It's just there so that a man city or a Chelsea can never happen again. In other words to keep the status quo, you can only invest or be sponsored to a percentage of the total worth, size and overall earnings of your club.
There’s an element of that, but it’s also a protection against clubs and fans desires to become the next Chelsea or city leading to them accepting ownership and responsible spending from charlatans that don’t have those means.
Without ffp there were more villa’s, pompey’s, Leeds’s, RS’s first americans, and even city’s first dodgy rich guy than there were abramoviches and sheik mansours.
Since football revenue exploded there’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle and for the wider good of the game it’s better to limit the chance of rogue spending above your means at the cost of stifling competition at the top.
It’s possible to compete from where we are. It just won’t happen the same way it has at Chelsea and city, where spending good money after bad and blowing teams out of the water for players can happen entirely.
We’ve got sufficient wealth that we can now attract a higher calibre of player than we could, through wages that would make them sign for us when they might not have otherwise.
What we need to do is be successful with our player scouting to mean those signings are more likely to be successful, because we can’t just flush them and try again if they’re not, due to ffp.
We need to be more like Leicester (with greater pull) than city or Chelsea.
Once we get the players, we can compete for top 4, once we are in the top four, revenues rise. Once revenues rise we can utilise our wealth more.
It’s going to take a bit of time and a lot of good decisions, but ffp doesn’t stop it from being possible.
Where we need to make sure we are the best is in player identification and commercial strategy.
If we get the signing wrong, ffp will make us pay for it.
If we get them right, but can’t cash in with increased revenues, we’ll fade away.