UEFA’s introduction of Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations during the last decade were designed to “improve the overall financial health of European club football.”

Uefa said that “the aim of financial fair play is not to make all clubs equal in size and wealth, but to encourage clubs to build for success rather than continually seeking a quick fix.”

Events of the past few years, and especially in the current transfer window, show this is something they have been unable to achieve, with Barcelona perhaps the most obvious recent example.

And in modern football’s current state of hyper-capitalism, it’s something that’s probably impossible to achieve.

Top-level football’s financial and ownership structures would need to change considerably for such a thing to happen — building sustainable clubs on the back of more responsible, community-oriented ownership.

But football at this level is already too far gone, so governing bodies continue to come up with artificial ways to police a football business that is already out of control.

Having failed to deal with irresponsible and immoral club ownership, they have now turned to capitalism’s usual target when money needs saving — those whose work actually makes that money: the players.

The Times reported this month that Uefa plans to introduce a salary cap, with clubs only allowed to spend a certain percentage of their revenue on player wages.

This should be an immediate red flag to players and especially to the organisations that represent them.

Reassuringly, the Professional Footballers Association (PFA) and FIFPro have previously demonstrated some opposition to such measures.

An appeal by the PFA — the union representing professional footballers in the English leagues — succeeded in forcing the EFL to scrap their salary caps in League 1 and 2 earlier this year.

Meanwhile, Jonas Baer-Hoffmann, the general secretary of FIFPro which represents players across the world, has described salary caps as “philosophically and economically incompatible with a transfer fee system.”

If salary caps were introduced by Uefa, these unions would need to be much more prominent and more active than they already are in their opposition to such measures.

Salary caps can increase the disparity between the highest and lowest earners within teams and leagues.

The desire to bring in highly paid global stars will remain. So, to remain within the salary cap, the players at the lower end of the pay scale, even at the top level, could see their wages drop over time.

Teams could, for example, look to save tens of thousands on the wages of 10 players in order to offer an extra hundred thousand to one star.

There is already evidence for this in a league that uses a salary cap system — Major League Soccer (MLS).

In 2016, research by USA Today showed that the top 10 earners in MLS accounted for 38 per cent of the league’s total wage bill.

A study in 2019 by American Soccer Analysis showed that MLS spends just 28 per cent of its revenue on player salaries while all other leagues included in the study, including the familiar European leagues, spend more than 50 per cent of their revenue on player wages.

If salary caps are to be introduced in European football, the first people to lose out will be the players.

Why should those who contribute the most to the game be the ones who take the biggest hit?

To placate the richest and most powerful owners, part of Uefa’s plan is to reportedly include a “luxury tax.” This would mean the salary cap could be breached, with the penalty merely a fine rather than tougher measures such as a ban from Uefa competition.

This would mean the clubs who can “afford” to pay fines and higher salaries would venture ever further into a league of their own or, depending on their particular brand of bad ownership, even further into debt.

As well as unfairly targeting the players, this also seems to go against what Uefa wants to achieve.

In many ways, luxury taxes are already paid by clubs in every deal they do with a player. The problem is, little of this goes back to the player or into the game, and instead goes to agents and intermediaries.

Huge amounts of money not going back into the sport that creates it is a more pressing problem than the amount players earn.

Between February 2019 and 2021 Liverpool, for example, paid close to £100 million on agents’ fees.

In total, Premier League clubs spent £272m on agents’ fees between February 2020 and 2021.

This is not to tar all agents with the same brush — many represent their players as a good union would, but others use their wealth and influence to direct the world of football.

In some cases, they have more influence on the transfer market and recruitment than clubs’ actual directors of football.

There is increasingly a case for a more centralised agency that works alongside the players’ unions.

The creation of such an organisation would mean more money stays in the game, players are better represented both in terms of career choices and earnings, and clubs are not crippled by wasted fees and don't have their recruitment policy dictated by an influential agent.

The ridiculous amounts of money players earn shouldn’t be the issue. As long as there are ridiculous amounts of money in the game, those whose work brings it in shouldn’t be begrudged it.

If Uefa are looking to improve the financial health of the game in its current state, then there are better ways to do it than imposing a salary cap.

But, given the direction football has been going in for some time, it’s no surprise they have eventually decided the ones who lose out should be the players.

It also suggests some club owners and agents now have more of a say in the direction of the game than the governing bodies themselves.

It’s now up to the players’ unions to make sure the players themselves have just as much of a say.