http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/530b31d8-8b80-11df-ab4d-00144feab49a.htmlPlatini has a goal for European footballBy Roger Blitz in Johannesburg
Published: July 9 2010
Europe looks like the real winner of this World Cup. According to Michel Platini, president of Uefa, European football’s governing body, the presence of the Netherlands and Spain in Sunday’s final in Soweto, not forgetting semi-finalists Germany, is a tribute to their investment in education and training.
Mr Platini was careful to single out these teams rather than laud the continent as a whole. For France, Italy and England, this tournament has been to varying degrees a disaster.
He was also anxious to focus on what he called “a triumph for technical education programmes, sound management and good governance”. Because for all the positives to emerge for European football from the World Cup, back on the continent the chronic state of management and good governance among clubs continues to cause alarm.
No less an exalted club than Barcelona, which provided seven of Spain’s starting line up that beat Germany in the semi-final this week, quietly announced that it was seeking a €150m ($190m) loan to cover cash flow problems, and was concerned about the stability of its €1bn TV rights deal.
This is the club that last week crowed it was the world’s biggest sporting club by revenue – generating €445.5m in the 12 months to June 30 – and which in May paid €40m for Spanish striker and joint leading World Cup scorer David Villa.
Mr Platini may admire the development of young players in Spain but privately Uefa regards Spanish clubs – save perhaps for isolated cases like Seville – as unregulated and unaccountable. The Spanish Football Federation is weakened by the dominance of Barcelona and Real Madrid, which sell their TV rights separately. One academic study puts the level of debt in Spain’s La Liga at €3.5bn.
European club football’s financial problems are by no means confined to Spain. Roma, winner of three Serie A titles, is now effectively in the hands of UniCredit after a deal on Thursday between the bank and the Sensi family, the Italian club’s majority owners for 17 years, to settle their debts.
Throw in the bankruptcy this year of Portsmouth, now relegated from England’s Premier League, and the fraught efforts of Liverpool’s owners to meet the demands of its banks by finding a new buyer, and there are plenty of reasons to believe European football will be confined to its sickbed for some time to come.
All of which leaves Uefa surprisingly upbeat. The governing body has long struggled to keep Europe’s big clubs in check. It has watched impotently for years as the top teams traded players for huge sums and paid them increasingly exorbitant wages. Not so long ago, Uefa even worried about the big clubs forming a breakaway league.
But each case of financial failure strengthens Mr Platini’s hand in creating a Europe-wide licensing system that compels clubs to spend within their means. In February, Uefa published a report on the financial health of the game and concluded that net debt across European clubs was €6.3bn.
Uefa hopes that its Financial Fair Play strategy, a set of new financial rules signed off in May by the European Clubs Association, which represents nearly 150 clubs, will mark the moment when the financial excesses in the European game begin to be reversed. That agreement took months of negotiation. But for Uefa the hard work has just started. Self-regulation would be the ideal outcome, and there were some promising signs last season.
Two big Premier League club owners, Chelsea’s Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch, and Manchester City’s Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Abu Dhabi royal, converted debt in the club to equity, in anticipation of the new financial regime being drawn up by Uefa.
But the scale of the task is enormous – there are 53 national associations in Fifa comprising more than 700 clubs – and Uefa is not hopeful of the clubs reforming themselves.
“The complete free market approach doesn’t really work in sport,” says one senior Uefa insider.
As the World Cup comes to an end and attention turns to the start of Europe’s domestic league seasons, the work of Uefa’s Club Financial Control Panel assumes considerable importance.
This is the body, under the chairmanship of former Belgian prime minister Jean-Luc Dehaene, that has begun to analyse cases of clubs running into financial problems, requesting audits and investigating clubs.
European hands will hold aloft the World Cup trophy in South Africa on Sunday night.
After that begins European football’s long, hard journey towards financial stability.
