Arsène Wenger believes that Uefa has caved in over the robustness of its financial fair play regulations because of pressure from Europe’s top clubs, who have been uneasy about the Premier League’s new £5.14bn TV deal.
The Arsenal manager was reacting to the comments of Michel Platini, the Uefa president, who said that the governing body would “relax things” with regard to FFP, as the current rules risked impeding the game’s growth.
The Premier League’s mammoth contract with the broadcasters will take effect from 2016 for three seasons and, under FFP, will afford English clubs greater leeway, which others across Europe might not enjoy.
Uefa is now inclined to permit club owners to invest more of their own money over a three- to five-year period, as long as they can show that revenues will grow over that time to allow them eventually to break even. There have been concerns that the current system promotes the status quo of the very richest clubs and does not encourage investors to buy into the others.
“It looks like there’s an international pressure to make these rules more flexible because of potential investors in other countries,” Wenger said. “I believe the television contract in England has pushed some other clubs in Europe to want this to be a bit more flexible for them so they can compete better with investors investing in their clubs.
“I believe it’s more down to counteracting the potential investments of the English clubs by the other European clubs. The pressure came more from the other European clubs.”
Wenger, a long-term advocate of financial prudence, is frustrated because he feels that the mooted changes are coming before the current regulations have had time to fully take hold.
“FFP never worked completely,” Wenger said. “It restricted. It had a positive influence on some aspects of our job but it was never completely in place yet. The only thing you can say is before it is completely in place, it is already more flexible.”
Uefa is facing at least 10 separate legal challenges over FFP, and Wenger added: “Uefa or Fifa do not have the same power that they had 10 or 15 years ago, on the legal side of it. Everything can be challenged by the European court and that makes it much more difficult for Uefa to have rigid rules applied, because it’s always in contradiction with freedom of investment regulated by the European rules.
“It’s not easy because there are very intelligent people at Uefa who work for a few years now on that problem. At the start, to me it looked very logical, very easy and very easy to apply, as well. When they wanted to push it in, you see it was more and more difficult.
“They took the investment in the youth system out of FFP and then of course what did it create? Huge amounts of money in the youth system and the wages came up in the youth system and made it more difficult as well.”
Wenger meanwhile, refused to be drawn on the latest transfer speculation surrounding Liverpool’s Raheem Sterling and insisted it would be “stupid” to allow anything to disrupt their end to the season.
“At the moment we are not in a transfer mode. We want to finish our season well,” said Wenger. “The transfer period comes after the FA Cup final. In the summer we will bid for people, [but] at the moment we are not in transfer mode at all.
“You absolutely want me to say something that I don’t want to say. I don’t like to lie. If I say that I will and I don’t do it, then I have lied.”