UEFA relaxes financial fair play rules due to COVID-19 crisis

FFP rules mean that, over a three-year period, clubs competing in European competition are not permitted to lose more than 30 million euros ($33.7m).

However, given the damage done to the footballing economy by the interruption to the sport caused by the pandemic, UEFA has agreed to a loosening of the rules which, it says, "aim at addressing the actual problem which is revenue shortfall due to COVID-19 and not financial mismanagement".

It means that clubs will be given longer than usual to show they have met payments owed on transfers and salaries, while "the assessment of financial year 2020 is postponed for one season, and will be assessed together with the financial year 2021".

These measures do not impact on decisions already taken before the crisis, so for example French club Marseille are still set to be punished after they were referred in March to the adjudicatory chamber of UEFA's Club Financial Control Body for not complying with an agreement to balance their books. Manchester City have been banned from Europe for two years and handed a 30 million-euro fine for serious breaches of FFP regulations between 2012 and 2016.

The English club have appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland, which will announce its judgement on the case in July. The FFP rules were brought in to combat growing debt in European football.

Assessments began in 2011 when European clubs reported overall losses of 1.7 billion euros. In contrast, according to UEFA's most recent annual "benchmarking" report, the 700 top-tier clubs across the continent made a combined profit of 140 million euros in 2018.