It is painfully ironic that Michel Platini was the face of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations, passed in 2009.
The former UEFA president – who would preach: “I just want clubs to spend the money they have, not the money they don’t have” – resigned in disgrace after receiving under-the-table payments from his corrupt FIFA counterpart Sepp Blatter .
Platini eventually paid the price for his unfair accounting and the rules he fiercely supported have led to a series of punishments for some of Europe’s elite clubs.
Here are the most significant sanctions that UEFA has imposed on those who do not belong to its own board of directors.
Had Manchester City not enlisted the help of an extravagantly paid legal team, this entry might have been at the other end of this list. A shock wave ran through the foundations of European football when UEFA handed City a two-year Champions League ban and a €30m fine in February 2020.
However, City took the case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) and won on appeal. The €10m fine the club received was largely due to City’s “obstruction of investigations”, rather than offenses that CAS said were “unproven or time-barred”.
José Mourinho was not the only one who described the decision as “shameful”.
In the six transfer periods that preceded the summer of 2014, Zenit did not sell any player for more than one million euros. However, in that time, the Russian giant spent more than 140 million euros on players like Axel Witsel, Hulk and Salomon Rondon.
Unsurprisingly, Zenit was included in the batch of fines imposed by UEFA that summer.
Milan have been in the crosshairs of UEFA accountants for years. After ending a decade of waiting to win Serie A, the Rossoneri had their celebrations marred by a 15 million euro fine for failing to comply with the FFP in 2022.
However, UEFA only wanted €2m upfront and it’s not the worst punishment Milan have received.
Li Yonghong’s bizarrely brief stint as Milan’s owner exacerbated the club’s significant financial woes, forcing iron-fisted hedge fund Elliott Management to take control of the club in July 2018. At the end of his first season at the helm, Elliott had to swallow a one-year European ban.
After spending more than 100 million euros, Milan had qualified for the Europa League in 2019. The ban deprived the Rossoneri of up to 21 million euros in potential prize money and untold sums in lost sponsorships.
In recent years, Juventus’ accounts have been scrutinized more thoroughly than the team’s tactics. Juve were one of four Serie A clubs fined by UEFA in 2022, but faced much bigger financial problems the following season.
It’s probably for the best that UEFA’s FFP regulations didn’t come into force until the end of Massimo Moratti’s tenure at Inter. The son of the previous owner, Angelo Moratti, spent some 1.2 billion euros trying to repeat the golden age that the club lived with his father.
Moratti’s successor, Steven Zhang, has been forced to parsimony by modern currency restrictions, but still broke the rules in 2022.
José Mourinho has always been selective when choosing the facts. Praising Roma’s advance to the 2023 Europa League final spending just €9m, he said: “It’s like Jesus Christ came to Rome and went on a trip to the Vatican.”
What Mourinho failed to mention, however, was that the club had to make up for the 128 million euros wasted during his first season in the Italian capital. UEFA did not overlook the outlay.
In 2012, Platini stated: “Do you think people in Paris think about Financial Fair Play and PSG? Most people in Paris don’t even know there’s a club in Paris… It’s not London. This is France”.
Well, three years after Qatar Sports Investment took control of PSG, they did find out about UEFA’s financial regulations.
During the first six years that Sheikh Mansour owned Manchester City, the club spent more than 750 million euros on transfers, while earning back less than 30 million on average each summer.
In the first wave of FFP sanctions in 2014, City received the largest fine and limited budget for subsequent years.
It is always difficult to analyze one’s own actions, but it certainly helps when imposing punishments.
PSG President Nasser Al-Khelaifi is also the representative of the European Club Association (ECA) on the UEFA Executive Committee. Al-Khelaifi’s position in the governing body of European football has only increased after the failed coup by the clubs that wanted to form the European Super League in April 2021. PSG were not part of the unruly cabal from which he took notes UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin.
This did not stop UEFA from imposing on PSG in 2022 the largest fine in the history of the FFP. However, €65 million is a drop in the ocean for owners worth €441 billion. Conveniently, there has been no talk that the repeated breach of the rules by PSG will give rise to a sanction of any kind.
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