Arsenal vs Manchester City confirmed lineups - image of Pep Guardiola
Arsenal vs Manchester City confirmed lineups - image of Pep Guardiola
Manchester City finally being convicted of the 115 charges that were brought against them has got the football world speaking. The international break hasn’t helped their cause, but phone-ins up and down the country have been inundated with talk of title stripping and financial skullduggery. Rangers are the closest example that many British fans will be familiar with as their 2010 relegation to the lowest level was one of the biggest stories of the time.
The highest courts, the SPFL, SFA, FIFA, and UEFA have all had their say, case closed, but 14 years later, it is still their comfort blanket. A fate that awaits the Cityzens and their fans.
Can Man City be relegated like Rangers?
Yes and no. Rangers were relegated in the sense that they dropped from the Premiership to League 2, as it is known now; however, they weren’t, technically, made to play their football in Scotland’s lowest professional league.
After losing a vote to retain their membership in the Premiership, they had to apply to join the SPFL. A situation entirely different to the one that faces City now. While it isn’t impossible, it is unlikely that the Cityzens have their membership taken away. Such a fate has met badly run and debt-riddled sides like Bordeaux in recent memory.
What Did Rangers Do Wrong?
The causative factors are also different. Rangers didn’t cheat or break the rules that were in place. They were given specialist advice and guidance that the troublesome Employee Benefit Trust scheme was above board and that it was a legitimate way of enticing transfer targets to Ibrox.
It was a legal process at the time, and it was signed off by auditors, as former chairman Sir David Murray told Simon Jordan on the Graeme Souness Tackles podcast: “It was brought forward to me as a valid scheme and I rubber-stamped it for two reasons.
“Our auditors signed it off; the Rangers auditors signed it off in the accounts. It’s a wee bit like coming back to BDO because that is where the idea came into my mind.
“But on top of that, Ernst and Young were our company auditors. So it was being audited at Rangers and audited at my head office at my company. So one would believe it is a valid scheme if you have gone through six different lots of audits.”
Subsequently, it wasn’t, and HRMC’s pursuit over a near £100 million tax bill put prospective buyers off and made the chances of an agreement with creditors virtually impossible. That this figure ended up being halved is a bitter pill to swallow for Rangers fans who still believe that something wasn’t right from day one.
Rangers were punished, substantially, but not for using EBTs, for failing to disclose that they were being used. The punishment wasn’t relegation; it was a £250,000 fine.
City are in a whole lot more trouble.
Why Man City are different from Rangers
According to the Premier League’s damning statement, City knew the rules and made every attempt to circumvent them and to falsify their accounts both in terms of what they were receiving in and what they were paying out – to a tune of over £900 million during the reporting period that was assessed.
To make matters worse for City, there are already examples of teams like Everton and Nottingham Forest being impacted by points deductions for relatively minor breaches of Financial Fair Play rules and regulations.
The Premier League can, and probably will, issue the sort of deduction that will see City relegated to the Championship. Beyond that, it is anyone’s guess in terms of future point deductions, transfer bans, or fines.
Rangers could have stayed in the Premiership had the other teams voted in favour of them, City won’t have that option.
The Last Word
The fundamental difference is that Rangers were incompetent behind the scenes, which then spiralled into a situation where an owner was allowed to gamble away future season ticket sales.
City, knew all along what they were trying to do, and why they were trying to do it. They had the money, but were frustrated at the speed by which they could catch up on the historical big guns of the Premier League.
If any lessons have been learned from the Rangers fiasco, though, it is that City’s trials and tribulations are far from over.
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