Manchester City 'hid' £30m from UEFA FFP investigators. Football leaks going crazy

quote:

---

The Investigative Chamber required Paris Saint-Germain to open its books to the body for the first time in July 2013. One year earlier, the state-owned Qatar Tourism Authority (QTA) had signed an "Agreement for the Promotion of the Image of Qatar" with the team, which was to run for five years and generate revenues averaging 215 million euros per year for the club.It was a ludicrous amount of money, far more than the market would bear and inconsistent with anything that might smack of economic logic for the Qatari company. By comparison, FC Bayern Munich's main sponsor at the time, Deutsche Telekom, paid the team an annual sum of 29 million euros. It looked, in other words, as though the marketing contract was merely a façade, meant to allow the Qataris to pump as much money into the club as possible.

The agreement with the Qatar Tourism Authority consisted of a mere five pages and obligated Paris Saint-Germain to advertise for Qatar and "participate annually, at the request of Qatar, in its promotion activities." Otherwise, the team had to do nothing for QTA: It didn't have to put the company's logos on its jerseys, it didn't have to put up advertising in its stadium, it didn't even have to put a link on the club home page. The real reason for the excessive payments was a different one - which is also spelled out in the five-page agreement: Money from the Qatar Tourism Authority was to be used to buy players. By doing so, Paris Saint-Germain was to help Qatar become "a major player in the sporting world."

In response to a query about the deal, PSG stated that it was not a sponsoring deal, but that it was a "nation branding" agreement -- marketing for the entire country of Qatar. "Nation branding is of another scale compared to traditional sponsoring contracts," club executives wrote.

---