Barney Ronay wrote in The Guardian yesterday that “financial fair play was put in place to control the richest players at European football’s table”. This is not true. It’s an idea deliberately used, or used out of ignorance, that misleads people about FFP.

In the words of UEFA President Aleksander Čeferin speaking at a seminar in June 2019, "financial fair play was mainly established to terminate the losses and we succeeded. Now the European football is profitable."

Čeferin went on to say that terminating losses was not the same as competitive balance or as Ronay would put it, controlling the rich clubs. Čeferin said "but of course competitive balance is a different thing from financial fair play".

I don’t know if journalists purposefully mislead readers about FFP because of their bias against the “new” rich clubs, or just rich clubs in general, or they are genuinely ignorant of the facts due to a lack of professionalism.

Whatever the reason, their mischaracterization of FFP as a set of rules designed to protect smaller clubs from being dominated by larger clubs only serves to inflame their readers who feel “cheated” if another club, a larger competitor, is in breach of FFP.

The idea that somehow the CAS ruling on Manchester City signifies the death of FFP is another misleading idea. Čeferin stated at that seminar in 2019 that FFP had succeeded in its objectives, it’s TRUE objectives. Competitive balance, he said, is what needs change.

He said the idea of FFP as a tool for achieving competitive balance needed “renaming, maybe reshaping, maybe modernizing”. He mentioned proposals such as limiting squad size, solidarity payments and what he called "luxury taxes".

Therefore, UEFA has already recognized that FFP and limiting the ability of owners to invest in their clubs is not the way they want to go about trying to achieve greater competitive balance. In fact, IT NEVER WAS. City can't kill what never was.

In the meantime, journalists will continue to push their ideas, their biases and their misrepresentation of the facts. Not much we can do. We speak out about these things. We try to debate them. And we end up characterized as trolls.

Nothing City has achieved through CAS has killed FFP. If City killed anything let us hope it killed the misuse of FFP to protect the old established order from clubs who now have a chance to challenge them.