Today, governing bodies have become more stringent towards financial irregularities being done by soccer clubs and both FIFA and UEFA are showing their dire concerns for the playing and non-playing staff especially those who are not being paid for a long period of time. Recently, FFPs were in the headlines for European watchdog’s strict warning to every empaneled side to either reduce their expenses or stop buying players without having money into their accounts and now UEFA has again tightened its arm for recurring expenditures including salaries and other routine expenses. Interestedly, there are top notch sides who have not even met the breakeven point into their financial statements which include league giant Liverpool – surprising! Moreover, five of the UEFA cubs’ prize money has been seized for failing to pay the important overdue payments to other clubs, employees, and tax authorities for the season 2014-15. The infamous list includes: FC Astra Ploiești, Budućnost Podgorica, FK Ekranas, CFR 1907 Cluj, and Bursaspor. Apart from these five, seven more sides have kept under scrutiny list and asked to submit further documents for last three years in support of their claims that they have paid their compulsory dues and these seven clubs include: AS Roma, Liverpool, AS Monaco, Beşiktaş JK, FC Internazionale Milano, Krasnodar, and Sporting Clube de Portugal.
The UEFA Club Financial Control Body (CFCB), who is responsible for showing teeth to defaulting sides, has even asked other sides who are marginally above the breakeven to make sure they restrict their expenses in time to avoid any problem in the next financial season. It said in a statement, “The CFCB has opened formal investigations into seven clubs as they disclosed a break-even deficit on the basis of their financial reporting periods ending in 2012 and 2013.
“These clubs will need to submit additional monitoring information during October and November upon the deadlines set by the CFCB, subsequent to which an additional communication shall be made and conservatory measures may be imposed.”
As far The Reds are concerned, they are confident they would easily bypass it as many sponsorship deals are in the pipeline which would help them clear all the pending dues in no time. Calling the current step taken by the CFBC as an important one, UEFA added, “The introduction of the UEFA club licensing and financial fair play regulations has already had a very positive impact on the scale of overdue payables, as they have decreased from 57 million euros in June 2011 to eight million euros in June 2014. In addition, aggregate losses reported by Europe’s first-division clubs in the 2013 financial year have gone down to 800 million euros from a record-reported deficit of 1.7 billion euros in 2011.”