Will UEFA change the rules? It wants to replace financial fair play with a salary cap and a luxury tax!

There’s been a lot of fuss about him lately. The Financial Fair Play (FFP) rule, especially when looking at this year’s PSG reinforcements, gives the impression of being very imperfect. But it may soon be over. UEFA is due to discuss an interesting new proposal at its meeting in September that would replace the FFP entirely.

It is based on the salary cap, which has been discussed in European football for years. However, the presence of the Financial Fair Play rule, in force since 2010, has more or less prevented such a thing.

What exactly should the salary cap look like? This is yet to be discussed, but there are two ways. One is to set a percentage limit (70% is being talked about), linked to the club’s income. The other is a clearly defined amount of money for wages, which would be the same for everyone.

An interesting element of the whole proposal is the so-called luxury tax. This would have to be paid by anyone who breached the salary cap, apparently at the exact amount by which the cap was exceeded. The money collected would then go into the UEFA fund and the vast majority of it would be redistributed to others.

But beware! This would not go on forever, of course, as clubs whose owners see a de facto lying figure of eight in their bank accounts would not exactly mind paying some sort of tax.

The European Football Union now wants to be much stricter, and so if a club repeatedly exceeds the salary cap, it will simply be banned from European cups.

This proposal is supposed to be both fairer and more transparent than the current financial fair play rule, which is criticised almost every year. It will be discussed at the UEFA meeting in September.

There, among other things, they are to discuss how to prevent any future plans to separate some clubs and set up their own competition, as was the case this spring with the European Super League.

Sources: The Times, Daily Mail, 90min