Manchester City Should Be Punished For Fraud, Not for Spending Money

Egalitarianism has been at the heart of football history since the start of the game.

Football associations all over Europe fought against professionalism before the natural course of political and economic reality forced their hands. However, football regulatory bodies have continued to develop endless rules and regulations to keep professionalism in check for many decades.

UEFA, in its current form, utilizes FFP as a modern mechanism designed to keep professionalism in check. This is bad for football.

It is bad for football because it is bad for players in terms of potential earnings and other opportunities in a sport where their sell-by date remains quite limited. It is bad for the quality of the games as there is an arbitrary cap placed on the growth and quality of clubs by its rules.

Let’s be clear and call it what it is. Professionalism is capitalism. These days it appears that capitalism is a bad word that we would not allow our children to utter.

Capitalism is not a bad word. In fact, capitalism has made football the best and greatest game on the planet. It is capitalism that has made the English Premier League, without question, the best football league in the world.

The English Premier League is the best league because clubs have been allowed to spend the money and resources it takes to make their teams better. They have been allowed to hire the best players, coaches, and executives. Clubs have been given the green light to build better training facilities, bigger stadiums, and other ancillary facilities to make the teams better as well as to improve the supporter’s experience. All of these measures have made the league better in the long run.

The history of the Premier League shows that when one team spends money and obtains success, the other clubs, in an attempt to catch up, do the same thing. Teams have sometimes created more revolutionary ways to spend money and resources for the purpose of acting in their own rational self-interest. The rational self-interest of any club is to survive and thrive.

This has created multiple chain reactions that have led the Premier League to bring in more and more money for its clubs, leading to better players, leading to better teams, leading to better games, leading to more eyes on the matches, and leading to even more money being poured in, and then the cycle begins again.

The best form of capitalism is laissez-faire capitalism where there are limited rules and regulations governing how businesses (and all football teams are businesses) should be allowed to operate. The English FA allows the closest form of this system to operate within its purview. This has allowed the Premier League to become what it is now. Rules and regulations designed to create more financial equality drains investment and diminishes overall the quality of the leagues. That is why the German, Spanish, and Italian leagues can not match up to the EPL top to bottom.

UEFA’s FFP regulations are one of their main forms of creating more financial equality among the leagues and teams within its purview. If you run afoul of their rules then you run the risk of being omitted from the money they hand out in their competitions. Just ask AC Milan, PSG, and now Manchester City. It’s all designed for the good of the game in their minds.