Will Michel Platini save European football?

UEFA’s newly imposed rules will attempt to decrease the alarmingly increasing gap between the richer and the poorer teams in the football world. By forcing teams to break even and not spend any money not made as revenue, the new FInancial Fair Play (FFP) rules were designed to limit the effect of rich, foreign owners and ensure that more equality is achieved.

Any European club isn’t going to participate in any European competition if it doesn’t abide the rules by 2017. However, certain losses can be announced in every preceding year depending on the ownership status of the club.

In my opinion, these rules will favor the richer clubs in both the long and short term. Many loopholes will be utilized to use the inefficiencies of this system, such as an owner getting a huge sponsorship from a company he owns/creates. Furthermore, clubs with richer owners can post an extra 40 million euros in their losses column for the next 3 years, which beats the purpose of the system. Finally, suspicions still exist around whether the UEFA will dare to exclude bigger teams who break the rules in fear of the huge commercial losses they might suffer as a result