The biggest reforms of European soccer’s financial controls in a generation will stop short of creating U.S.-style salary caps to restrain teams’ spending, and instead will enact rules that are unlikely to stop the continent’s richest clubs from buying up the best talent and winning the most coveted trophies.
UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, has spent more than a year in talks with a representative group for elite clubs about a new model to replace its so-called financial fair play rules, the cost-control mechanism that has for a decade sought to limit team expenditures as part of an effort to promote competition.
UEFA has finally alighted on a replacement. Teams’ soccer-related spending, according to people briefed on the regulations, will not be able to surpass 70 percent of their income, a regulation that appears watered down from the strict salary cap that had long been championed by UEFA’s president, Aleksander Ceferin.
Ceferin had for at least five years discussed imposing salary caps as a way to address European soccer’s growing wealth gap. But faced with the complexities of European employment law and deep-pocketed opposition, UEFA has abandoned the concept of a hard cap and, according to three people familiar with the proposals, settled on a proposal that — after a three-year implementation period — will require teams to keep their spending within a strict ratio.
The rules will be added to UEFA’s rule book after a vote of its executive board on April 7....
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