Most liked posts in thread: Salford City, The State of Football & Financial Fair Play

Yes and they will be well within it. As I said to How Salford’s way of doing it is to have one or two players who are much better than the league who are on good money but to save money by having a streamline squad and the rest of the squad basically being good players for that level. The idea being the rest of the squad provides a solid base and those couple of higher paid players adding that extra bit of class to make a difference that wins games

 

They weren’t the biggest spenders though in the conference and were well within the wage limits if they were in League 2 last season. They are a fairly well run club who will spend well on a key player but aren’t just throwing money on 25 lower league galaticos

 

They already have done. The EFL has been negotiating its own TV broadcasting contracts with overseas TV operators for a few seasons now, quite separate from the PL's overseas contracts. And more importantly, they have also now negotiated a separate deal from the PL with Sky to broadcast EFL games for the next 5 seasons. So change is already happening.

As an aside, it was the EFL Sky TV deal which led to Harvey being sacked from the EFL because of the way the contract is distributed and a handful of the larger Championship clubs took exception to it.

 

I'm not sure you can say City have done it the right way though. For about 4 seasons they were spending 120% of their revenue on wages. Even getting below 100% has been suspect ranging from things like sacking most of their non-playing staff and then having a 3rd party company hire them and 'lease' them out to city for an amount much lower than they would be paid being directly employed to te various suspicious actions that they have been revealed to have undertaken to inflate income. If their owners had pulled out having got bored of their play thing (which isn't unknown when it comes to Arabs and their purchases) then city were screwed and even now with the uncertainties on legitimacy of sponsor revenue they could be in trouble. Same with PSG, both clubs are just lucky that they hate each other and are using sport as a battlefield which is keeping both interested longer term

 

I'm not sure how much I believe the Ramos story, certainly not the fee. While a couple of seasons ago they were throwing money around like it was going out of fashion but the Chinese government were concerned about it and changed the laws. They still have decent money to spend but not the bottomless pot they did all have

 

The problem is its difficult to find a punishment that works. The idea is clearly that the hope is that the fines work as a deterrent so clubs shouldn’t even reach a situation where they need to be fined (or docked points or kicked out of tournaments which is just as bad). The problem is while it is effective for most clubs you always get someone who says 'screw it we will deal with the consequences later' and it ends up causing major issues. And fines also have different impacts, if you were to fine man city 10% of their revenue they wouldn't blink as their owner would look down the back of the sofa to find it but do the same with Bolton and it bankrupts them.

We were seeing way too many clubs though getting into trouble at one point though and while it’s certainly not fixed it has helped a bit even though the deterrent isn’t perfect