UEFA could 'adapt' Financial Fair Play rules as Man City wait for ban appeal

UEFA is considering adapting its Financial Fair Play regulations, president Aleksander Ceferin said Tuesday, as Manchester City take their fight to overturn a ban from the Champions League for breaching the rules to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

"It is too early to say how it will look in the future but we are thinking about it and we will probably have to adapt it," the Slovenian Ceferin said at a press conference after the UEFA Congress in Amsterdam. "It was very successful as a system, there are almost no losses in European football any more, but now we will probably have to adapt to different times."

Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules were introduced by UEFA to combat growing debt in European football by obliging clubs to balance their books. Assessments began in 2011 when European clubs reported overall losses of 1.7 billion euros ($1.9 billion). In contrast, according to UEFA's most recent annual "benchmarking" report, the 700 top-tier clubs across the continent made a combined profit of 140 million euros in 2018.

However, the last decade has seen City and Paris Saint-Germain in particular, with mega-rich owners from Abu Dhabi and Qatar respectively, present a huge new challenge to Europe's established elite and to the FFP rules themselves.

City were banned from Europe for two years for serious breaches of FFP regulations. The reigning English champions last week filed an appeal to the sports court in Lausanne.