Sheriff's story is a fairytale... if you ignore the arms smuggling and KGB links

So now there is proof that UEFA's financial fair play rules were always a protectionist conspiracy, rigged to benefit the established elite. Sheriff Tiraspol, from Moldova. Why was nobody ever worried about them?

Of course, that might be about to change. Moldova's champions have very much broken cover with their win at Real Madrid on Tuesday. They sit three points clear at the top of Champions League Group D, which also includes Inter Milan, after just two games.

In their first match they beat Shakhtar Donetsk; in qualifying they eliminated Red Star Belgrade and Dinamo Zagreb. It was a campaign that began against Albanian champions Teuta, on the night England beat Denmark in a European Championship semi-final. By the time this ends, Sheriff will have quite the reputation.

And maybe some push-back, too, now they are challenging the status quo. That's all FFP was ever designed to address.

However noble its initial aims, it was corrupted by the influence of Europe's most powerful clubs to become an attack on new money, and new investment.

That's why UEFA and men such as Javier Tebas at La Liga, David Gill at Manchester United and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge of Bayern Munich were obsessed with Manchester City and Paris Saint- Germain. They represented a direct challenge to the hierarchy in England, Spain and Germany.

They would take what the elite saw as theirs by right: titles, power and, most of all, money. Sheriff Tiraspol's domination, the virtual destruction of competition in Moldova? Who cares? Maybe they do at sorry Madrid now.

Sheriff Tiraspol were founded in 1997 as Tiras Tiraspol, rebranded as Sheriff a year later, and won their first trophy, the self-explanatory Cupa Moldovei, in their debut season, 1998-99. They came fourth that year, second the next, and won the first league title in their history in 2000-01.

There have been 20 Moldovan titles awarded since, and Sheriff have won another 18 of them. The all-time table in Moldova places Sheriff 87 points ahead of their nearest rivals, the now-impoverished Zimbru Chisinau, despite playing seven seasons fewer.

Sheriff are third so far this season but will go top if they win their three games in hand. Few are expecting any other outcome.

Where does FFP come in? Well, Sheriff spent £150million on a training ground and stadium complex with a capacity of more than 12,000. Despite this, roughly 1,500 would be their biggest crowd for domestic matches, with the average south of 1,000.

Yet Sheriff also boast a team full of foreign imports. Only five of the squad are listed as Moldovan, and just two of those are from the local area, Transnistria.

The 14 players who featured in the win in Madrid were from Brazil (three), Greece (two), Colombia (two), Peru, Ghana, Luxembourg, Mali, Uzbekistan, North Macedonia and Trinidad.

Since 2015, Sheriff's permanent managers have come from Croatia, France, Italy and Ukraine. That's a lot of expense and investment to be funded by an average gate of 928 — taken from 2019 — the last full season when crowds were admitted.

Of course, Sheriff have sponsors. There is Agroprombank, a financial institution headquartered in Tiraspol and owned by Sheriff; there is the Sheriff Sports Complex owned by, er, Sheriff. You get the idea.

UEFA were very keen to look into City's ties to companies based in Abu Dhabi. Sheriff, not so much.

And, hey, good luck to them. This is not a cry for more regulation. It is a pity Moldovan football had to be destroyed for it to happen, but Sheriff are the first team from their league to reach the Champions League group stage and new names and new challengers are always welcome. A bloody nose for Real Madrid, who would presume to shut the door on the rest of Europe, is also to be enjoyed.

The question is why, when such enormous effort went into stopping City and PSG, was nobody concerned with how they make the sums work in the breakaway enclave of Transnistria?

For that is Sheriff's back story. How two ex-KGB officers, Viktor Gushan and Ilya Kazmaly, set up a charity to look after retired servicemen, then took advantage of the collapse of the Soviet Union to build a giant company.

Sheriff's slogan is 'Always with you' and in Transnistria — which seeks independence but also closer ties to Russia — they are.

Sheriff's logo claims supermarkets, petrol stations, a television station, the mobile telephone network, a brewery, publishing, railways, two bread factories, a spirits factory, a construction company, meat-processing plants, the major utilities, an advertising agency and a Mercedes dealership. It also has substantial local government influence.

The company, and the country — although it is unrecognised internationally — was built on loose regulation making it a haven for smuggling. Weapons to African warlords, cigarettes and alcohol are all believed to have passed through Transnistria as it built its autonomy from Moldova.

Unlike the rest of the league clubs, Sheriff Tiraspol do not pay taxes on transfers, salaries or international participation to the Moldovan FA. Their influence, however, is huge. There used to be a stipulation that six Moldovan players had to be part of the team. Sheriff had that changed.

And the win in Madrid is the result. It's a wonderful fairytale, even if it involves the KGB, alleged arms smuggling, the total ruination of a national football culture and a dead end for the young footballers of Transnistria. Yet City was a fairytale, too.

The second club of Manchester, plucked from mediocrity and made great by a generous benefactor. And UEFA, and their allies, spent years trying to stop it. So what's different? Just one aspect: nobody saw Sheriff Tiraspol as a threat. They're not as smart as they think, these guys.

When four of the six Premier League clubs that were part of the breakaway Super League plot called a meeting to dissolve the company, Liverpool and Manchester United did not agree.

No surprise there. Ostensibly, this was because they feared legal repercussions from Barcelona, Real Madrid and Juventus but the real reasons are obvious. It was them. It was always them.

They needed the others to make their rotten plan work but this was driven by the two red clubs in the north and had their fingerprints all over it from the start.