Financial Fair Play in European Club Football: What Is It All About?

The new UEFA Club Licensing and Financial Fair Play Regulations have encountered stiff criticism. The concerns are that the new regulation may harm football in three different ways: By forgoing the potential benefits from substantial injections of "external" money into payrolls, by restricting competition in the player market without at the same dine achieving benefits from more balanced competition, and by creating some sort of barrier to entry which could "freeze" the current hierarchy of clubs. It is the purpose of this paper to take these concerns as a starting point for discussing the likely effects of the new regulations. As a by-product it will become obvious why and in which points the concerns are unfounded.