8PercentAndroid

I don’t know much about Martin Samuels — but this is the worst drivel I’ve ever read. 1. FFP was created and implemented by UEFA. Mainly driven by Germany, France, Belgium and other continental Europe, and on the club side, Bayern and Real. It takes 5 minutes of fact checking by anyone to find out that Arsenal, Liverpool and United had nothing to do with implementing the FFP rules in football. It is not in touch with reality in any way, shape or form. It’s just dishonest or delusional — I don’t know what is worse — to claim anything else. To see it come from reporters at big newspapers is just remarkable. What is most absurd is that reality is the complete opposite. The owners of Arsenal, Liverpool and United would tomorrow jump on a proposal to implement a strict salary cap in the PL where all clubs could spend exactly the same. Nobody even talk about this because it doesn’t suit their agenda. 2. Samuel also drives the thesis that City should not get punished because Man City, Man Utd, Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and Tottenham agreed to join the Super League. A project that was stopped by fans of Liverpool and United taking things into their own hands. The Super League was a betrayal of the very soul of football. But the least of the concerns with a Super League was that it breached rules. Any club can leave the Premier League whenever it wants. When you say goodbye to the Premier League — you say goodbye to football the way every fan on the planet wants to see it played. But there is no law that you have to compete in it. 3. Facts are that Martin Samuels and his pals — that “care so much about English football” — were more than happy to look the other way when Malcom Glazers set up a ridiculous scheme to plunder England’s greatest football club. Why? Because everyone realized that it in the long run would cripple United’s ability to compete on the pitch. 4. An indisputable fact is that the Premier League supposedly run by this “Red Cartel” — always — have had the most fair distribution of wealth of all top leagues in Europe. And it is not even close. 67% of the PL’s revenue is divided equally between all PL clubs. If the highest income in a league is divided with the lowest, you get an income quota. The lower number, the more equal the wealth is divided. In the PL it is 1.6. In Serie A it’s 2.9. In Ligue 1 it’s 3.3. In Bundesliga it’s 3.8. In La Liga it’s 3.8 (and for a long time, up until 2015, it was 12-15).