankrupt. After running FFP, it did work well. By 2018, 29 of the top 54 European leagues will be profitable, with a total profit of 600 million euros. From a loss of 600 million to a profit of 600 million, isn’t it? All clubs should twist the Yangko song for three days and three nights to express their inner joy?
In fact, it really isn’t.
Some bosses never even think about running away after spending money, they just want to invest in it. Even after the FFP was introduced, everyone didn’t stop burning money, so in 2014 UEFA turned over its old accounts for the first time-eight teams including Greater Paris and Manchester City were fined 49 million pounds for violating the fiscal fairness bill.
(Picture) After the implementation of the FFP Act, European clubs as a whole turned a profit
[Every village has its own tricks in every village]
For clubs that violate FFP, UEFA’s penalties include: warnings, fines, deduction of league points, deduction of revenue from European matches, prohibition of new players registered in the European War, restriction of the number of players registered in the European War, cancellation of matches Qualifications, prohibitionsStop participating in future European wars.
Warnings and fines are nothing to local tyrant clubs, but deducting league points, deducting earnings from European competitions, and banning participation in future European wars can hurt your mind. Therefore, in order to meet the FFP review, the methods used by everyone to find a hole in these years can be described as various.
First, operate legally and make use of exemptions. Because the FFP Act stipulates that expenditures on infrastructure construction, youth training, etc. will not be counted as operating losses. For example, Manchester City lost a total of 150 million pounds in the 2011-2012 season and 2012-2013 season, but they spent more than 100 million pounds on building a training base, so they are not in the scope of the FFP review, and Manchester City reluctantly passed this. The first audit of UEFA. For example, related investments of youth teams such as the signing of young players under 18 and salary are also outside the FFP limit, and the sale of young players can also be counted as the team’s income. As a result, Chelsea has been engaged in the “taxi business” in recent years. The sale of the demon has earned a transfer fee of 193.6 million pounds, which can be used to pay the bill.
Second, the amortization of transfer fees is calculated by averaging the expenditure of one buyer over many years. For example, Juventus spent 100 million years to buy Cristiano Ronaldo, but this money will not be included in the team’s 2018 book at one time, but from the 2018-19 season to the 2021-22 season. The euro is counted as expenditure, which is equivalent to buying an arm this year and a leg next year.
Third, lease + buyout to extend the allocation period. Make a lease for 2 years + you must buy out unconditionally after expiration, so that the transfer fee will become a lease fee + a buyout fee, and the assessment period reflected in the FFP has changed from 5 years to 7 years. However, this method took less than two years and was blocked by UEFA officials. Now, the operation of leasing + forced buyout is always regarded as a direct transfer in the FFP audit.
Fourth, lease + “conditional buyout”, the effect is even worse. When Paris signed with Mbappe in the summer of 2017, there was a provision in the contract: As long as Paris Saint-Germain successfully relegated to the French League in the 2017-18 season, they must buy out Mbappe for 180 million euros. Yes, you read that right, not winning is relegation. Everyone knows that this is a matter of nails and nails, but “Great Paris Relegation” is not a 100% possibility in theory, so the buyout fee will not be amortized in the financial report until the 2018-19 season.
Fifth, buy yourself,Never break the law. The pinnacle of triggering this operation was Neymar. At the time of the transfer, the Qatar government handed Neymar 222 million euros as the “2022 World Cup image ambassador sponsorship fee.” Then Neymar took this money to Barcelona to buy himself Contract, then joined Grand Paris as a “free agent” …
In short, the FFP bill has forced several local clubs into mathematicians. However, these riotous operations in the transfer area will be included in UEFA’s blacklist as soon as they are played once, so everyone has started working on sponsors in recent years.
So, some “my grandma knew that there was a problem” contracts, and related party transactions that exceeded fair value … were put on the table again.
[Man City, still planted in sponsorship fees]
Maybe many fans will have questions, hasn’t Manchester City been fined by UEFA for financial fairness before? In the past few years, they have obviously subsided a lot. Why does Greater Paris look so much bigger than them? Is it still Manchester City?
The first question. Manchester City were last fined by UEFA together with Greater Paris to reduce the number of Champions League registrations due to suspicions that their sponsorship amount exceeds the fair value. What is fair value? It is the market value under fair trade conditions. In order to collude with the buyer, you sell 2,000 yuan for 100 yuan. No matter in which country in the world, you will definitely fail to pass the financial report audit.
So, UEFA feels that the sponsorship contracts provided by Etihad Airways and Qatar Tourism from the Middle East to Manchester City and Greater Paris, two clubs behind Middle East Capital, exceed the fair value. For example, they believe that the price of Etihad Airways titled Manchester City should not be higher than Allianz titled Bayern, because Bayern has a stronger brand effect locally. For another example, they think that the sponsorship of the Qatar Tourism Authority to Greater Paris should not be higher than similar endorsements of Real Madrid, because Real Madrid obviously has a stronger overall influence in the world.
But Manchester City and Greater Paris are arguing hard. They say that this kind of sponsorship is unique and there is no way to make a simple comparison. Neither the endorsements of the stadium nor the advertisements on the chest are clearly marked goods on the shelves. How much can be sold is a complicated result involving influence, affinity and negotiation ability. We are a club controlled by the Middle East capital itself, which is naturally more popular in the Middle East market. In short, only individual cases can be analyzed individually.
Entanglement between the two sidesAfter a long time, in the end each step back to sign a settlement agreement, UEFA issued a ticket, Manchester City and Greater Paris were unwilling but accepted.
Here is the second question. This time only Manchester City was “revised”, mainly because many of their internal emails were leaked by hackers.
The super hacker is Lu Pito and is currently being held in a prison in Lisbon on 147 criminal charges. He obtained a series of internal emails and materials of multinational companies through hacking, and then distributed it to major media and documentary directors. Among them, a lot of internal emails from Manchester City Club were sent to Der Spiegel.
One of the emails became the key to UEFA’s investigation. The sender was Manchester City’s then CFO Chumiras, and the recipients were Club CEO Soriano and board member Simon Pierce. Zumiras submitted an invoice from the club for the sponsorship fee, which showed that Etihad Airways sponsored £ 65 million in the 2013-14 season, but actually only paid £ 8 million. Sur’s Abu Dhabi United Group produced it themselves. In the 2015-16 season, with a total sponsorship fee of 67.5 million pounds, they still only made 8 million, and the remaining 59.5 million came from Abu Dhabi United Group.
In another email, when Simon Pierce sponsored Abbarra, he promised the other party to pay only 3 million for the 15 million pound sponsorship fee reached, and the remaining 12 million “our boss will use a variety of different Channel funding to make up. ”
Before I just talked about fairness and unfairness. Now, with the help of hackers, it becomes “fake not fake”. The plot is more serious, and the funding gap has become larger.
To make matters worse, the email exposed by the hacker also showed Manchester City’s tough attitude towards UEFA. For example, a lawyer they hired wrote in an email: “Our President Mubarak has told Europe Football Federation Secretary-General Infantino, Manchester City will not accept any punishment, and will spend 30 million US dollars to find the 50 best lawyers in the world for ten years.
Therefore, the unreliable UEFA launched a comprehensive investigation of Manchester City. Manchester City publicly stated that “the hacking method cannot be used as evidence, these emails are fake”, and it was said that it was “not willing to cooperate” in the investigation.
This is the super ticket for banning the European War. Why not punish Greater Paris? Because hackers only exposedIt’s Manchester City …