Financial fair play: can it regulate European club football? An investigation into UEFA’s Financial Fair Play regulations, how they work and its potential success or failure in regulating European club football.

Abstract

European club football today has seen a financial trend where wealthy clubs in Europe are making substantial trading losses, spending way beyond their means in order to become successful in European and domestic competition. This is mostly gone on enticing the best playing talent to these clubs, paying ridiculous fees to buy them out of their current contracts and promising very lucrative wages. This leads to the revenue stream not being strong enough to cover these expenses and thus leads to annual loss making. But with the influence of wealthy investors, losses are covered by investment brought into the club and so, the playing talent desired can be afforded. This type of reckless financial management can put the viability of a club at risk, examples such as Chelsea, Manchester City & Paris St. Germain benefit from such investors. With the introduction of UEFA’s ‘Financial Fair Play’, it is hoped that regulating the spending of clubs hoping to participate in European competition will put a stop to this and to install a since of financial discipline into European club football. The aim of this research is to understand how FFP works and gain an overall opinion of football fans and two senior officials as to their confidence in FFP. The research methodology consists of a questionnaire and two semi-structured interviews. The research findings indicate that the two senior officials are of the opinion that FFP is a good way to discipline football clubs and think it will work given time. The football fans also think it is a good idea but would question the successful enforcement of the rules. Seeing these rules enforced in future competition can be a basis for future research.