Retention policies for modern team sites

o.k. I have opened a support request up to Microsoft and they have told me that I need to be an owner of every site I want to add to a retention policy. They have told me this is the only way to do this.

I have of course asked them to document this claim in an email, I shall await their email.

Thanks Vasil. 

I will open up a support case as it appears I can't do what you suggest.

I'd rather not use Powershell at the moment for this until I can address some of the other issues I am having.

Hi Max, 

             I am trying to prevent owners from deleting Sites. Also wanting to retain any data from the sites. When you say permissions should be the way to prevent deletion totally, what is the preferred method to do this? e.g. as an admin we create a Groups connected site and only give them member access to that group?

I am indeed creating a retention policy from S&CC and I can only see the root sharepoint site for the tenant. However I am aware that you need to add the full URL for an individual site if you want to add these but on this occasion it seems I can (as a Global admin) only add sites that I am a member of or owner of. I'm not sure if I am missing something but the whole admin side of the new modern site management seems a bit shambolic. 

One thing I noticed is that when a site is created by someone either via Teams/Outlook etc then the admin centre shows "Group Owners" as the primary admin. Makes no sense and as an admin we need to either add ourselves to the group as an owner or sift through the audit logs to see who created the site.

The overall goal here is to prevent normal users from creating the sites/groups themselves but at the moment I am struggling to see how best to manage these.

Thanks for replying.