It’s painfully ironic that Michel Platini was the face of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations which were approved in 2009.
The former UEFA president – who would preach: “I just want clubs to spend money they have, not what 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 unjust accounting and the rules which he fiercely supported have led to an array of punishments for some of Europe’s elite clubs.
Here are the most significant penalties which UEFA have enforced to those outside their own boardroom.
Man City’s Champions League ban has been lifted.
Surprised? 🤔 pic.twitter.com/RiXnRCojxu
— 90min (@90min_Football) July 13, 2020
Had Manchester City not enlisted the help of an extravagantly remunerated legal team, this entry may have been at the other end of this list. A seismic ripple coursed through the foundation 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 that the club received was largely a result of City’s “obstruction of the investigations” rather than any breaches which, according to CAS “were either not established or time-barred”.
Jose Mourinho was not alone when he called it a “disgraceful decision”.
Across the six transfer windows leading up to the summer of 2014, Zenit didn’t sell a single player for more than €1m. Yet, in that time, the Russian giants spent north of €140m on the likes of Axel Witsel, Hulk and Salomon Rondon.
Unsurprisingly, Zenit were included in the batch of fines handed out by UEFA that summer.
Milan have been in the crosshairs of UEFA’s bean counters for years. After ending a decade-long wait to win Serie A, the Rossoneri had their celebrations tinged by a €15m fine for FFP breaches in 2022.
However, UEFA only wanted €2m up front and it is hardly the worst punishment Milan have received.
Li Yonghong’s bizarre and brief spell as Milan’s owner deepened the club’s significant financial woes, forcing the steel-fisted hedge fund Elliott Management to take control of the club in July 2018. At the end of their first season at the helm, Elliott had to swallow a one-year European ban.
After spending more than €100m, Milan had qualified for the Europa League in 2019. The ban robbed the Rossoneri of as much as €21m in potential prize money and untold sums in lost sponsorship.
Juventus’ accounts have been more thoroughly dissected than the team’s tactics in recent years. Juve were one of four Serie A clubs fined by UEFA in 2022 but had far bigger financial issues to contend with in the subsequent season.
It is probably for the best that UEFA’s FFP regulations only came into practice at the tail-end of Massimo Moratti’s spell at the helm of Inter. The son of former owner Angelo Moratti spent an estimated €1.2bn trying to replicate the golden age that the club enjoyed under his father.
Moratti’s successor Steven Zhang has been forced into parsimony by modern monetary restrictions but still fell foul of the rules in 2022.
Jose Mourinho has always been selective with his choice of facts. While lauding Roma’s progress to the 2023 Europa League final while spending just €9m, he claimed: “It’s like Jesus Christ coming to Rome and going for a trip to the Vatican.”
What Mourinho failed to mention, however, was that the club had to compensate for the €128m splurged during his first season in the Italian capital. UEFA did not overlook the outlay.
In 2012, Platini claimed: “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 over PSG they certainly found out about UEFA’s financial regulations.
Across the first six years of Sheikh Mansour’s ownership of Manchester City, the club spent more than €750m on transfer fees, while recouping less than an average of €30m each summer.
In the first wave of FFP punishments in 2014, City were slapped with the biggest fine and had their budget over future years capped.
It’s always hard to analyse your own actions but it certainly helps when punishments are being dished out.
PSG’s chairman and CEO Nasser Al-Khelaifi also happens to be the European Club Association (ECA) representative for the UEFA Executive Committee. Al-Khelaifi’s standing within the governing body for European football was only enhanced by the failed coup from clubs trying to form the European Super League in April 2021. PSG were not part of the unruly cabal which was noted by UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin.
This didn’t stop UEFA from handing out the largest fine in FFP history to PSG in 2022. Yet, €65m is a drop in the ocean for owners that are worth €441bn. Conveniently, there has been no talk of PSG’s repeated disregard for the rules resulting in a ban of any kind.
