Financial Fair Play rules not high on Chelsea or PSG’s agenda

On Saturday, Juan Mata tweeted a link to an impassioned blog post in which he praised and thanked pretty much everybody who had ever crossed his path at Chelsea. Over more than 1,000 words, Mata gave a good insight into why everybody thinks he is such a good egg.

The relentless positivity and generosity of tone might even have come across as slightly insincere, had it not so precisely matched the tone of other recent blogs of his in which he praised the likes of Samuel Eto’o (“an example in terms of experience, mobility, definition, attitude, opportunism and many more skills”), Petr Cech (“a great guy, a leading example of professionalism and humility... a fantastic team mate and you can chat with him about everything”), even the departing Kevin de Bruyne (“I haven’t seen many footballers with such a great right foot”).

There was one passive-aggressive touch when Mata pointedly thanked even the man who had driven him out of the club, Jose Mourinho, “for making me a stronger player, because in difficult moments, I have learnt to remain positive and to keep working hard”.

Readers could see Mata's gratitude to Mourinho was couched in less glowing terms than he had thanked Andre Villas-Boas, Roberto di Matteo and Rafael Benitez, and this is about as withering as he gets.

Backroom staff
Mata's blog was notable for the awareness he displayed of the club as a whole – mentioning not just team-mates and fans, but also the owner, ex-managers and backroom staff. There are limits to even his awareness, however, as he noted "my years in Chelsea have been profitable for the club, which I'm very pleased about".

It’s not clear what Mata was talking about, since Chelsea last month announced annual losses of nearly £50 million. They maintained at the time that they were still on course to meet the Financial Fair Play requirements and their desire to abide by Uefa’s regulations was mentioned by Jose Mourinho when he discussed the reasons for the sale of Mata last week. But the £37.1 million Chelsea received for Mata will not do much to offset losses when in the last week they have spent an even larger sum recruiting Nemanja Matic and Mohamed Salah.

One wonders how serious Chelsea really are about Financial Fair Play. Last week, it was revealed that they have slipped two places to seventh in the annual Deloitte Money List, which ranks the richest clubs in Europe by turnover. The clubs that have surpassed them in the rankings are the Gulf-owned sugar daddy outfits, Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain.

PSG’s rise is particularly noteworthy, as they are now the club with the largest commercial income in the world. Last year they made € 254 million from deals with sponsors, almost € 18 m more than their closest rivals in this sphere, Bayern Munich.

The increase in PSG’s commercial income has been driven by some huge sponsorship deals, most significantly an arrangement with the Qatar Tourism Authority that will earn them € 200 million in its final year. That’s more than the entire revenue generated by Manchester United from all their deals with commercial sponsors, worldwide.

The Financial Fair Play regulations are supposed to forbid "related company deals", where a company closely related to the owners of a club commits to a sweetheart sponsorship deal at a price in excess of market values, thus ensuring that what is effectively more owner-investment is counted as income in the accounts. If Uefa are serious about this prohibition, then PSG's sponsorship deals must be questioned.

Clubs collapsed
The problem is that it is difficult to imagine the governing body of European football telling prospective sponsors that they are putting too much money into European football.

The original idea of FFP was to prevent clubs from overstretching themselves financially. It was conceived to prevent the sort of thing that happened at Leeds or Portsmouth, where the clubs collapsed under the strain of huge debts they no longer had the ability to service.

It was never really meant to stop clubs earning vast sums from sponsors who ensured no-strings-attached euros flowed into European football from the Gulf. But clubs like Bayern, Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool will be hoping Uefa take a tough line.

Chelsea’s position is more complicated. They currently pay lip-service to the notion of financial fair-play, but if the rules were strictly enforced it would surely be disastrous for their prospects of remaining one of England’s strongest teams.

If spending was strictly linked to turnover as envisaged by FFP, Chelsea could spend less than three pounds for every four spent by Manchester United. Even Jose Mourinho wouldn’t back himself in the long run at those odds. In which case, maybe Juan Mata won’t have seen the last of him.