UEFA Financial Fair Play Regulations
The UEFA Financial Fair Play Regulations (FFP) are a set of regulations established to prevent professional football clubs spending more than they earn in the pursuit of success, and in doing so not getting into financial problems which might threaten their long-term survival. Some have argued that they were instituted to prevent financial "doping" from outside sources injecting money into smaller clubs. They were agreed to in September 2009 by the Financial Control Panel of football's governing body in Europe (Union of European Football Associations – UEFA). The regulations provide for sanctions to be taken against clubs who exceed spending, over several seasons, within a set budgetary framework. Implementation of the regulations took place at the outset of the 2011–12 football season. The severest penalty is disqualification from the European competitions. Other penalties included fines, the withholding of prize money, and player transfer bans. On announcing the new legislation, former UEFA President Michel Platini said, Platini went on to say that the measures were supported by the majority of football club owners, and that an independent panel would be set up to judge whether clubs had broken the rules. Although the intentions of encouraging greater financial caution in football have been well-received, FFP has been criticised as illegal by limiting the internal market, failing to reduce football club debt and protecting the status quo. In 2015, UEFA announced FFP would be "eased". A newspaper article alleged that this was in response to a number of lawsuits. Background A 2009 UEFA review showed that more than half of 655 European clubs incurred a loss over the previous year, and although a small proportion were able to sustain heavy losses year-on-year as a result of the wealth of their owners, at least 20% of clubs surveyed were believed to be in actual financial peril. The reasons for this are well summarised in the 2010–12 House of Commons report on Football Governance: Even among Europe's elite sides, continued excessive spending has often been justified by club executives as being "necessary to keep the club competitive". As Christian Müller, CFO of the German Bundesliga told the European Commission: "... we learn by experience all over the world [that] most club executives tend to operate riskily, tend to overestimate their chances in the Championship. This may result in disproportionate spending relative to the income some clubs generate... club executives have somehow to be protected from themselves." The vast majority of the overall European football debt is owed by only three of the biggest leagues: the English Premier League, the Italian Serie A and the Spanish Primera División, commonly known as La Liga. The English, Italian and Spanish leagues Premier League A report by Deloitte indicated that total debt among the 20 Premier League clubs at the end of the 2008/09 season was £3.3 billion. At the time of the introduction of FFP, several Premier League clubs were known to be spending considerably above their income. For example, between 2005 and 2010, West Ham United recorded