UEFA financial regulations to be challenged in court

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UEFA’s financial fair regulations are going to be challenged in the courts of Europe due to a players agent being upset that the rules are restricting the total amount of money that a player can earn.

The Belgium agent, Daniel Striani, has placed a formal complaint with the EC stating that the rules are unfair since they require clubs in the EC from 2011 forward to financially more forward. Lawyer Jean Louis-Dupont will represent Striani. Louis-Dupont successfully challenged contract rules in 1995 for Jean-Marc Bosman and won allowing Belgium players from that point forward to move without any costs at the completion of their contracts.

This time around Dupont believes that he will once again beat the rules outlined by UEFA even if they are argued additionally by the European Commission. He stated that the regulations that are supposed to help prevent financial losses from occurring at clubs will have many adverse consequences that are not competitive.

The very first argument he plans to make is that by not allowing a club to run at a loss they will not be able to make any proper investments. The second argument is that it will give an unfair advantage of rich clubs and will secure their power in the league making it hard for any other team to rise up as Manchester City has done in the past.

In addition, he plans to argue that the FFP simply wants to reduce wages and transfer fees which is obviously anti-competitive and not fair to the players because it will end up reducing the amount of transfers that take place on a regular basis as well as the number of players that actually end up on a contract with different clubs. Over time this will also lead to salaries of players decreasing.

Chelsea WAG accused in Belgian magazine of having an affair with another player

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Chelsea has been stricken by a host of rumours that one of their players WAG’s was guilty of an affair with another squad member. Belgian magazine ‘Story’ broke the story that Kevin De Bruyne dumped girlfriend Caroline because she was caught having an affair with Thibaut Courtois the goalkeeper. Both of the men are Chelsea players; which explains how it could have happened, but at the moment they are both out on loan.

De Bruyne the 21 year old received £7m for signing in January of 2012, but is playing at the moment with Weder Bremen the Bundesliga side. Courtois on the other hand was signed out to play for Athletico Madrid.

The two men are Belgian national team team-mates and both used to play at Genk. According to the magazine while De Bruyne was training in Turkey at a Bremen training camp Caroline drove to Madrid and visited Courtois. It went on to explain that De Bruyne heard about the affair and Caroline was then told she had to move out.

It is believed that the two days off that De Bruyne received from training at the beginning of March were likely to be as a result of the affair. He reacted by deleting all photos of Caroline from his Twitter. A source reportedly told the magazine that she cheated on Kevin in the house in Madrid, but Kevin did not know anything about the affair so when it came to light he was thoroughly shocked.

Bild, the German newspaper, stated that he attempted to contact De Bruyne but they were told that he did not want to make a comment. The scandal is very similar to the 2010 scandal that emerged when it was discovered that John Terry had an affair with Wayne Bridge’s girlfriend and also the mother of his child.

 

Lower division clubs ask FA for fairer payouts

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Football League clubs are asking the FA to increase the amount of money that it hands out to other divisions. This past Tuesday it was announced that sides from the top flight would be paid as much as £60m over the next four years starting at the 2014 season. However, clubs are asking that the sides do not receive any additional funds.

The 72 Football League clubs met on Wednesday to talk about how payments should be distributed over the next three years. The clubs did not however reach an agreement about how payments should be disbursed and will meet again in May to talk about the matter in more depth.

The Premier League sold the broadcast rights for the next three years to BT and Sky for £3bn which is a very large increase over the past £1.25bn. Overseas rights to air the matches will put that total up to about £5bn. Out of that, parachute payments; which are money that is given to the different sides from top flight and cash that was given to clubs that did not receive parachute money consists about 15% of that total deal.

The Press Association Sport stated that clubs that are a part of the Championship that do not already get parachute payments will given £2.3m each which is more than they would get if they made their own TV deal.

League One Clubs will be given £360,000 and League Two will be given £240,000 which is a 5% to 6% increase. Parachute payments were originally created to help clubs that lost a large amount of revenue when they dropped out of the top division of England.

Even though there has been a lot of debate about solidarity payments and parachute payments the Premier League continues to insist that it does not prevent clubs from eventually being promoted into the Premier League.

Scotland teams to vote on the reconstruction of their football league

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When the ballot involving top-flight clubs in Scotland comes up in the following week, St Mirren has threatened to vote against the reconstruction of the league. The proposal will be put in front of a 12 Scottish premier league clubs, and is designed to merge the Scottish football league, and introduce a 12-12-18 structure.

The Paisley Club has stated that after studying the Articles of association, structure and shareholders agreement, The St Mirren Board Members have declined to support the motion set up in the proposal, which will be tabled on Monday.

The joining of the Senior Football League, and the Scottish League, into a single organisation is supported by the Saints Chiefs. Despite their perceived support for this proposal, they have expressed disdain at some of the terms which the SPL leaders want to put into place before the start of the next season.

A case in point is the proposal to split up the two divisions at the top of the league into 3 groups, with eight teams. These concerns are not just shared by the Saints Chiefs, but also by fans and coaching staff, who were included in the deliberations.

Although they support the proposal to have a new league structure, a single governing body, and a new model of distribution is one that is well thought out. But the way that the proposal is presented will not have the desired effect of promoting Scottish football.

The proposal outlays plans to have teams play 22 games before splitting into 3 groups of 8 teams. However, the middle 8 will lose all the points that they had won in the first round, and this will serve to demoralise players, and affect the game. The system has been tried in other countries and rejected for this reason. The fans would also have to get rid of their season tickets, a fact that will not go down well with them.

Argument rumbles on about logos on football shirts

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Football fans have to wear shirts that bear the logo of the sponsor, whether they agree to this principle or not. Many feel that this is an unfair practice given that teams are offered children’s shirts without a logo. A good case study is where the sponsor may be a gambling company.

The absence of the logo may seem to be ethical but it is most probably a means of avoiding hefty fines imposed on company’s that break advertising guidelines. Looking for a sponsor at the start of the season is akin to the frenzied activity that goes on before the transfer period is over. The FA was put in a quandary when, in 1976, the late Derek Dougan secured sponsorship from a company named Kettering Tyres.

The FA put Derek to task over the logo on the shirts, and he, in turn, shrewdly changed the lettering to Kettering “T”; the T standing for both “Tyres”, and “Town”. The following year, the FA had to relax the rules about the logos that go on the T-shirts.

Another Interesting scenario is that surrounding Barcelona’s sponsorship. For 111 years, this team refused all forms of sponsorship logos on their shirts, and only toted the UNICEF logo. In the year 2010, this trend changed and the UNICEF logo was relegated to the back of the shirts, and the logo for the Qatar Foundation was placed on the front. This caused a furour as people took issue with the human rights violations that are experienced in Qatar.

Another team, Sunderland, seemed to embrace positive sponsorship practices when it put the logo “Invest in Africa” on the front of their shirts. This was before it was discovered that the company behind the logo was an oil and gas exploration multinational corporation.

Supporters should be more informed about the ethics behind the logos on the kits that they blindly buy. The office of Fair Trading Investigations is looking at the matter at present.