Why punish fans because a billionaire can’t help sticking his fingers in too many pies?
The thing about football rulebooks is that they are not set in stone. They are living, breathing, amorphous things, open to interpretation, weak in some areas, strong in others. Usually, if you have the right lawyers, they can bend pretty far before breaking.
When Manchester City came along and, via the City Football Group (CFG), started buying up clubs and creating a giant, efficient, continent-spanning network, people started to take notice.
Integrity questions were raised. At the very least, what they were doing didn’t seem in the spirit of football. Other big clubs, naturally, thought it was a great idea and followed suit.
Let’s face it: Palace are nothing like Manchester City (Photo: Getty)
So Uefa was forced to introduce multi-club ownership regulations, then when inevitable conflicts emerged, worked hard with sides who breached them to ensure they had not, in fact, breached them.
Lawyers and accountants got around tables and worked out ways they could tweak semantics, shift numbers on spreadsheets and move names around contracts to appease Uefa.
In years previously, owners of Aston Villa and Brighton & Hove Albion reduced shares in other clubs to comply, as though numbers on documents are ever going to stop billionaires from having their say.
Last summer, when Manchester City and Manchester United were in breach, they hit upon the perfect solution: the blind trust.
Essentially, the owner’s shares are temporarily placed in the power of a separate entity over which the owner has no sway. City and United’s owners placed their respective Girona and Nice shares into a blind trust, and everyone was allowed to crack on.
To now make an example of Palace, to make this modest club punching upwards the first serious case of pushing back against the system, seems remarkably unfair. This is a club who qualified for the Europa League by winning the first FA Cup in their history. A club that has not played in Europe since they were beaten 4-0 on aggregate by Samsunspor in the Intertoto Cup in 1998.
Palace sources I spoke to have always been adamant that the club are not in breach, fundamentally due to the complicated ownership structure. Palace owners, including John Textor, the focal point of the issue, Steve Parish, the longstanding figurehead, Josh Harris and David Blitzer have made their case to Uefa’s Club Financial Control Body.
Uefa officials are now deciding, with an outcome expected at the end of June.
Palace argue that while Textor may own 45 per cent of shares – and is the majority owner of Lyon, who also qualified for the Europa League – his influence is limited by decisions having to be voted on by all four other prominent shareholders.
Uefa’s investigators need only read several interviews with Textor over the last few years to learn how frustrating he finds this. He has tried to buy out the others, he is now open to selling his stake. Textor doesn’t want a piece of something – he wants to run it.
Palace do not, really, operate as part of a multi-club model. They happen to have a significant shareholder, with 25 per cent voting rights, who owns other clubs.
Yes, they have done a few deals between Palace, Lyon and RWD Molenbeek, one of Textor’s other teams. But they are not like City, who sit atop a mighty empire of teams that span the world, buying talent at one club, training it at another, before eventually selling onto City.
Savinho became the poster boy of multi-club possibilities when he was bought by CFG-owned Troyes, loaned to CFG-owned Girona, sold to CFG-owned City for £30.8m.
Palace do not share staff, databases or scouting networks with Textor’s clubs.
And, even if they did, the stipulations applied to each of the other clubs in breach of the rules feels a simple fix to stop the odd bit of trading between Textor-owned teams. In each of the cases, regardless of blind trusts or share dilution, the teams were banned from transferring players and sharing staff and resources.
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Above all else, this just feels incredibly harsh on Palace.
Uefa set a deadline of 1 March for clubs to ensure houses were in order around multi-club regulations. On 1 March, Palace were playing Millwall in the fifth round of the FA Cup. They were 12th in the table.
There were slim enough odds of them qualifying for Europe via the league, let alone winning the FA Cup. Odds that only shortened fractionally as they beat Fulham in the quarter-finals, Aston Villa in the semi-finals, Manchester City in the final.
Why punish Palace fans because a billionaire can’t help sticking his fingers in too many pies?
Palace qualifying for Europe should be seen as a fairytale story, not evidence of a slick multi-billion-pound machine ruining football. To make them the scapegoats would be a travesty.