Manchester City tarnish financial fair play guidelines
In recent days Manchester City have completed a deal to sell the naming rights of their stadium; what was once the ‘City of Manchester Stadium’ has now been named the ‘Etihad Stadium’ in a blockbuster deal worth around £400million over ten years!
It has made a joke of the financial fair play guidelines as Sheikh Mansour the Manchester City owner also has ties into the Etihad Airline company, and by striking this mega-deal, the Blue’s owner has basically just injected £40million a year by dictating Etihad to make this move. It is immoral and ridiculously unfair to the other remaining Premiership teams!
This move has come in for some fierce criticism from the likes of Arsene Wenger and West Ham part owner David Sullivan have branded it a “nonsense”. Sullivan went on to state that it’s like David Gold (the second owner of West Ham) renaming the stadium the ‘Anne Summers Stadium’ and pumping in huge amount of money from there.
I think it’s key to point of that the selling of naming rights is not bad, but the manner in which Manchester City have done this, is just ridiculous. Arsenal themselves have a contract with Emirates in which they will receive £100million over a 15year period and Bayern Munich also will get £120million over a 30 year period from Allianz. The scale of City’s move is hugely unprecedented and wrong for the sport.
