Found guilty on all but one of more than 100 charges, the club’s behaviour casts doubt over an entire era of football. How, Miguel Delaney asks, can they be allowed to remain in the top flight?
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After the most hard-hitting language possible, the Premier League’s independent commission has set up the most hard-hitting sanctions. There is surely little choice but to expel Manchester City from the competition. The conclusions are so profoundly damning that it even raises the question of whether opposition clubs could or would want to play with them.
Worse, the new Independent Football Regulator has an even bigger decision than to whether to expel. The question will be now whether to exercise their statutory power to force a sale.
The new body made considerable noise about their ability to remove “rogue owners” around the difficulties of Sheffield Wednesday and Morecambe.
Manchester City are set to appeal after being found guilty on almost every chargeopen image in gallery
Manchester City are set to appeal after being found guilty on almost every charge (Getty)
The details in the Premier League’s decision of the eight-year City case, published on Tuesday afternoon, go way beyond such a description.
The word “sham” was used eight times over 40 pages, in reference to sponsorship, image rights and other arrangements that inflated revenue and reduced costs by more than £900m.
One conclusion was “that certain of those factual witnesses had given evidence at the hearing that they knew to be untrue and so had been dishonest”. The Premier League itself went on to say “the club filed mis-stated accounts and concealed the true state of its finances from its auditors and football regulators”, with City accused of being “significantly in breach of both the Premier League’s and Uefa’s spending limits”.
Although the decision doesn’t use the words, the details mirror Uefa’s previous description of “a sophisticated, thoughtful and fundamental attempt to circumvent or violate” the rules.
The actual words used were still far more damning than even some of City’s most vocal critics – as well as sources that worked on previous cases – expected.
The Premier League’s statement was strongopen image in gallery
The Premier League’s statement was strong (Getty)
As one source with knowledge of that previous Uefa case says, “it exposes them for exactly who they are and what they did”.
Consequently, it now looks worse than what had been one of football’s biggest corruption scandals, Italy’s Calciopoli. This isn’t about interpretation of phone calls. It is hard figures on pages.
It amounts to the biggest scandal in club football history – a complete revisionism of the most dominant champions the Premier League has ever seen, the blackening of the name of a club, while also going to geopolitical levels. The observations on the course of the proceedings detail that both parties relied on evidence from experts in the fields of “Abu Dhabi politics and governance”.
Even the Premier League statement accompanying the decision, seemed to betray an attitude that they were finally fed up with this.
The Premier League appears fed up with the caseopen image in gallery
The Premier League appears fed up with the case (PA Archive)
Executives at rival clubs had strong suspicions that City were “cheating” long before the football leaks of 2018. Here it was all is written down.
Except, the only language more strident was that in the club’s own statement.
City re-iterated their innocence and again referred to “a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence”.
“The club will therefore be relentless, and where necessary proactive, in any and all appropriate regulatory legal forums”.
It went on that City “will now pursue the appeal avenues open to it, on the basis that the opinion contains clear material errors, of law, principle and fact, and is unsafe”.
Previous statements were meanwhile elaborated on, as there was a reference to how they “diligently respected due process for eight years on the basis that the Premier League Board and Executive would behave as an independent, impartial and fair-minded regulator, free from partisan influence”.
Manchester City Chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak, former manager Pep Guardiola, CEO Ferran Soriano, and Director of Football, Txiki Begiristainopen image in gallery
Manchester City Chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak, former manager Pep Guardiola, CEO Ferran Soriano, and Director of Football, Txiki Begiristain (PA)
It’s clear to read between the lines there. They intend on turning this legal cold war into open conflict.
Chief executive Ferran Soriano, whose own role at the club is surely at risk pending the outcome, delivered a three-minute video to staff stating that “the whole Premier League case against us is based on a single false accusation” and that “every other false charge that has been thrown at us comes from that simple, central and completely false accusation.
Soriano also described the “Premier League’s conspiracy theory”.
This is where we are.
It’s why it’s actually hard to see how games can even be played in anything like a proper football atmosphere. Opposition fans up and down the country are just going to have banners declaring “sham”.
How can the Premier League go on unchanged?open image in gallery
How can the Premier League go on unchanged? (PA Archive)
Many will be furious at the amount they invested, for a competition that was made - yes - a mockery of. Perhaps even a “sham”, given City’s success.
That is why points deductions don’t feel sufficient. The scale of the impact in the other direction has been far too great. Expulsion would require a special shareholder vote, and a vote of 15, but feeling is currently running that high.
As regards their potential success in an appeals process, that is open to question. The scope under the remit of the rules is limited.
The widespread belief in football is that they will attack the process, as with the strategy against Uefa. One big difference is that this is described as a “rock solid” process.
They may go to the High Court. But that delay would be even more damaging for the context of their games. It could become a diplomatic incident.
As one geopolitical expert says: “The one thing that Gulf autocracies like Abu Dhabi won’t accept is embarrassment or shame. But will they use up political capital to preserve City when so much else is at stake?
“They already lean heavily on the UK to ensure they evade accountability in Sudan.”
This is the level we’re talking about.
And yet this decision went to levels that no one expected.
It is football’s worst ever scandal. It warrants a punishment to fit.