In the 10 months since Vivendi confirmed that it is seeking a buyer for as much as 50% of Universal Music Group, the industry has watched analysts’ proposed valuations of the company balloon from an initial $22 billion to as much as $50 billion.

But according to a report in Bloomberg, private equity investors have been losing interest due to the high price of the company — which sources said ranges between $28 billion and $33 billion — and the slow pace of the deal, leading Vivendi to enter talks with other companies, including Chinese giant Tencent, which has been among the reported interested parties for several months.

UMG is by far the world’s largest music company, with recorded-music, publishing, merchandise, management and other divisions and a sprawling roster that includes Taylor Swift, Drake, Lady Gaga, Kanye West, Kacey Musgraves and many other superstar artists. A deal with Tencent would elevate UMG’s already formidable international presence in the tightly controlled Chinese market; however, a different set of problems has emerged in recent weeks due to trade tensions between China and the U.S.

Reps for UMG, Vivendi and Tencent did not immediately respond to Variety’s requests for comment.

Rumors about the sale began some months before Vivendi confirmed its plans last July, and in the months since the process has moved slowly. According to the report, Vivendi has yet to hire formal advisors, despite UMG technically being on the market for many months.

Many insiders have expressed skepticism about the deal as proposed, noting that few companies or investors would pay such a steep price for an essentially passive role in UMG; several said they found it hard to imagine Lucian Grainge, UMG’s chairman and CEO (pictured above), sharing decision-making with an outside party. According to the report, some potential advisers have floated the idea of a majority stake. Over the past few months, interested parties have included SiriusXM/Pandora owner Liberty Media Corp. — which is also a partial owner of the world’s largest live-entertainment company, Live Nation — Apple,  Chinese technology firm Alibaba and KKR & Co.

In an earnings report released by Vivendi in February, UMG clocked total annual revenues of approximately $7.15 billion, a 10% increase at constant currency over 2017. The company continues to be a primary driver of Vivendi’s revenue: “For the second half of 2018, at constant currency and perimeter, Vivendi’s revenues increased by 5.7% compared to the second half of 2017, an improvement compared to the first half of 2018 (+3.9% compared to the first half of 2017), mainly driven by Universal Music Group (+12.8% for the second half, compared to +6.8% for the first half),” the report reads.

UMG is a crown jewel in the otherwise-tepid Vivendi holdings, and has helped the company’s shares gain 24% over the past two years.

Tottenham’s Lucas Moura celebrating in Amsterdam. PHOTOGRAPHER: PETER DEJONG/AP PHOTO

If Manchester City breached UEFA’s financial fair play rules, it deserves to be punished. But those rules should probably be scrapped anyway.

Wealthy new owners should be free to throw their money around if they want to. Photographer: BEN STANSALL/AFP

It’s hard to beat the unscripted theater of the Champions League, which pits Europe’s best soccer clubs and players against each other in a battle for sporting immortality and unimaginable riches. And, in fairness to the superstars, it’s been a particularly stirring tournament this year, with Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur both coming back from the dead against Barcelona and Ajax to claim their places in the final.

Right now, though, there’s some equally arresting drama happening off the field. Manchester City, one of the world’s richest clubs and the recently crowned English champions, faces a potential ban from the elite European competition. Owned by Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Mansour, the talent-packed team could be barred for one season if the adjudicatory chamber of governing body UEFA decides it breached financial rules designed to curtail excessive spending on players.

Last year, Der Spiegel published emails revealing allegedly inflated sponsorship deals that concealed where some of the club’s money was really coming from. UEFA investigators’ decision to refer the Manchester City probe for judgment suggests there is a compelling case to answer.

Should the adjudicators find against the club, rival teams and fans will be enraged by anything less than a ban. After all, why bother complying with these so-called Financial Fair Play rules (known to everyone in the game as FFP) if there’s no ultimate sanction? The Italian club Roma, for example, claims it sold top player Mohamed Salah to Liverpool because it wouldn’t have been compliant otherwise.

UEFA’s credibility would be shattered if it just gave Manchester City another financial slap on the wrist, as has happened in the past. Der Spiegel’s reporting showed how supine the governing body was when questions about Manchester City’s and Qatari-owned Paris Saint-German’s compliance arose previously.

Manchester City says the accusations of financial irregularities are “entirely false” and its accounts “are full and complete and a matter of legal and regulatory record.” It is unlikely to back down without a protracted fight.

While it won’t find much sympathy if it loses that battle (it seems a reasonable principle that competing teams should all follow the same rule book), there is another question here: Does FFP even work for the greater good of the game? I’d argue not. It has tended to enshrine the power of already dominant teams by hobbling the capacity of up-and-comers to spend their way to the top table. In future, it might be “fairer” to weaken or scrap the break-even requirement – which allows clubs to spend only what they make in revenue – and let club owners invest how they please.

FFP was dreamt up after arriviste billionaire owners like Chelsea’s Roman Abramovich and Sheikh Mansour sparked an arms race for players. As salaries and transfer fees ballooned, a swathe of clubs made losses in the effort to keep up. Eight years since the system’s introduction, UEFA claims it has been a success and – superficially at least – the data seem to back that up. In the 2017 financial year, the 700 top division clubs in Europe made an aggregate profit for the first time and their balance sheets are in much better shape.

Financial rewards haven’t been shared around, though. The top dozen clubs have added 1.6 billion euros ($1.8 billion) of sponsorship and commercial revenue over the past decade, while the next 700 have added less than 1 billion euros between them, UEFA data show. Europe’s 30 leading clubs had combined revenues of almost 10 billion euros in fiscal 2017, half of all the sales generated by the continent’s top division teams.

Because of FFP, the clubs that bring in most revenue can spend most on players and wages, meaning they’ve a much better chance of qualifying again and again for the Champions League, whose 32 participants shared 2 billion euros of proceeds between them last season. In contrast, the fair play rules have made it harder for the large cohort below to catch up because a new owner can’t just inject a wad of cash – as Abramovich and Sheikh Mansour did back in the day. In effect, the big guns used FFP to pull the ladder up.

The English Premier League is still reasonably competitive (although Manchester City appears to be challenging that notion after winning it twice in a row), thanks in part to a collectively negotiated TV deal. But elsewhere national football has become horribly predictable, as this list of recent winners shows.

In short, instead of making football more equitable, FFP has helped make it more polarized and reinforced the power of already wealthy clubs. The system “kills competition and that’s bad for the game,” says Stefan Szymanski, a sports finance expert at the University of Michigan. As American sports fans – with their player drafts, wage caps and rich-team surcharges – understand, a lack of true rivalry is a very dull thing.

UEFA is thinking about reforming FPP and there’s no shortage of things it could do. Budget limits or U.S.-style salary caps sound appealing, but these types of intervention would invite a breakaway by the elite clubs. They are already angling to change the format of the Champions League to ensure most of them qualify automatically, thus limiting the number of qualification places to just a handful.

Another approach might be to give clubs that finish lower down a domestic league a greater share of the prize money or television receipts than the winners. However, in the U.S. similar rewards for failure have encouraged teams to deliberately lose games, in their cases to get better draft picks.

In truth, the ultra-capitalist approach of European soccer owners doesn’t really marry well with the surprisingly socialist tools used by the Americans to maintain an even playing field. So maybe it’s just better to let it rip. Softening or even getting rid of FFP altogether might be the easiest way to make things more competitive.

Would some clubs get into financial difficulties again? Almost certainly. It’s largely unheard of, though, for a leading club to go bankrupt and disappear altogether. There’s always somebody else willing to put in more cash, says Szymanski. For example, Italian club Parma went bankrupt in 2015, got relegated to the fourth division, then quickly fought its way back to the top again.

There’s no question that money already has too much influence over soccer, explaining the soulless atmosphere at many English top division games as clubs raise ticket prices and chase merchandise-loving global fans. But you can’t wind back the clock, and die-hard supporters can at least take comfort in the travails of maybe the world’s best-known soccer “super-brand:” Manchester United.

While that famous club is one of of the three biggest revenue generators in soccer, according to Deloitte, it finished a distant sixth in the England’s top division this season and failed to get past the quarter-finals of the European Champions League. PSG, Manchester City and Juventus, also failed to reach the competition’s semi-final, the latter despite signing mega-star Cristiano Ronaldo for 100 million euros. This year’s finalists, Tottenham and Liverpool, are paragons of modesty by comparison (although you’d hardly describe them as poor).

Throwing money at a soccer club still won’t buy you guaranteed success. Billionaires should be free to try though.