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Wenger - FFP has never worked completely

Arsene Wenger feels Financial Fair Play has “never worked completely”, but says the regulations have had a positive influence on club ownership.

Michel Platini announced recently that Uefa are likely to relax rules designed to prevent teams from spending beyond their means.

The Arsenal boss believes that is happening because governing bodies are less influential than they were at the turn of the century.

"It will not affect us at all because we always spend the money we have. It will affect the clubs who have never respected the FFP"

“It [FFP] never worked completely,” Wenger said. “It’s restricted - it had a positive influence on some aspects of our job but it was never completely in place yet.

“The only thing you can say before it is completely in place, [is that] it is already more flexible. Uefa or Fifa do not have the same power that they had 10 or 15 years ago on the legal side of it.

“Everything can be challenged by the European Court and that makes it much more difficult for Uefa to have rigid rules applied, because it’s always in contradiction with freedom of investment regulated by the European rules.

“It’s not easy [to tighten the rules] because there are very intelligent people at Uefa who work for a few years now on that problem.

“At the start to me it looked very logical, very easy and very easy to apply as well. When they wanted to push it in, you see it was more and more difficult."

Wenger is sure the changes to FFP will have no bearing on Arsenal.

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“It will not affect us at all because we always spend the money we have,” he said. “It will affect the clubs who have never respected the FFP.

“It looks like there’s an international pressure to make these rules more flexible because of potential investors in other countries.

“I believe the television contract in England has pushed some other clubs in Europe to want this to be a bit more flexible for them so they can compete better with investors investing in their clubs.”

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