Harry Redknapp hits out at £40m financial fair play sanction

http://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/sep/12/harry-redknapp-qpr-financial-fair-play-sanction

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Harry Redknapp has criticised the financial fair play rules that could see Queens Park Rangers forced to pay a £40m fine.

The Football League chief executive, Shaun Harvey, warned that the club could be demoted to the Conference if they get relegated this term, unless they pay the penalty which relates to the losses they made during last season in the Championship. However, Redknapp has branded the threats “unrealistic”.

The club posted pre-tax losses of £65.4m for the year ending May 2013, when they were relegated from the Premier League, and the losses for the last financial year are also likely to be sizeable.

Rangers have vowed to fight any sanctions, but must submit last year’s accounts or pay their fine by 1 December.

“I’ve blocked it out of my own mind,” Redknapp said. “That’s up to the owners, I’m sure they know what they’re doing and I’ll leave it to them.

“It’s a difficult one; if teams invest then get relegated, what do you do? You lose all your players. If you buy a few players to try to stay up then go down, you can’t suddenly have a fire sale, it’s tough to unload players on Premier League wages into the Championship.”

To make fair play and avoid others clubs suffering similar sanctions, Redknapp suggests all clubs should be given the same amount to spend and make better use of their youth teams to compensate for a smaller transfer budget.

“We should be able to spend as much as Man United before we play them on Sunday shouldn’t we? What is fair play? I don’t know. One team can spend £200m on a team, another team might spend £8m on a team, and that’s not fair play is it. Fair play would be everybody having a maximum of £30m a year to spend on their team, produce some kids out of the youth team and work harder with the players they’ve got.”

But the QPR manager concedes the Premier League is a long way off introducing such rules: “The whole league isn’t fair play: you’ve got seven teams at the top on another planet. But it’s never going to be a fair playing field, you haven’t got to be a genius to know the top seven will almost certainly be the same as last year.”

QPR travel to Old Trafford on Sunday on the back of a 1-0 win against Sunderland, while the 2012-13 champions are expected to give debuts to three summer signings to help secure their first win of the season – Radamel Falcao, Daley Blind and Luke Shaw who is returning from injury.