Clubs are risking their future by pouring fortunes into attempts to qualify for Europe, writes Emmet Malone

THE FAI have, over the last couple of years, made a good deal of how much attention has been paid abroad to their attempts to promote better financial stewardship by clubs here.

Still, as Uefa contemplates strict new rules for clubs competing in the Champions and Europa League, the organisation is, in truth, unlikely to find the Irish example all that inspiring.

Uefa president, Michel Platini, and its general secretary, Gianni Infantino, have both been talking up the prospect of tough new regulations aimed at forcing clubs to operate at break even or better and keep levels of debt low which, they hope, can be in place for the 2012/13 season.

A panel intended to make a detailed assessment of the present situation and then provide recommendations on just how high the judicious financial management bar should be set has already been appointed under the chairmanship of former Belgian prime minister, Jean-Luc Dehaene.

In Ireland, however, the attempt at greater regulation has contributed to an even greater sense of mayhem than had previously prevailed. Most of the league’s bigger clubs have found the period of “adjustment” acutely painful and the combination of continuing crises at club and sanctions (or the threat of them) by the authorities has severely damaged the credibility of the league here over the past couple of years.

Quite whether Platini and Infantino have the stomach to risk similarly tarnishing the image of Uefa’s cash cow, the Champions League, remains to be seen but if they decide to press ahead with the rule changes it is difficult to see how they could avoid it given the scale of the problems at the Continent’s leading clubs and the relative shortness of the run in to implementation that they are talking about.

When the competition resumes next Tuesday evening, Europe’s six most indebted clubs will be amongst the 16 sides still battling it out for the club game’s richest prize.

Manchester United top the list with American owners, the Glazers, having plunged the club some €860 million into the red and if the threat of the new rules is keeping the family awake at night then it isn’t showing for plans are afoot to load another €575 million in borrowings onto the Old Trafford outfit during the coming year.

Despite a massive bail out a few years ago, Real Madrid come second (or sixth, if you accept their take on the figures) with Barcelona, Inter, AC Milan and Arsenal next up in that order – the Londoners reckoned to be in hock to the tune of some €341 million.

United, as it happens, made a profit last year which you might expect given that they won both the Premier League and League Cup while finishing as runners-up to Barcelona in the Champions League.

The club’s surplus, though, would have been a deficit had it not been for the sale of Ronaldo to Real Madrid – a club that appears hell bent on actually achieving self destruction no matter how many times they are hauled back from the brink.

Neither Chelsea nor Manchester City feature on the list as their wealthy owners have opted not to treat their lavish spending as loans, but Roman Abramovich’s side has already rather gloriously missed one self set target for self sufficiency and with wages for the 2007/08 season running at €197 million, some 30 per cent up on the previous year, they seem unlikely to achieve the required break even any time soon.

City, meanwhile, were said by their owners only recently to be in “investment mode” and it is almost inconceivable that revenues will come anywhere close to catching up with spending in just three seasons.

The figures suggest, in any case, that most clubs always spend slightly more than they earn in the hope that achieving their target will bring sufficient reward to make up the shortfall or, failing that, they will somehow figure it out later.

In 2007/08, the last season for which complete set of figures for the Premier League are available, 14 of the 20 clubs ran at a loss despite stunning revenue growth over the previous decade and a half.

The apparent insanity of it all is illustrated by the fact that Serie A revenues jumped by 34 per cent in 2007/08 but wages went up by 35 per cent and a more recent Uefa survey of around 650 clubs across Europe found that just about 50 per cent failed to break even with 20 per cent spending in excess of 120 per cent of revenue.

A significant number, the organisation estimated, had no realistic prospect of ever paying off their debts.

Portsmouth would appear to fall into this category with the English outfit now paying a hefty price for their assault on the big time a couple of years back.

Under Harry Redknapp, they became the sixth biggest spenders on player wages in the English top flight, a punt that secured them an eighth-place finish, an FA Cup success and a place in the then Uefa Cup.

Just as the dream of winning the Champions League tends to distort the spending of the very biggest clubs, however, desperation to qualify for it regularly skews the thinking of those in charge at lesser clubs.

West Ham’s new owners, David Gold and David Sullivan, talked about getting the Londoners into the competition within seven years at least until they realised that the club has already spent €86 million on players who earn around €68 million annually and run up debts of more than €125 million getting to where they are now which scarcely seems like value for money.

Across Europe the problem is the same even if its scale varies with Shelbourne, for instance, having mortgaged its future in the hope of hitting the Champions League jackpot.

The FAI ultimately made an example of the Dubliners but the problems persist and it is hard to

imagine Uefa getting quite so tough with big English, Spanish or Italian clubs it has had to spend so much time and effort keeping within the fold in the first place.

Mr Dehaene, one suspects, might just find over the next couple of years that compared to sorting this one out, running Belgium was a piece of cake.