Actually, I tell a lie, as City’s deal includes one unique element, the Etihad Campus, which is perhaps the cleverest and certainly the most innovative part of the agreement. This is a gigantic redevelopment project on 80 acres of land adjacent to the stadium, including a relocated training ground, youth academy, a sports science facility, office space, a call centre and City Square retail outlets. The academy will be seriously impressive, catering for up to 400 young players, with 16 football pitches, a 7,000 capacity stadium for youth matches and on-site accommodation.
Such a development will not only benefit the community, but will bring a raft of sponsorship opportunities. Nothing like this has been done before, so it will be very difficult for UEFA to assess and almost impossible to deem unfair. In fact, this is exactly the type of expenditure that UEFA is trying to encourage with direct youth and community development costs being totally excluded from the FFP break-even calculation. For someone with pockets as deep as Sheikh Mansour, this is effectively “free” money, at least in terms of FFP.
On top of that, Annex X allows any profits from non-football operations to be included in the calculation, so long as the operations are: (a) based at, or in close proximity to, a club’s stadium and training facilities, such as a hotel, restaurant, conference centre, business premises (for rental), health-care centre, other sports teams; and (b) clearly using the name/brand of a club as part of their operations.
That sounds very familiar, so it’s a double whammy for City: the costs for this development are excluded, while the profits from the business located there are included. Not only that, but UEFA should be positively delighted, as it’s very much in the spirit of the stated objectives of FFP. Given those factors, the temptation must be to load up the sponsorship on this part of the agreement, so the deal split might be more like £10 million on shirt sponsorship, £5 million on naming rights and £25 million on the campus. We shall see.
