Neymar, PSG and Manchester City accused of 'peeing in the swimming pool' by La Liga president Javier Tebas
Uefa, European football's governing body, are investigating whether PSG breached Financial Fair Play regulations this summer
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Your support makes all the difference.The president of La Liga has accused Paris Saint-Germain and Neymar of “peeing in the swimming pool” with regard to European football’s Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations.
Javier Tebas, who unsuccessfully attempted to block Neymar’s record-breaking €222m move from Barcelona to the Ligue 1 club last month, also reiterated his belief that Manchester City are guilty of breaching FFP rules.
Speaking at the Soccerex Global Conference in Manchester, Tebas claimed that PSG had made a mockery of Uefa, European football’s governing body, and the current financial regulations in place.
“They’re laughing at the system, aren’t they? With Neymar to PSG, what we have done is caught them peeing in the bed, or in the swimming pool,” he said.
“Neymar’s gone on the diving board and now he’s peed from the diving board,” Tebas added. “We can’t accept this.
“This is when the football clubs have competitive advantage not coming from the club itself. PSG and Manchester City and in the past from Chelsea.”
Tebas’ remarks come days after he revealed that he wrote letters to Uefa last month demanding that both Abu Dhabi-backed City and Qatar-funded PSG be fully investigated for benefitting from “state-aid” that is “irreparably harming the football industry”.
Since 2011, PSG have been owned by Qatar Sports Investments, a Doha-based sovereign wealth fund run by Nasser Al-Khelaifi.
As well as signing Neymar this summer, PSG brokered a €180m loan-to-buy agreement with Monaco for the highly-rated teenager Kylian Mbappé.
Last week, Uefa opened an investigation into PSG’s compliance with FFP but the governing body currently has no plans to probe City’s activity.
“They have not said they will never have one. We still have hope,” Tebas said, regarding an investigation into City. “They [Uefa] have created the financial fair play rules and we think these rules have been infringed.
“We believed Uefa need to carry out investigations. We believed the EU need to investigate, too. We are not hiding what we want to do.”
Tebas also suggested that Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi were not immune from the advances of ‘state-aid’ clubs, telling reporters: “If Nasser [Al-Khelaifi] wants, he can just open the gas and buy them, can’t he?”
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