Portsmouth farce should have been prevented, says Michel Platini

Michel Platini, the Uefa president, declared last night that the Premier League’s spirit of “liberalism” was to blame for Portsmouth’s descent towards financial oblivion.
In an interview with The Times, Platini rejected persistent accusations of Anglophobia, tipping Fabio Capello’s team as one of three favourites to win the World Cup and dismissing theories of a power shift away from England in the Champions League.
But he condemned the situation at Portsmouth, who have become the first Premier League club to go into administration and still face the threat of liquidation unless they can satisfy their creditors, who include Revenue & Customs.
Richard Scudamore, the Premier League chief executive, has said that Portsmouth’s problems “can only be down to rank bad management” under a succession of owners, but Platini believes that greater financial regulation would have prevented a situation whereby excessive spending allowed them to run up debts that stand at more than £100 million by building an FA Cup-winning squad that they could not afford.
“I’m not in favour of the big liberalism of what has happened with the English clubs,” Platini said. “I’m not an expert of finance, but it was easy to understand that clubs like Portsmouth would be in big danger of going bankrupt and going down. We have to protect them. Why was this club winning [the FA Cup in 2008] with losses of £50 million?
“When I was younger, I remember seeing people with no money buy Ferraris — and then, because of the Ferrari, they would get the best girls! That’s not correct, but it’s what has happened in football: you don’t have the money to buy the players, but you get the players and in the end you cheat and win the competition. That’s not correct.”
The Premier League introduced tighter financial regulations this season — partly in response to Portsmouth’s situation — that, according to Scudamore, have “reduced the risk of a repeat situation down to the absolute minimum”.
Platini has welcomed that as a step in the right direction, but it is a long way short of his “Financial Fair Play” initiative — a scheme that Scudamore expects the leading Premier League clubs to oppose “if it comes to an absolute regulation of their income”.
In response to Platini’s comments, a Premier League spokesman said last night: “Had we been able to introduce our financial criteria a year earlier, that would have certainly helped ease the problems faced by Portsmouth. The new rules, which we believe will help clubs operate in a more sustainable manner, combined with further regulations to be introduced this summer, should prevent another club in the Premier League reaching the point where their very existence is threatened.
“Having said that, regulation is not a cure-all. There are numerous examples of clubs in leagues deemed to be more heavily regulated than the Premier League that have got into difficulties.”
It was also reported last night that the League is considering a radical change to transfer rules to force all clubs to pay fees within a year of the signing rather than in instalments over the length of a player’s contract.
Platini plans to introduce the “Financial Fair Play” regulations for clubs involved in Uefa competition in time for the 2012-13 season, which will restrict owners such as Roman Abramovich at Chelsea and Sheikh Mansour at Manchester City to a maximum €45 million (about £40 million) investment on players over an initial three-year period. That sum will be reduced to €30 million over the three years from 2015 to 2018, ending what Platini calls “financial doping”.
Source:The Times