Jackie Broon

UEFA's FFP rules still exclude infrastructure spending from the calculation as far as I can tell (Article 89.01(e) of the UEFA Club Licencing and Financial Sustainability Regulations). I think there was some talk of them removing the exclusion of infrastructure spending but I don't think that did, or is going to, happen. Although I might be completely wrong because there's lots of talk of it on here, so I might have missed something.

We're playing the long game, we're just sticking to the rules and letting the rest of the league strangle itself with FFP. Either the FFP chains will be loosened eventually or we'll get to a financial position where it doesn't really restrict us much. The number of clubs that are turning against FFP is gradually increasing and we're the only club in the league other than Man City with the ability to really inflate our income to get around FFP (provided that we don't get sloppy with email trails and hacked), that is clearly happening (e.g. the Sela-Adidas partnership).

I'm not sure it works like that for ffp purposes, I think the fee is amortised over 5 years whatever the structure of the actual deal. It might matter in terms of cash flow for clubs where that is an issue but most clubs are now limited by ffp rather than actual cash flow.

Specifically, Premier League rules E.55-69.

Net spend will still be relevant in the long run, selling players to buy should only really result in a short term boost. It's useful for us because our revenue should continue to increase dramatically, and it pushes most of the cost further into the future when we will have a lot more revenue. Not so useful for the likes of Chelsea, who won't have that type of revenue growth. Where Chelsea do very well though is in profit from selling players that have come through the academy, and that is probably one of the best ways to legitimately boost profit for FFP, but would take us a long time to build that type of academy set-up.

I think that table is a bit misleading being labelled 'profit', that table is just income from player sales, not taking into account expenditure. Chelsea had a £238m loss on income minus expenditure.

Income from related parties is counted, it's just restricted to whatever the PL determine to be fair market value. To be truly 'fair' that market value should be the largest equivalent non-related party sponsorship deal in the league. If they were just to make that change in interpretation (both the PL and UEFA) I think FFP would be okay. As it is it's just being used as a tool to restrict competition and protect the established order.

Which is fine if we keep our shape in a fluid way, with one or both of the more of the forward two dropping back into the hole that Bruno leaves when he pushes forward. But that's just not happening consistently and it's consistently being exploited by other teams.

But that's in addition to rather then instead of the rule restricting losses over 3 seasons.

Bruno is brilliant, I love him, but he needs to either be more defensively disciplined or for Longstaff or Miley to play in his position in a more disciplined way. There is constantly a big hole between our midfield and defence, where Bruno should be, and it makes us so easy to play through. It's been the same all season.

Probably not, but we clearly aren't going to go down that route, yet.

The rules are already in place to stop that, we can't just get a huge sponsorship because the PL will be able to say it's not market value. We have to (be seen at least) to be gradually and naturally increasing the club's market value.

No, because they have massive revenues, and selling players to create headroom will only really work for a club, like us, where revenues are going to increase significantly over the following 5 years.

There hasn't been any suggestion of them doing it in relation to FFP though, only in relation to preventing English clubs playing in the ESL. Obviously they could, but there would be unlikely to be the same level of public political pressure to legislate to keep FFP in place if it were to be successfully challenged. Also, if there were a successful challenge here it would need to be repeated in the european court to completely free top clubs from FFP.

I doubt they see it as an either/or, even when we looked more likely than not to go down the chairman came for a first round FA cup tie against Cambridge. He was apparently furious and went into the dressing room to speak to the squad when we lost. They're not Ashley, they won't be thinking that us going out of the cup will help is in the league.

I think they will but because it is our last opportunity to compete for something this season rather than it being the mackems. Yasir turned up for Cambridge, they take the cups very seriously.

It might be 115 instances of payments being hidden, as in the Etihad situation, there may also be multiple charges relating the same breach, for example both for hiding the payments and the breach of FFP if income hadn't been inflated. Ultimately ut wss likely to be all about getting around FFP. These aren't criminal charges, it's not alleged that they broke the law, it would all have about being able to spend more within FFP, there would have been no other reasob for them to do it.

If they did what is alleged it would have been to inflate their income to allow them to spend more under FFP.

City absolutely are being done for FFP, they are not accused of doing anything illegal only of breaching the PL's rules relating to FFP.

Possibility but the there were signs of gaps in our midfield in terms of creativity and defense right from the start of the season, even against Villa but particularly Brighton and Liverpool.

Maybe he was affected by the off the pitch stuff but there were a lot of questions about Tonali's performances before he was suspended. There were also signs of similar issues with teams waltzing through our midfield with ease before we were beset with injuries and fatigue.

I think the plan is to rotate our wide players, taking advantage of the 5 subs for them to run themselves into the ground for 45-60 minutes and then bring fresh legs on.

IIRC they had about three clear chances on the break in the first 35 mins where they waltzed through us far too easily. We had more of the ball but the signs were there.

I think FFP will probably be challenged on that basis soon, but I doubt we'll be the ones do do it, it'll probably by one or all of Man City, Everton and/or Chelsea.