By David Owen
January 22 – UEFA President Aleksander Čeferin has followed up the body’s latest Club Licensing Benchmarking Report, which documented growing disparities between Europe’s super-elite and the rest, by floating the idea of a “luxury tax”.
Čeferin used an interview with La Tribune de Genève, a French-language Swiss newspaper, to identify a range of possible measures, including – in addition to the tax – regulating or banning player loans and limiting the number of players a club can have under contract. He said some of the measures could be implemented from next season.
His comments were rather short on detail: on the tax, he outlined only the principle that “if a club spends more than it should, it will pay a tax on the difference”. However, they may herald a renewed drive to do something about competitive balance, which Čeferin volunteered was the biggest problem facing modern football.
The report painted a picture of mounting polarisation in a still booming industry, noting, for example, that whereas in 2010 the top 12, so-called “global” clubs generated 25% of the commercial and sponsorship revenue produced by all European top-division clubs, by 2016, this proportion had risen to no less than 40%.
The UEFA President told La Tribune de Genève that while football would remain a business, “we must prevent the ditch being dug”. He went on: “Our financial fair play specialists think that in 2020, if things go on like today, five European clubs will have annual budgets of more than €1 billion. For me, that would be a disaster.”
The club with the highest revenue in the 2016 financial year was Manchester United, with €689 million, ahead of the two Spanish giants, Barcelona and Real Madrid, both on €620 million.
Regarding player numbers, Čeferin observed that one unnamed Italian club had 103 players under contract. “There too we can set limits.”
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