From Brown Envelopes to Financial Fair Play

It all began in June 1993 at the Old Bailey when we first heard of a 'bung'. Alan Sugar claimed in court that Terry Venables had told him that a transfer involving Teddy Sheringham leaving Nottingham Forest for Tottenham Hotspur would proceed more quickly if the then Forest manager Brian Clough was given "a bung".
That revelation that a brown envelope containing cash was to be handed over at a motorway service station, led to the bung inquiry instigated by the F.A. Only the then Arsenal manager George Graham was found to be guilty of receiving money as part of a transfer deal, although many other rumours abounded.

'Offshore trust funds' then joined 'bung' in football's vocabulary for the first time.The influx of foreign players on transfers that were officially regarded as "free", following the Bosman ruling, but which in effect were far from it, made the task of monitoring incomings and outgoings ever more difficult to perform as Graham Taylor pointed out. This was later followed by newspaper and media exposé when a number of agents were recorded unknowingly, revealing the "greed" in English football, and exposing allegations of an "under the table culture" that threatened to destabilise the state of the game in this country.

The advent of the Premier League in 1992 only exacerbated the sitution as English football's top division became awash with unprecedented amounts of cash, mainly from television rights deals. With such riches at stake, and cuts from some £1.5bn of transfer deals per year up for grabs, there was clear potential for agents and other middlemen, in some cases, to make secret and illegal subsequent payments to third parties to help them seal transfers.

With the top clubs now awash with cash, UEFA introduced financial fair play (FFP) in an attempt to prevent clubs that qualify for its competitions from spending beyond their means and stamp out what their then president Michael Platini called "financial doping" within football.

This led to nine clubs being found to have breached the FFP criteria in the first assessment period, most notably Man City and Paris St-Germain, and a range of fines and sanctions were imposed.
Man City were fined £49m, £32m of which was suspended, had spending restrictions imposed and could only name a 21-man Champions League squad for 2014-15.
Now, following German newspaper Der Spiegel publishing leaked documents in November 2018 alleging Manchester City had inflated the value of a sponsorship deal, misleading European football's governing body, the club have been banned from European club competition for the next two seasons and fined £25m.