But you admit you're pissing all over it, right?
The thing that bugs me is that they make a rule and then a court can overturn it. Why not do that in every sport? Ferrari lose a race and say "we've got a car with a nuclear reactor in it, why can't we use it? we're gonna sue!" or an NFL team goes over the salary cap and sues because a salary cap isn't fair.
Sorry I've not been ignoring you but been busy with a potential client (which seems to have been successful) for a couple of days. I wish people would stop using emotive language like "pissing all over it". We aren't. The club have made it clear they intend to comply and this financial year will, I believe, be the year that we genuinely break even. That's the stated intention of FFP and it's in ours and UEFA's interest that we're seen to abide by the rules.
This year, I've already said, we've clearly been a bit clever in how we meet the break-even requirement in a way that avoids sanctions. But I don't believe we've done anything illegal or immoral but done two transactions that are a means to an end. As I've tried to explain, the sale of IP rights to related parties is something that we would have done anyway as a Cost Sharing Arrangement is the accepted standard for managing IP in multi-national companies. There's talk of Arsenal possibly setting up an MLS franchise and you can be assured they'll do a CSA if they do. But the value of these things have to be justified to the tax authorities and I'm sure they will have been valued very carefully.
This left a shortfall, mainly because of Mancini's sacking and the £30m payoff to him and his staff. Without that, we wouldn't have needed to sell the marketing rights but it was a straighforward way of raising money quickly. We've sold something we own that we aren't going to get revenue for. I'm surethe owners would have preferred not to do it but they had little choice if they were going to meet FFP, which is the object of the exercise. We could have funnelled money in the back door, via a convenient sponsorship or some other arrangement which never saw the light of day but we didn't. We did something that we had to declare in our accounts.
I'm sure we are one club that UEFA will have a good look at but will people accept everything is OK if they say it is?
To change the subject, I had a look at the NFL finances about a year ago and compared them to the PL. In 2012, the Dallas Cowboys had revenue equivalent to about £325m (which was about the same as United's in 2011). Both of them had the highest revenue in the respective leagues. The Cowboys were by far the biggest earners with the second highest being the Patriots at £245m. At the bottom of the NFL revenue league were the then Oakland Raiders, with £145m.
In contrast, the second highest PL revenues came from Arsenal with £256m and lowest earning PL club reported revenues of about £50m (compared to United's £330m). If we take out the Cowboys and United, to avoid distortion, the second highest earning PL club earned 3.3 times what the lowest earned. In the NFL it was just over half that.
In the PL, the Cowboys would have won something or come very close to it. Yet they didn't even win the NFC East division (they were third out of the four clubs). In the last 10 years, they've only gotten to the real play-offs (excluding the wild-card games) twice so it's clearly not just revenue alone that makes the difference but presumably the wage cap and the draft. We obviously can't reproduce the draft (slthough there are possibilities for limiting transfer spending) but we already know there's a high correlation between wage bills and success so levelling the playing field would have to involve some sort of salary restriction. UEFA already recommend a higher limit of 70% salaries to turnover so would that be fair? The PL's version is quite cute, involving a restriction on increases unless supported by increased commercial income (which they should have restricted to say 50%)
The other alternative is to levelling the playing field is to resume the revenue sharing agreement for match-day revenues. United & Arsenal pull in about £4m a game. If they had to give £1m of that to their opponents every home game that might make a difference, particulalry now that gate receipts are sometimes the smallest of the three main income streams.
