Financial Fair Play, The £194m Loss....And Snoods

Personalised snoods.

Those two words alone tell you all you need to know about the ridiculous situation at Manchester City.

On the pitch things are going superbly, 11 wins in 12 games to start the season tells you as much.

Off the field, it’s not so good – at least on paper. First they lost Chief Exec Garry Cook thanks to some pretty stupid and offensive remarks about a player’s mother who had cancer, then last week they announced record losses.

In case you haven’t seen, Man City lost a quite staggering £194 million last year. Just to repeat that figure it is ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY FOUR MILLION POUNDS.

Then this week we see the news that they have bought all their players personalised snoods to wear in training – of course that is a miniscule outlay compared to the losses, but doesn’t it just sum things up? Doesn’t it just sum up how out of control football’s spending is? And those comments could apply to every club at top level really, not just City.

As Ian Herbert put it in the Independent last week, though: ”Thankfully for City, the figures will not be taken into account used as part of UEFA's Financial Fair Play regulations as they fall outside the accounting window.”

Those regulations stipulate that no club can incur loses of more than £40m in the two seasons of the FFP regulations (the monitoring period begins at the end of this season.)

But even then, of course, clubs will get round the regulations, by finding ever more novel ways to do things, in a similar way of course to that which Manchester City have in having their ground and the so-called Etihad Village that is being built across the road from the ground sponsored for a reported £350m over a ten year period.

So UEFA can make all its grand pronouncements and it can talk as tough as it likes, but until a massive club is actually punished, surely they will just pay the regulations lip service and football will spiral out of control even further.

No other business (except maybe Banking – but that is a whole different political argument ) would be allowed to carry on in such a fashion, nobody else in any walk of life other than football would be able to spend money with such impunity and have someone else picking up the tab. And crucially nobody else, faced with these figures would try and give them a positive spin, which is what the powers that be at Manchester City attempted to do last week.

What of the role of the fans in all of this?

Lets be honest the fans of “Citeh” don’t really care about this – and neither should they, when they thrashed Man United, when they won the Cup, do you really think they thought to themselves, “yeah this is great, but we can’t afford it, it just not fair,” but then the same could be said for Portsmouth fans a couple of seasons ago.

But the responsibility rests with the owners of Man City to run the club in a responsible and business-like way, consistent with the principles of running any other business and crucially it rests with the Governing bodies to enforce their own rules and not be as toothless as you suspect they might be.

Because if they don’t actually do something about the situation then big football clubs will carry on in exactly the way they choose to do with absolutely no recompense.

I stress again that those comments don’t just relate Manchester City, but all football clubs, its just that Man city are the only ones who announced £194m losses last week – and promptly bought their players personalised snoods.