From FFP to UEFA's 70% rule: what actually changed

In short: Financial Fair Play stopped existing in 2022. What replaced it asks a different question — not “did you lose money?” but “what share of your income goes to the squad?” The limit is 70%, it has been fully in force since 2025/26, and on 30 June 2026 it cost nine clubs real money. The change matters because a ratio cannot be fixed by an owner writing a cheque.

People still say “FFP” the way they say “Hoover”. The rules it named were replaced four years ago by the UEFA Club Licensing and Financial Sustainability Regulations, approved by the Executive Committee on 7 April 2022 and in force from that June.

The replacement is not a rebrand. It measures something else entirely, and understanding what it measures explains most of what has happened to European club finances since.

What FFP actually required

The original rule, in force from 2011, was a break-even requirement. Over a rolling three-year period, a club’s relevant income had to cover its relevant expenses. Losses were tolerated up to an acceptable deviation of €30 million across three years, and only if an owner covered them with equity rather than debt.

It was a solvency test dressed as a competition rule: don’t spend money you do not have.

Two weaknesses became obvious. The first is that it looked backwards. A club could overspend for two seasons, win things, and face a judgment long after the sporting benefit was banked. The second is more fundamental: break-even measures the gap between income and costs, and a club with enormous income can run enormous costs and still break even. FFP never restrained spending. It restrained losing.

And a rule about the gap invites you to work on the income side. If a related company buys the naming rights at a generous price, income rises and the gap closes without a single euro of cost coming out. That is why so much of FFP enforcement became an argument about whether a sponsorship was priced at fair value — a question about one contract at a time, litigated slowly.

What replaced it

The 2022 regulations rest on three requirements rather than one.

Solvency — no overdue payables to other clubs, employees, or tax authorities. The simplest test and the one that catches clubs in genuine distress.

Stability — the football earnings rule, the direct descendant of break-even. The acceptable deviation was raised from €30m to €60 million over three years, and up to €90 million for a club in good financial health.

That looks like a loosening, and on its own it is. It is not on its own.

Cost control — the squad cost rule, which is new, and which is where the actual bite is.

The 70% rule

Article 94 of the regulations states it in one sentence:

A licensee’s squad cost ratio for the licence season must be no greater than the defined limit of 70%.

Squad costs mean the wages of players and the head coach, the amortisation and impairment of transfer fees, and agents’ fees. The ratio is those costs divided by football revenue plus net profit or loss on player sales.

It arrived on a ramp, to give clubs time to restructure:

Season	Limit
2023/24	90%
2024/25	80%
2025/26 onwards	70%

The philosophical shift is the whole story. Break-even asked whether your books balanced. The squad cost ratio asks what proportion of your football income you spend on the football team, and caps it.

This is why it is harder to circumvent. An owner can cover a loss with equity — that is what the old acceptable deviation contemplated. An owner cannot make a ratio smaller by donating money, because a donation is not football revenue. To improve the ratio you must either raise genuine football income or cut what you pay the squad. Inflated related-party sponsorship still helps, which is why fair-value assessment has not gone away, but the lever is much shorter than it was.

It has teeth, and we now know how sharp

On 30 June 2026, UEFA’s Club Financial Control Body finalised monitoring for the 2025/26 season — the first cycle assessed at the full 70%. Fourteen clubs were sanctioned.

Nine reported a squad cost ratio above 70% for the 2025 calendar year: Aston Villa, Chelsea, Newcastle United, Nottingham Forest, OGC Nice, RC Strasbourg, AEK Athens, Fiorentina and Fenerbahçe.

Club	Fine	Notes
Aston Villa	€22.5m	€15m suspended; barred from registering new players for the Champions League
RC Strasbourg	€13m	Plus a further €12m conditional
Chelsea	€3m	€2m suspended
Nottingham Forest	€2.5m	—
Newcastle United	€3m	Separately settled under the football earnings rule

Two details are worth pausing on.

The suspended portions are conditional on the ratio continuing to fall. UEFA is not really fining these clubs for 2025; it is buying a trajectory, and it holds the balance of the fine as security. Aston Villa and Chelsea had both been sanctioned the previous season, and the Chamber explicitly credited the improving trend between 2024 and 2025.

The second is that Strasbourg and Chelsea share an owner, BlueCo. Two clubs in one group, both over the ratio, sanctioned in the same decision — which is exactly the kind of structure the multi-club ownership rules govern from a completely different direction.

The objection the rule cannot answer

A percentage applies equally to everyone. The money it applies to does not.

Seventy per cent of Real Madrid’s football revenue is an enormous number. Seventy per cent of Fiorentina’s is not. A ratio cap is neutral in form and profoundly conservative in effect: it permits every club to spend in proportion to what it already earns, and what a club already earns is mostly a function of how big it already was.

The honest defence is that this is not the rule’s job. The squad cost ratio exists to stop clubs destroying themselves, not to redistribute European football. Whoever wants competitive balance has to look at how the money is divided in the first place, not at what percentage of it clubs may spend.

That argument gets its own piece: do football’s financial rules entrench the clubs on top? The honest criticism is that the rule is still not neutral, because a club trying to become big must outspend its current revenue for a period, and that is precisely what it now forbids. The ladder was pulled up after the last climbers.

Three leagues, three different instruments

European financial regulation is often discussed as one thing. It is at least three, and they work differently enough that comparing them by headline number is misleading.

	Mechanism	Limit	When it bites
UEFA	Ratio of squad cost to revenue	70%	Assessed after the year, fines and registration bans
Premier League	Ratio of squad cost to revenue	85%	From 2026/27, levies then points
LaLiga	Absolute euro limit per club	Individual	Before registration — the player simply cannot play

LaLiga’s is the strictest in practice, and not because its number is lower. It is strictest because it is ex ante: the Spanish limit stops a registration before it happens, while UEFA and the Premier League both assess the year after it ends and then punish. A club that will accept a fine can breach a retrospective rule deliberately. It cannot breach a rule that simply refuses to register the player.

That is the distinction worth carrying into any argument about which league is toughest. The question is not what the percentage is. It is whether the rule can stop you before you act, or only bill you afterwards.