What happened to FFP?
STCC was a set of rules that were put into effect in 2013 by the English top-flight league to ensure:
– Premier League Clubs could not dump all their TV money straight into salaries
– Clubs could not dump unlimited money into their salary budget
A club could only increase its overall wage bill using TV money by 8% a season. This allowed for a little extra investment but was supposed to prevent big clubs from gaining an even bigger advantage, and protected small clubs from overextending themselves. The other part of STCC was that if a club wanted to increase their total wage bill by more than 8%, they could – as long as 100% of any increase over that 8% came from non-TV revenues, which means commercial deals (sponsorships). On the surface, this seems reasonable – if a club gets more commercial money, they should be able to spend it as they see fit, including on wages.
The problem though was that big clubs, by their very nature, had vastly bigger commercial revenue deals than small clubs so in 2o19 Premier League clubs voted to ditch STCC.
UEFA Financial Fair Play is still in existence but instead of wages looks at losses and allows clubs who want to complete in Europe lose up to 30m euros (£25m) each season monitored over a three-year rolling programme.
In the case of West Ham, they lost £28m last season (2018/2019) but they made £17m profit the season before that (2017/2018) and £43m three seasons ago (2016/2017).
That leaves the Hammers a net profit over three years of £32m and since they could lose up to £75m over three years they have over a £100m buffer available as it stands at the moment. Of course, the other factor is West Ham would need to qualify for a European competition to be banned from it.
That’s why you don’t hear FFP mentioned as an excuse anymore!