Midway through the summer window, Paris Saint-Germain persuaded one of Europe's most accomplished footballers to join them.

The French champions had the money to cover both a stratospheric transfer fee and a remuneration package that would have made the player one of the best-paid sportsmen on the continent.

There was just one problem: UEFA's Financial Fair Play regulations.

As part of a penalty for failing to meet the European governing body's break-even targets, PSG were already committed to reducing their annual deficit to €30 million this season and zero the next, while keeping wage costs no higher than 2013/14 levels.

To abbreviate a complex story, they couldn't sign their man and meet those targets.

None of the three main parties to the proposed deal were happy. Some sought legal advice. The lawyers' guidance was that should the player be prepared to challenge FFP on the basis that it restricted his freedom of employment, the deal could be forced through.

Though no case was opened, it seems a matter of time and personality before one is. In June, a professor of competition law and economics at the University of Liege published a paper entitled "'Financial fair play' or an 'oligopoleague' of football clubs?"

Nicolas Petit argued that "a number of aspects suggest that the FFP Regulation is likely to be in violation of EU competition law" and that a legal challenge would force the European Commission to decide its fate.

Jean-Louis Dupont, the lawyer who helped Jean-Marc Bosman force a rewrite of global transfer rules in the mid-'90s, has already taken one claim to the European Commission on behalf of a Belgian player's agent.

While the Commission rejected that complaint on the basis that FFP applies to clubs and not players’ agents, Dupont is preparing another on behalf of supporters of PSG and Manchester City, the two Champions League clubs most aggressively penalised by UEFA for FFP violations.

Championed by UEFA president Michel Platini as a means of limiting losses that reached €1.7 billion among top-division outfits in 2011, FFP has been broadly welcomed by clubs whose revenues have reached such levels that they are no longer dependent on owner investment.

While Chelsea would have run into the same issues as PSG and Manchester City had Roman Abramovich bought the club in 2013 rather than 2003, the club's income is now in the top 10 in Europe and their losses stemmed. At Stamford Bridge, FFP is welcomed as a discouragement to others from copying the pump-priming model with which Abramovich created a Champions League-winning club.

As FFP has restricted the transfer-market activities of clubs with lesser revenues, Chelsea have developed a strategy of buying talented young foreigners, parking them at clubs in some of Europe's strongest divisions to assess their development before selling for a profit.

Chelsea's website currently lists 19 such loanees, and this year, the club grossed more than £40 million from the sale of two Belgium World Cup internationals deemed inadequate for first-team purposes: Romelu Lukaku and Kevin De Bruyne.

One of Chelsea's preferred "player parks," Vitesse Arnhem, is currently under investigation by the Dutch Football Federation following an allegation by its former majority shareholder, Merab Jordania, that the London club instructed Vitesse to avoid qualifying for the Champions League in 2013.

At Ajax, they believe Chelsea ordered Vitesse to transfer Marco van Ginkel to Stamford Bridge at the end of that season instead of selling the young Netherlands international to them.

Formally, Vitesse is now owned by Alexander Chigirinsky, a business associate of Abramovich's. Marina Granovskaia—Abramovich's personal assistant and one of the most powerful directors at Chelsea—has been a key figure in the Dutch club's business strategy.

Buying up and loaning out an entire first-team squad's worth of footballers, becoming so entrenched in the running of a foreign club that the integrity of a prominent European league is questioned, is entirely acceptable under FFP.

In fact, some would argue that the regulations encourage it. Yet Platini rages against other forms of external influences and wishes to add a prohibition on third-party ownership (TPO) to the FFP suite.

Already banned in the Premier League, such shared ownership of footballers' transfer rights between clubs, financial institutions or businessmen has inflicted gross damage on the likes of West Ham United.

It has also been astutely deployed by Atletico Madrid to achieve what many observers had declared impossible—extracting the Spanish league title out of the hands of Barcelona and Real Madrid.

Not only did a club with an annual revenue of €120 million the previous season take La Liga from two rivals who'd grossed €1 billion between them, Atletico also came within seconds of overcoming Real in the Champions League final.

In Portugal, FC Porto have structured one of the most successful transfer strategies in the world game around TPO, winning three major European trophies in the last 12 seasons. Benfica have used it to reach the last two Europa League finals.

With FIFA joining Platini in preparing a ban on the practice, these clubs are threatened by a further penal concentration of resources amongst European football's grand revenue machines.

In the last window, 82 percent of the $2.3 billion total spent on transfer fees came from clubs in England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

According to an analysis by Switzerland's International Centre for Sports Studies, 72 percent of that expenditure went to clubs within the big five Leagues.

"The biggest leagues and clubs operate in an increasingly closed system," the report concluded. "Consequently, the redistributive power of transfers is diminishing."

Those at the sharp end of Platini's assault consider this to be anything but fair play. Their lawyers stand ready to counter-attack.

By Duncan Castles, From Bleacher repports the 5th December.

Huh, that whole Vitese-Chelsea thing seems interesting. If it were true, then thats very dirty.

FFP was maybe a good idea, to do something about all the oil-money-clubs but its ofc much more complicated now what this FFP has done, you can say it has made the gap between rich and non-rich club bigger as now, normal clubs cant take the same route as those who went from non-rich to rich. And the rich clubs can just bypass FFP with loop-holes which there are plenty of, thus keeping themself up there, very rich.

So the rule is some sense has made it harder for averege sized clubs but because of loop-holes have not made it so much harder for already rich clubs

worthy of a read http://www.playthegame.org/news/news-articles/2014/is-financial-fair-play-in-european-football-any-good/

@tiki: please try to stay on topic mate.

FFP is not enough, but it prevented PSG from buying heavily this year as they were wanting.
Now that recent money clubs benefitted enough from oil/arab money, its a little too late and even unfair to stop other from doing the same.

Agree, FFP is not enough. Extra rules needs to be there to control the insane spending of the "already" big clubs (I'm talking about Real, Chelsea, MU, BM... even Barca). Especially the wages... it's ridiculous

It's an old topic but the new television contract in EPL will blow everything away, again