**Manchester City and the Premier League recently reached a settlement regarding the Associated Party Transaction Rules after a tribunal last year ruled that certain parts of the rules were unlawful.**
The Premier League's rules around Associated Party Transactions (APT) were brought in as a direct response to Newcastle United's takeover by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund.
Saudi Arabia's PIF has extraordinarily deep pockets and is tied to many huge businesses around the world, and the Premier League was terrified that Newcastle would take advantage of that fact and create sponsorship opportunities with some of those businesses at inflated prices.
However, as the Premier League tends to do, they over-engineered their solution, and the APT rules affected many other clubs, including Manchester City, who really weren't happy with the rules and launched a legal challenge against the Premier League and won.
> [](https://twitter.com/talkSPORT/status/1965429999889998057)
Manchester City challenged the Premier League's APT rules
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After the Premier League made changes to the rules after the tribunal ruled against them, Manchester City still weren't happy and challenged them again, with the two parties reaching a settlement in recent weeks.
Now, football finance expert [Stefan Borson has told Football Insider](https://www.footballinsider247.com/newcastle-could-submit-instant-legal-claim-against-premier-league-after-man-city-twist/) that Newcastle could easily launch their own case against the Premier League using Man City's victory as a basis.
> “City have settled. It does have the benefit, of course, that Newcastle have not settled.“So, if Newcastle wanted to make a complaint about the lawfulness of the current regime, they could do that tomorrow if they wanted to.“They’re not bound in by the settlement and they’d obviously also have a lot of information about how a commission might look at this, how a panel might look at this from a competition perspective because they have all the benefit of the first APT hearing, and presumably City would share if they were able to under confidentiality some of their legal analysis of the situation that was leading up to the second APT.“So, there’s this theoretical possibility that Newcastle could get busy.
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> “But I think in all likelihood, that’s not going to be the case and this really will be the end of it.”
Newcastle should save its money and only launch a legal attack if it needs to
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Manchester are now expected to press on with a very lucrative deal with Etihad Airways, which is owned by the club's owners.
Rather than wasting time challenging the Premier League, Newcastle should just go ahead with deals of their own and wait to see if the Premier League try to block them before tying them up in legal action.
We're sure that what Man City has done already should have paved the way for Newcastle to take advantage of the PIF's portfolio.