Kevin

Pakistán e India se odian, viven en guerra, tienen una carrera de arsenal nuclear. Sin embargo tienen la mejor ceremonia de apertura y cierre de frontera del mundo.

The penalty that turned the game in Hearts favour. Seeing a lot of complaints about this online. Personally can't see how they don't give it

This one is a football accounting gem. I promise you will love it. In January 2023, Chelsea signed Mykhailo Mudryk from Shakhtar Donetsk for £88.5 million. The deal was jaw dropping on its own. But what really made the football world stop and stare was not the fee. It was the contract length. Eight and a half years. The longest contract in Premier League history at the time. Journalists questioned it. Rival clubs complained about it. And most fans had absolutely no idea what Chelsea were actually doing. But let me tell you. They were not being reckless. They were doing math. Very clever, very deliberate, very legal math. And the tool they were using is called amortisation. This is part of what football insiders consider during transfers. Are you with me? Good. Here is the simplest way to understand amortization. When a club signs a player, they spread the accounting of the cost of the transfer fee over the period of the contract signed by the player. So for example, when Harry Maguire signed for Manchester United in 2019 for £80 million on a six year deal, that did not show up as an £80 million expense in year one. It worked out as an annual amortisation cost of £13.3 million per year. That is the entire concept. Think of it the same way you think of a mortgage. You do not pay the full value of a house on the day you move in. You spread it. Football clubs do the exact same thing with players, and it is not a trick or a cheat. It is standard accounting practice used across every industry in the world. Check it. It's International Standard 38- used for accounting for intangible assets. The reason it matters so much in football is because of Financial Fair Play and Profitability and Sustainability Rules, which regulate how much clubs can lose in any given period. Amortisation costs are added to the profit and loss account each year, so the lower your annual amortisation figure, the healthier your books look. And here is where contract length becomes a weapon. Now let us do the math together. By using amortisation to complete Mudryk's transfer, Chelsea were able to record his £80 million fee as just £9.41 million per year for UEFA's FFP calculation. Had they signed Mudryk to a four year deal instead, his fee would have been recorded as £20 million per year. Same player. Same fee. More than double the annual accounting cost just by changing the contract length. That is the power of what Chelsea figured out. They did the same with Enzo Fernandez, signed for a then-British record of £106.8 million on an eight and a half year deal, which translated to an annual amortisation expense of approximately £13.4 million. And Moises Caicedo for £115 million on eight and a half years. And Wesley Fofana for £70 million on seven years. Repeat this across an entire squad and a billion pounds of spending starts to look manageable on paper. Did you get that? Now let's look at another part of amortization- the book value piece, because this changes how you think about every transfer you have ever watched. Book value is the difference between the transfer fee spent on a player minus what has already been amortised. For example, after two years, a £50 million player signed on a five year deal has a book value of £30 million. Any sale above £30 million is recorded as a profit. Anything below is a loss. This is why clubs can sell a player for what looks like a loss and still report a gain in their accounts. Take this example: a player is signed for £40 million on a five year contract. He is not a success and is sold two years later for £26 million. At the point of sale, his book value is £24 million, meaning the club actually books a £2 million profit on the deal. Fans see terrible business. The accountants see a gain. Same transaction, completely different reality. Manchester City lived this with Robinho. He was bought for £32.5 million on a four year deal in 2008, with annual amortisation of £8.1 million. He was sold after two years, leaving a book value of £16.3 million. City sold him for £18 million and claimed a £1.7 million profit on the sale. Supporters spent years calling it a disaster. The finance department called it a profit. There is one more trick worth knowing: contract extensions. If a player signs a new contract during their existing deal, the remaining unamortised value is spread over the length of the new contract. So if you bought a player for £60 million on a five year deal and after two years you extend his contract by three more years, the remaining £36 million book value is now spread across five new years instead of three. That reduces the annual amortisation cost and can reduce FFP losses by millions per year. Extending a contract is not always about keeping a player happy. Sometimes it is purely a financial decision dressed up as a vote of confidence. Back to Chelsea. Other clubs eventually complained loudly enough that UEFA had to act. UEFA amended its Financial Sustainability Regulations in July 2023, introducing a rule that limits the amortisation of player registrations to a maximum of five years, regardless of how long the contract actually runs. The Premier League followed in December 2023, when shareholders voted to apply the same five year maximum to all new or extended player contracts going forward. The loophole was closed. But crucially, the rule could not be applied retrospectively, meaning every player Chelsea signed on those long contracts before December 2023 continues to be amortised over the full contract length. Chelsea were already finished with their biggest spending windows by the time the door was shut. The timing was not a coincidence. As I conclude, always remember this- the contract is never just a contract. It is an accounting instrument. And the clubs that understand that are always three moves ahead of the ones that do not. I hope you enjoyed this. Tomorrow, by 7AM WAT, We get into the wage bill, and why a £50 million transfer can quietly become a £150 million commitment before you have blinked. Thanks for reading. My name is Ajoje. I am a FIFA Licensed Agent and International Sports Lawyer. I write on the Law and Business of Football, a lot. Repost and Follow if you want to read more posts like this.

BREAKING: New startup "RentAHuman" allows AI agents to rent humans to perform tasks they cannot physically perform themselves.

🗣 | 𝗖𝗵𝗿𝗶𝘀 𝗦𝘂𝘁𝘁𝗼𝗻 𝗢𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗠𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗧𝗮𝗹𝗸𝘀 𝗕𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗖𝗲𝗹𝘁𝗶𝗰 𝗕𝗼𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗦𝘂𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗚𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗽𝘀 "Bring me in, and I’ll mediate between the two. Maybe I can bang a few skulls together for the greater good. "Something has to give, because nonsense like the other night isn’t going to work. ‌"Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been critical of the decision makers at Celtic since before the season even started. I’m not saying I told you so again but I could see the warning signs coming down the road and it’s proved to be the case. "The supporters have every right to be angry given the massive regression over the past 12 months. ‌ "But they are going to have to park it for a few weeks, because going into this crucial stage of the season, O’Neill is going to need all the help he can get. "We know this squad isn’t up to much. We know the deficiencies and vulnerabilities in the group. ‌ "We also know if there’s anyone who can overcome them to get results, it’s O’Neill. "I’m not blindly believing in my old manager. Yet I understand his frustration the other night. "He will have tried to motivate the team to get off to a solid start against Stuttgart – but then the players had to hang around for five minutes while the balls were removed from the pitch. ‌ "It took the atmosphere out of the ground and it would have been totally deflating for those out there. As I said, that was no excuse for what followed – but it definitely didn’t help."