• Premier League

Liverpool finances to be investigated by UEFA

Last season's Premier League runners-up Liverpool are to be investigated by UEFA © Getty Images

Enlarge

The UEFA Club Financial Control Body has opened formal investigations into seven clubs, including Liverpool, regarding "potential break-even breaches".

Monaco, Roma, Besiktas, Inter Milan, Kuban Krasnodar and Sporting Lisbon are the other clubs being investigated by UEFA.

The clubs must offer information on their accounts to UEFA from the past three years, as reported by ESPN on Tuesday.

Liverpool were absent from European competition last year and only recently submitted detailed accounts to the governing body, which dictates that losses must be restricted to £35.4 million over a two-year window.

Liverpool reported losses of £49.8m for the 2012-13 season, and £40.5m for the 10-month period before that, and join the six other European clubs in being subjected to investigations.

Sources have also told ESPN that Liverpool are confident of avoiding any breaches of UEFA's financial fair play rules, despite their accounts being probed by the governing body.

A UEFA statement read: "The CFCB [club financial control body] has opened formal investigations into seven clubs as they disclosed a break-even deficit on the basis of their financial reporting periods ending in 2012 and 2013.

"These clubs will need to submit additional monitoring information during October and November upon the deadlines set by the CFCB, subsequent to which an additional communication shall be made and conservatory measures may be imposed."

Liverpool face no immediate sanction as they prepare to provide further details to UEFA throughout the next two months, though the provisional withholding of Champions League funds lingers as a potential next step.

Liverpool are thought to be confident they will avoid such penalties by virtue of lucrative new commercial deals and writing off some previous losses.

FFP allows certain spending streams, including youth development and stadium expenditure, to exist outside of its strict guidelines and Liverpool will argue that a £35m chunk of their 2011-12 deficit was attached to former co-owner Tom Hicks' aborted plans for a new stadium on Stanley Park.

Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain were the clubs hit hardest by UEFA last season for breaching FFP rules - they were each fined £49m and handed restrictions on transfer spending and a reduction in Champions League squad size.

UEFA has also announced that prize money has been held back from five clubs - Bursaspor, CFR Cluj, Astra Giurgiu, Buducnost Podgorica and Ekranas - as a result of non-payments to other clubs, players and/or tax authorities.

Reflecting on the recent work of CFCB and the FFP regulations, the UEFA statement continued: "The introduction of the UEFA club licensing and financial fair play regulations has already had a very positive impact on the scale of overdue payables, as they have decreased from £44.5m in June 2011 to £6.3m in June 2014.

"In addition, aggregate losses reported by Europe's first-division clubs in the 2013 financial year have gone down to £625.4m from a record-reported deficit of £1.3 billion in 2011.''

© ESPN Sports Media Ltd