The first true test of UEFA's Financial Fair Play

Given the title, you can safely assume the club in question can be from one of the following: Manchester City, PSG, Manchester City, PSG, Chelsea, PSG and Manchester City. If you chose PSG, congratulations you win a quart of Quaker State!

There could be many that argue the first test was City's controversial stadium-naming rights from last year, but the latest news coming out of Paris makes the Etihad deal look meek and minuscule in comparison. I mean, this is just so...unreal.

PSG are in advanced talks with Qatari National Bank in regards to shirt sponsorship rights (and possibly stadium-naming rights) for, get this, €100 million per year. €100 million per year. I will say this one more time: €100 MILLION PER YEAR. If this doesn't make you feel sick to your stomach, it should and you should probably drink a gallon of month-old milk to replicate the feeling many around the sport have this morning upon hearing this news. This deal, if it goes through, would curb-stomp the £45 million per year deal Manchester United struck with Chevrolet

UEFA, and especially Michel Platini, now have their biggest test of FFP facing them square in their stupid, subjective faces. As Swiss Ramble points out in this wonderful and oft-linked piece:

UEFA tackle such deals by assessing whether they represent "fair value" and then deducting any excess (not the entire agreement) from the club’s income for the purposes of the FFP break-even calculation. Given the rate of change of such sponsorship deals, my view is that they are unlikely to exclude this deal.

What Swiss Ramble is alluding to in the last sentence is the Manchester City-Etihad deal. So, essentially, what this means for the potential PSG-QNB agreement is that 1) UEFA has some sort of subjective guidelines on what constitutes "fair value"- a guideline that has yet to be made public, and 2) HOLY BALLS THIS MIGHT ACTUALLY GO THROUGH.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the owners of PSG and Qatari National Bank are in cahoots with each other, considering each other's common interests, and if the majority of their sponsorship money can be excluded from their FFP break-even point then you can start to find some nails for the coffin that contains UEFA's attempt at controlling reckless spending in the sport.