Two of the world’s biggest football clubs- Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain have been accused of financial fraud by a series of investigative reports published by German outlet Der Spiegel.
In the middle of last week, FIFA had announced that their servers had been hacked and they were expecting some information which is confidential to them to leak out because of that. At the end of last week, an investigative report from Der Spiegel brought out shocking revelations about the mismanagement by FIFA and the two clubs.
Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules are a set of rules setup by FIFA themselves to make sure that clubs don’t overspend and they stay within their limits of signing players during the transfer window. This is also aimed to bridge the gap between the smaller and the bigger clubs and to reduce the number of clubs that go bankrupt.
Der Spiegel though, have stated that the oil-rich owners of Man City and PSG pumped well over 1 billion euros of money into their clubs and while FIFA knew of it, the organization’s president Gianni Infantino and many other executives agreed a settlement to help them avoid any FFP sanctions.
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The owners of both of the clubs are based in the middle east and are influential billionaires. City are owned by Sheikh Mansour- the deputy prime minister of UAE and the brother of the prime minister of the country. He has a net worth about over 5 billion USD, as things stand.
Fresh reports have also stated that both clubs paid their sponsors such that they could pump money into the clubs. And not just that, both of the clubs presented highly modified accounts of their spendings to FIFA, when the actual numbers were much more higher.
Both the clubs have refused to comment on the issue, but Der Spiegel have stated that they deceived UEFA and FIFA over how much they had spent and their spendings were well more inflated than what they presented them to be.