Q&A on Financial Fair Play and the mountain Man City have to climb
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By Nick Harris 8 October 2010 Uefa's Financial Fair Play regulations won't wipe out the tradition of benefactor involvement in football. They will merely lead to bans from European competition for clubs whose owners want to spend lots of their own money building up those clubs. Those who want to spend freely can do so, but be barred. It's a personal point of view that any owner should be allowed to spend their own cash on their own football club, with the proviso that the money is given freely and without conditions, not as loans but as equity, and provides some kind of guarantees of middle-term stability if they walk away. Maybe future funds for a set period could be held in escrow. On the one hand that still allows benefactor growth (see Blackburn under Jack Walker, Middlesbrough under Steve Gibson, Chelsea, Man City, Wolfsburg, Bayer Leverkusen, Hoffenheim, Zenit and on and on and on). On the other hand it allows some security in the the catastrophic event that the benefactor disappears for some reason, or dies. It's easy to argue that Portsmouth went pop, for example, because supposed benefactors turned out not to be. And a more dramatic case of meteoric growth then sudden collapse was seen at
Q&A on Financial Fair Play and the mountain Man City have to climb
Q&A on Financial Fair Play and the mountain…
Q&A on Financial Fair Play and the mountain Man City have to climb
By Nick Harris 8 October 2010 Uefa's Financial Fair Play regulations won't wipe out the tradition of benefactor involvement in football. They will merely lead to bans from European competition for clubs whose owners want to spend lots of their own money building up those clubs. Those who want to spend freely can do so, but be barred. It's a personal point of view that any owner should be allowed to spend their own cash on their own football club, with the proviso that the money is given freely and without conditions, not as loans but as equity, and provides some kind of guarantees of middle-term stability if they walk away. Maybe future funds for a set period could be held in escrow. On the one hand that still allows benefactor growth (see Blackburn under Jack Walker, Middlesbrough under Steve Gibson, Chelsea, Man City, Wolfsburg, Bayer Leverkusen, Hoffenheim, Zenit and on and on and on). On the other hand it allows some security in the the catastrophic event that the benefactor disappears for some reason, or dies. It's easy to argue that Portsmouth went pop, for example, because supposed benefactors turned out not to be. And a more dramatic case of meteoric growth then sudden collapse was seen at