Financial Fair Play Is Gone: What Replaced It, and Why 70% Is the Number

The name people still use was retired in 2022

“Financial Fair Play” remains the phrase in general use, and it no longer describes the rules in force.

Football closed another financing route entirely in 2015 — see third-party ownership.

The Premier League moved to the same kind of test for 2026-27 — see squad cost ratio.

In 2022 UEFA replaced it with Financial Sustainability Regulations, built on three pillars: solvency, stability and cost control.

The shift in vocabulary is meaningful. Fair play implies a level competitive field. Sustainability implies clubs not going out of business. Those are different objectives, and the new rules are more honest about which one they are pursuing.

The squad cost rule is the centrepiece

The headline mechanism is a cap on squad spending as a proportion of revenue.

Spending on player and coach wages, transfer costs and agent fees is limited to 70% of club revenue — phased in:

Season	Cap
2023-24	90%
2024-25	80%
From 2025-26	70%

A ratio is a very different instrument from a fixed cap. It does not equalise spending — a club with far greater revenue may still spend far more in absolute terms. It constrains how much of your own income you may commit to the squad.

Compare rugby’s fixed £6.4m salary cap or the NWSL’s fixed team cap. Those attempt competitive balance. A percentage cap does not, and is not trying to.

What it actually prevents

If the rule does not equalise clubs, what does it do?

It prevents a club spending money it does not have. Under a ratio, revenue must arrive before the wage bill can rise — so a club cannot commit to a squad on the assumption of future success, future qualification, or a future owner’s willingness to cover losses.

That is the failure mode the regulations exist for. Clubs that collapse generally do so by committing to costs against expected income that then does not arrive.

Losses got easier, not harder

This surprises people who assume the rules tightened.

The football earnings rule replaced FFP’s break-even requirement and permits larger losses — in the region of €60m over three years, roughly double what FFP allowed.

UEFA loosened the loss limit while tightening the cost ratio. That combination says something specific: the concern is no longer that owners invest in clubs, but that clubs commit to costs they cannot carry.

An owner putting money in is now treated as less dangerous than a wage bill outrunning revenue.

Sanctions are graduated, and fines go sideways

Breaches attract predefined financial penalties scaled to how far the threshold was crossed, and those fines are redistributed among the clubs that complied.

That detail is worth pausing on. A fine paid to the governing body is a cost. A fine paid to your competitors is a competitive transfer — it makes breaching worse than the headline number suggests.

Beyond fines, serious or repeated breaches bring sporting sanctions: limits on squad size, restrictions on registering players, and points deductions.

Graduating the response is the same design as the NFL’s escalating cap penalties and snooker’s minimum foul — make the small breach a price and the large one existential, so nobody can treat the sanction as a cost of doing business.

More on how football is governed is in how sport is run.