Jog On Fawaz

[wassy04]

Gibson is pissing in the wind!

All that Morris has done is sell an asset - the ground.

He may have sold the ground to another one of his Companies but that is not illegal so long as he did so for a fair price; HMRC are the people who make that decision not the EFL.

Yep, they may change the FFP rules to discount this option. If nothing else it’s dangerous having clubs selling their major asset to private companies as Coventry will testify. Sounds like Sheff We’d May have done the same too.

The way to punish Derby is to carefully monitor how the grounds and income is now accounted. I would assume they now can no longer take any income from any stadium related activities? One thing that I was wondering, as stadium improvement costs are outside of FFP does that also apply to stadium costs. Is the repurchase of a stadium say? Hypothetically could they just repurchase it next year and the cost wouldn’t count towards FFP? (I think the rules will change before this happens)

They will still take in income from ticket sales but will have to pay rent to the Stadium owners; they will also lose out on any peripheral income which will now go straight to the stadium owner, such as conferencing and all of the concessions.

Buying the stadium back would not be a problem either; they would take out a mortgage or some other commercial loan and offset the cost over a number of years.

I cannot for the life of me see why this should impact on FFP or lead to a rule change; they have done nothing wrong.

Well if they can legitimately buy the stadium back and it not impact FFP is this not just another way of an owner investing large capital into the club? Thus getting around FFP and making the rules redundant?

I think that is a strange way of looking at the situation.

They now pay rent for a facility they once owned; not only that but they miss out on around 3m worth of income each season.

If they decide to buy back the stadium they will still have a mortgage or loan to service.

All of this impacts on FFP because it decreases their income which has a negative impact.

If you think that selling the club to a related company is equivalent to injecting capitol into the football club, that's fine, but it cannot be done more than once.

The sale took place to avoid transgressing FFP, of that there is no doubt, it also left them in a far weaker position long term.

So you’re seeing it as either an £80mil loan or a minor loss in income. What I was wondering was whether an owner could inject £80m directly to repurchase the stadium and then class it as a stadium cost which sits outside of FFP?