Perhaps the biggest controversy in soccer today is the penalization of Manchester City F.C., one of the "Big Six" clubs of English football, and the most successful over the last 15 years, for breaking Financial Fair Play (FFP) laws that govern the finances of clubs.

For some background, Manchester City wasn't a major English club until 2008, when they were acquired by the Abu Dhabi United Group, a holding firm for the Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan and the royal family of the United Arab Emirates. Prior to then, Man City had only minimal success, including a couple of English First Division titles in 1968 and 1937, and four FA Cup victories all prior to the 70s. This pales in comparison to their crosstown rivals Manchester United, as well as other English giants such as Liverpool and Arsenal, all with multiple league titles and FA Cup trophies across multiple eras, and European Champions League triumphs for the former two teams. Although not a small club, per se, City had not had consistent glory over their 128 year history, even facing the occasional relegation to the Second Division of English football.

Beginning with the Emirati acquisition, their new ownership began spending heavily, signing world class talents like Carlos Tevez, Sergio Aguero, Kevin de Bruyne, and Erling Haaland to fill out their squad over the next two decades. The sudden rise in quality of players allowed them to compete with the prestigious legacy clubs of England, and their watershed moment came in 2012 when Aguero scored a last minute goalon the final day of the Premier League to catapult them above Manchester United in the rankings and the club's first league championship since 1968. Since then, they've won an additional 7 Premiere League titles, 4 FA Cups, and the European Champions League in 2023, becoming only the second English team besides Manchester United in 1999 to earn the "treble"- a league championship, cup championship, and European championship all in the same year.

But now the party might be coming to an end. English courts have found Man City guilty of inflating sponsorship revenues, hiding operating costs, misstating financial accounts, breaching spending limits, and a number of other FFP violations. Although City will likely appeal and drag out the court process, it is looking increasingly likely that they will be punished through some combination of stripped titles and trophies, financial penalties, or forced relegation.

Every bit of media coverage I've seen of this story has been harshly negative towards them, and while I completely agree that it is likely City and their parents at the Abu Dhabi United Group did in fact engage in financial hijinks to cover up their cash injections into the club, I believe this misses the broader point: FFP is itself a corrupt system, created to protect the legacy clubs of England and Europe from new blood and greater competition.

The basic idea behind Financial Fair Play is a system of financial regulations in European football designed to prevent clubs from spending excessively relative to the revenue they generate. The belief behind it is that football clubs should operate as financially sustainable businesses rather than relying on wealthy owners to cover their losses. In other words, a club that only generates, say, $70 million in revenue from tickets, merchandise, sponsorships, broadcast rights, etc., should only be allowed to spend approximately that much on player wages and other annual expenses. Wealthy owners, be they billionaires like Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, who owned Chelsea football club for a long period, or the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia that owns Newcastle F.C., or Qatar Sports Investments that owns Paris Saint-Germain, would not be allowed to inject their own seemingly-limitless capital into the club and make it more competitive on the domestic and continental stage.

However, the real effect of FFP is that it protects legacy football clubs that have achieved tremendous success in the past, before FFP regulations were in place: Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Juventus, AC Milan, and Bayern Munich. Such clubs, owing to their rich history, have enormous fan bases spread across the world, leading to large revenue streams across all of the aforementioned products. This, in turn, enables them to outspend smaller clubs that don't have such large fan bases and revenue streams, and therefore cannot compete in the market to sign the best players and biggest stars.

The way smaller clubs achieved parity with those historic giants was to become acquired by an entity such as Abu Dhabi United Group, the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, Qatar Sports Investments or Roman Abramovich, and then their deep-pocketed owners would use their own funds to make them competitive. FFP exists to create a regulatory barrier to entry for these parties under the guise of "fairness," pulling up the ladder behind the legacy football behemoths.

Financial Fair Play is also a good example of a cartel, as described in economics: an arrangement between otherwise competing firms to restrict competition for their own benefit. In the Premier League, clubs collectively vote on rules governing their own competitive environment, creating a potential conflict of interest. This was, interestingly enough, demonstrated in a November 2025 vote by the Premier League clubs 14 to 6 in favor of a new "Squad Cost Revenue" system that ties spending to each club's individual revenue, rejecting a separate proposal that would've placed a common ceiling on spending. All six of the dissenting votes came from clubs outside of the traditional Big Six, demonstrating that these votes often align with each club's individual interests.

In Germany, there is a rule known as 50% + 1 that requires the majority of ownership for any club in the country to be by the fans themselves, never any singular entity. The premise behind this rule is to keep football clubs there community owned and controlled, outside the hands of billionaires, corporations, and sovereign wealth funds. However, what it has also done is create a monopoly by one giant club: Bayern Munich. Owing to its historical success dating back to the 70s, when they had stars such as Franz Beckenbauer and Gerd Muller, Bayern generates far more revenue and drastically outspends every other German club. The result is domination: they've won 34 of 63 Bundesliga titles since 1963, including 11 consecutive from 2013 to 2023, and 21 DFB Pokals. Although this system has its defenders, I'm of the belief that it produces a boring competition when you know the winner with 90%+ certainty from the outset. The fundamental reason to watch any sport is uncertainty about the eventual winner, and when one team can collect all of the best talent year-in, year-out, and dominate the competition, it significantly diminishes any excitement or incentive to be a fan and viewer.

In summation, FFP and similar rules like 50%+1 should be scrapped, and, instead, we should allow more large money interests to acquire and inject outside capital into smaller football clubs, enabling them to compete with historical giants. This produces a more exciting contest relative to seeing the usual characters, such as Bayern Munich, Real Madrid, Barcelona or Manchester United dominate.