Financial Fair Play

Broseph Stalin

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The foreigner limit is the worst thing that ever happened to Russian football and it completely destroyed Russian national team. And honestly, Russian premier league is a pretty bad reference point for competitiveness since most Russian football clubs still heavily rely on state financing which completely eliminates any need to be profitable or to run clubs as a business.

Also, Gaich was loaned out not because CSKA couldn’t afford him. He was just utter shit
 

brehme1989

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The foreigner limit is the worst thing that ever happened to Russian football and it completely destroyed Russian national team. And honestly, Russian premier league is a pretty bad reference point for competitiveness since most Russian football clubs still heavily rely on state financing which completely eliminates any need to be profitable or to run clubs as a business.

Also, Gaich was loaned out not because CSKA couldn’t afford him. He was just utter shit

Yes, they couldn't afford to keep him on the roster, not to pay him. Having him around meant that they were missing out on the chance to have a better/more suitable player in his stead. ie if he was still around, getting a foreign quota, the team would be worse off.


The foreigners limit did not "happen" to Russian football, it was always there. Not sure what you're referring to. All leagues had a 3-5 foreigners rule until 1996 and then it became 3 to 5 non-EU spots for European teams, but gradually for some.

Italy actually has one of the strictest rules on non-EU players.

- - - Updated - - -

I'm not sure what the right number of people per team to pick, clearly its not 20 (e.g. the top 20 players wont all be at United, a number of them would start elsewhere), but that squad depth at the bottom of the league starts to look really fucking thin quite quickly imho.

There's no problem with that really. It's only an issue for the casual couch potatoes who play video games and will whine about squad building becoming "hard".

What you've done is not wrong or anything, it's just hypothetical and the reason I won't go further is because you could come up with tons of assumptions and examples, so it's just clash of creativity to that point.

But what is not, is with everyone else. You focused on the domestic players, but instead you should have focused on the foreigners.


Back to the Manchester City example that I started, I will just assume that the 5 players that Guardiola would have kept are:
Kevin De Bruyne
Bernardo Silva
Ilkay Gundogan
Ederson
Ruben Dias

and for whatever it's worth, I'll assume that Aguero holds a British passport after all those years, so he gets to stick around.

This means that the following players could not play for Manchester City this season: Joao Cancelo, Aymeric Laporte, Oleg Zinchenko, Gabriel Jesus, Riyad Mahrez, Nathan Ake, Ferran Torres, Benjamin Mendy, Zack Steffen, Rodri, Eric Garcia, Fernandinho, Philippe Sandler.

Where do these players go? Assuming that some of them want to be in the PL and are better than the foreigners that teams will be keeping, you could assume that a player like Mahrez, Rodri and Cancelo could find a job at Arsenal o Tottenham. But they'd either settle for a midtable club, move to their country to play for a top club, or move to a lesser league for a strong team there. The first option makes the league stronger, the second option makes their national league stronger and the third one makes European competitions stronger. As a result, staying at Manchester City just makes Manchester City stronger. And since this is the new norm and what I'm talking about is actually the vast majority of football history, this is just a return to normality, rather than something radical. We are currently living in the radical.

And sure, Manchester City would look to sign better English/British players. And they'd probably sign some. But they wouldn't be able to fill their roster with the England and Wales national team, they'd have 10 players at best perhaps, and only half of those would be starters. Where does this come from? Just look at every roster of World Cup or Euro from WC94 and EU96 and back. Rich clubs isn't something new. Dominant clubs isn't something new. Yet, you didn't see them all the time in Europe, they didn't expect to win every game in their domestic league or in Europe. They went to what now seems like obscure grounds and were happy if they got a draw. That's real parity. And this is the only way to achieve it.

The Dutch team of 1996, when Ajax was dominating Europe, had 8 Ajax players + Seedorf (from the 1995 CL) then at Sampdoria.
The Spanish team of 1994, when Barcelona was dominating Spain, had 9 players from there.

That's as dominant as you can get. When you have teams that can also afford the top guys, then it just diminishes. The only country where this may still be an issue is Germany.
 

.h.

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I get the argument that foreign talent will be further dispersed, but I think you'd only group together the best national players further. As I posted above, its actually not ba that more than half of the best 40 players from each country dont play at their top clubs.

Infact, you probably end up with the big countries just hhoarding more people from Brazil/Argentina etc. As a first degree approximation, Germany, Spain, Italy, England, Holland, maybe even France and Portugal will mostly keep their own best players.

I get you'd porobably argue this is a good thing to make football overall more competitive, and I cant really disagree with that I suppose. But in terms of local nationality players, they'd end up more clumped than ever.

I think your examples illustrate it quite nicely - Barca and Ajax held the vast majority of their national team's players.


If you look at those Italian player valuations, you've got Verratti, Barella, Donnarumma, Chiesa, Bastoni are the only ones worth more than 50mil - its not entirely inconceivable they end up at one, MAYBE two clubs. Right now we're the only club who own more than 1 of those guys.
 

brehme1989

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Just a note that those valuation numbers fluctuate according to club and national performance much more than they do based on individual quality.

And a reminder that the problem we're facing now is with clubs who can buy 3 top 5 players from 8 nations and just stack up. With a foreigners limit you're curbing that.
 

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I know, but it was a good starting basis tbh.
 

Broseph Stalin

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Yes, they couldn't afford to keep him on the roster, not to pay him. Having him around meant that they were missing out on the chance to have a better/more suitable player in his stead. ie if he was still around, getting a foreign quota, the team would be worse off.


The foreigners limit did not "happen" to Russian football, it was always there. Not sure what you're referring to. All leagues had a 3-5 foreigners rule until 1996 and then it became 3 to 5 non-EU spots for European teams, but gradually for some.

.

Nope, Russia introduced their first restrictions on foreign players in 2004 after Russian team’s disastrous performance in 2002 WC. Here’s an article telling the whole sad story of the Russian league limit on foreign players. It’s in Russian but you can use Google translate or something
 

brehme1989

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Nope, Russia introduced their first restrictions on foreign players in 2004 after Russian team’s disastrous performance in 2002 WC. Here’s an article telling the whole sad story of the Russian league limit on foreign players. It’s in Russian but you can use Google translate or something

I vividly remember the 90s were Russian teams had 3 foreigners only and usually it was Ukrainians and Brazilians.

I can read a bit of Russian btw, from what I see this was a discussion on how you got to field the teams, based on Blatter's proposal of 6+5. Russia iirc meddled with this a lot.

At the moment there is still a restriction on foreigners in Russian football but they've been slowly abandoning it(I think 8 then 10, then 12-13 foreigners in squad or something but only 5 or 8 can play?).
Makes sense, since everyone else is YOLO, you fall behind if you don't abuse the system yourselves. But being an outsider league and with a federation that's indecisive, you get many rule changes as you go. You see this a lot in most of Europe as well, and it is very common in the Americas.

But for the most time since the full effect of the Bosman rule, I think Russia had 5-8 foreigners limits. Now they had it at 6 foreigners on the pitch and switched to 8 foreigners total. Which means some teams, like CSKA Moscow with Gaich, would need to offload their extra foreigners in order to create more roster spots.
 

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As reported before, UEFA will relax FFP-rules, essentially getting rid of them totally. At least in theory FFP put a leash on the oil clubs, whilst a luxury tax is a mere pittance to them. You're now not limiting what City, PSG and Chelsea can spend, you're allowing them to spend whatever they please, then taxing their numerous record transfer-breaking transfers to a very, very small extent.

Football is ruined, and instead of paying lawyers to enforce the rules they had, UEFA are turning a blind eye and willingly letting it happen.
Italian league got fucked more than any with FFP. We should be sueing those fucks at uefa.
 
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brehme1989

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Uefa needs to restrict roster building, fuck the finances. There will always be discrepancy in wealth.

Increase the quotas.
From 4 CT and 8 AT players make it 6 CT and 12 AT over 2 seasons and then make it 8 CT and 16 AT players from there on.
Make the eligibility start at 5 years part of the club or association prior to turning 21 rather than 3 years.

Rosters capped at 25 players.
Youth/secondary teams count against the quotas, so you can't simply sign 30 kids and hope 6-7 of them end up turning good.

Reduce non-EU slots to two players total as well.

And boom, more parity between and within leagues, higher quality football in all continents, without caring about who can pay the most.
 

Harpsabu

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Uefa needs to restrict roster building, fuck the finances. There will always be discrepancy in wealth.

Increase the quotas.
From 4 CT and 8 AT players make it 6 CT and 12 AT over 2 seasons and then make it 8 CT and 16 AT players from there on.
Make the eligibility start at 5 years part of the club or association prior to turning 21 rather than 3 years.

Rosters capped at 25 players.
Youth/secondary teams count against the quotas, so you can't simply sign 30 kids and hope 6-7 of them end up turning good.

Reduce non-EU slots to two players total as well.

And boom, more parity between and within leagues, higher quality football in all continents, without caring about who can pay the most.
The youth one is massive. The likes of Chelsea buying and signing up so many young players, loaning them out then eventually selling. Definitely needs something done there.

The increase in CT and At could only drive the prices higher for those good At trained players, but I do agree with that overall. That's going to be the only way to level the playing field.
 
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Ethor

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The whole problem with this thread is the title "Financial Fair Play" it's a misnomer :lol:
FFP means Financial Fiddling Primarily.
 
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TheNetworkZ

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A wage cap should probably be a thing but it'd be hard for uefa to implement through every league instead of being a domestic thing that would hinder clubs in the end ala barcelona
 

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Blanket salary cap for all euro clubs at 100 million. That will make things very interesting and likely mean that players move to get more money cause 1 team can’t afford to hog all the stars.
 

brehme1989

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Blanket salary cap for all euro clubs at 100 million. That will make things very interesting and likely mean that players move to get more money cause 1 team can’t afford to hog all the stars.

That's nothing really. Everyone will just have side sponsorships.

Half of the "star" players already have this scheme via loyalties or sign on bonuses.

Roster building is what matters. It will render money useless after a point. There would be no incentive for rich clubs to throw superstar transfer money for someone they'll barely use on their bench and that same player would end up at another club, reducing the gap between top and middle.

Why do you think they limited the quotas to 4+4 (out of 25) back then rather than go for something closer to the 6+5 (out of 11) that FIFA was pushing for? This was already the trend but it benefited a lot of top clubs from many leagues, including us. After failing to overcome the financial crisis in the 2010s, this only benefits the league(s) and team(s) with dodgy financing.
 

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Yeah that would be what they should do. Bump up the quotas and then specially limit the pro-contracts clubs can have at any given time. Chelsea has this feeder club system where they have tens and tens of players on contract and they send them on loan all over the place.

Salary caps won't work in Europe because there are thousands of clubs and those rules will be circumvented anyway one way or another. Also laws come easily against such systems.
 

brehme1989

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In the USA fhe salary caps are messed up due to State tax. Imagine if Europe has this with one country taxing at 15% after 1,000,000 and the other taxing every penny at 48%.
 
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.h.

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fortunately, all the big leagues pretty much tax at the same rate. The exception, actually, is Italy.

France is 45% tax, UK is 45% (but +2% for national insurance), Spain is 47%, Italy is 43%...

Obviously this doesnt preclude a Qatari purchase of a club in the Czech Republic (22% tax), but.. lets be practical
 

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That's the smallest issue here really. In America, players sign contracts with the league, the player is league's property after the signing (can be traded anywhere etc). Clubs are just franchises in the umbrella company which is the league (NFL, NHL, NBA etc). That is something which can never be built to Europe, like we saw with the Super league fiasco.

Just need to hold tight with the traditions and not destroy them in the altar of marketing and money making. (even if UEFA has done just that, but not in that spastic American closed league fashion)
 

brehme1989

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Yeah of course that's important, but the player isn't taxed where the league is based, but where the franchise is.

In Europe if they want to implement a cap system it has to be using net salaries.
So far we have several domestic competitions using such a system, but I haven't seen much about its efficacy and didn't check either.

Serie B has a max contract limit so you cannot sign 20 top players and get yourself in Serie A just like that. It helps being a B league, coz if you do this at the top level the limits will either be too high so it's be a moot change, or it will cause a lot of issues with lack of transparency as players will get most of their money under the table.
 
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