I don’t think it is hyperbole to suggest English football is undergoing something of an existential crisis following the news of Manchester City’s apparent guilt of 115 breaches of the PL’s financial regulations. They were decided by some of the country’s finest legal minds after a hugely extended period of deliberation.
I don’t doubt their verdicts. They’ll be relieved to hear that. Ahem. I do wonder what Man City’s overwhelming and compelling evidence of their own innocence actually comprises and why the independent panel hasn’t seen it already?
The whole episode is the talk of football nationally and internationally. The case goes to the centre of the nature of the Premier League and its ethos and its sporting principles. It is not going to be over within a few weeks.
Outside of the Directors Box at The Etihad, there will be few who believe Man City has not broken the rules. Even objectively it seems a nonsense that City can generate more commercial income than Real Madrid. The Mancini remuneration almost doubling his Man City contract with the briefest of coaching sessions for the Abu Dhabis is laughable. I am no solicitor but the sulphorous odour from all of this is noxious.
But here is the truth of the Premier League. If Man City had not broken financial rules (which they maintain they did not despite the panel’s findings) then you might reflect upon what English football would have looked like over the last decade and more.
Without the vast investment Sheikh Mansour has made into Man City, the Cityzens are highly unlikely to have won even one Premier League trophy let alone numerous cups and a Champions League.
So who would have won those Premier League trophies?
I can tell you who wouldn’t - Newcastle United, Aston Villa, Everton, Spurs, Leeds, West Ham, Forest et al.
At this point you are away ahead of me. The trophies Man City paraded through the streets of Manchester would have been headed, in greatest likelihood, towards Old Trafford, the Emirates and Anfield.
Then let us look at Chelsea. The Abramovich era flushed the West London club with cash on an unprecedented scale. The Russian’s entry point to English football convinced Sir John Hall the time was for him to get out of football and cash in his Newcastle United chips. He knew Newcastle United could not compete with Abramovich’s billions. Chelsea prior to their Abromvich takeover with one league Championship in their entire history (the mid-50s) have won more trophies, including Premier League titles and two Champions Leagues.
## Man City and the Premier League: Part 1 - the legal explainer
Yousef Hatem
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Sep 29
Man City and the Premier League: Part 1 - the legal explainer
The Premier League’s independent disciplinary tribunal has found against Manchester City in respect of 114 out of 115 of its alleged breaches of the PL’s rules. That’s all we know. Deeply unsatisfactory, but true. And - although the use of words like “guilty” and “charges” is not correct, and perhaps unhelpfully - if inadvertently - sensationalist (this…
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Again, I ask the question who would have won those honours but for the Russian oligarch’s team?
Again, the most likely answers are Man Utd, Arsenal and Liverpool.
Go further back to the mid-90s and a certain Alan Shearer-led Blackburn Rovers 1994/95 PL title win thanks to the money invested by local lad done good Jack Walker. Without Walker’s millions Ewood Park would never have seen Dalglish in the dug-out, Shearer as centre-forward and a Premier League trophy presented to incredulous fans of that historic but modest Lancashire club. That investment would not have been possible in a world of PSR, SCR etc.
So, since the formation of the Premier League, the only clubs outside of the Red Cartel to have won the title are those who have been financially doped. Put Leicester City to one side. They are a case study all on their own. But we can say that title win, relished by neutral fans across the country, was an abberration, something that should never have happened. But Leicester City’s finances are a separate subject too.
## Man City and the Premier League: Part 2 - where do we go from here?
Yousef Hatem
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Sep 30
Man City and the Premier League: Part 2 - where do we go from here?
In this follow-up to my initial legal explainer (here), I’ll look at three things. Firstly, what this case could mean for other clubs. Secondly, whether the verdict should give us any pause for thought when it comes to Newcastle’s own strategy over recent years. And thirdly, how all of this should make us feel as football fans (or, to be more accurate a…
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The bottom line is this last ten days has demonstrated conclusively only three clubs can win the title within the financial rules and environment created by the Premier League. The Premier League is its clubs. It is as Richard Scudamore told me directly across the table in my capacity as a NUST representative over a decade ago, a trades body. Its members make the rules.
That is fact.
Compare the Premier League’s title winners since its formation to the thirty odd years preceding the “brand new ball game”. Across those three decades from the 60s, 70s and 80s the following clubs were Champions of England - Ipswich, Burnley, Spurs, Forest, Derby, Aston Villa, Man City, Everton, Leeds - nine clubs outside of the Red Cartel. And several amongst them won it more than once. Indeed two of those clubs … Forest and Villa won three European Cups between them. Leeds reached a European Cup Final in the mid-70s and were robbed in Paris of glory by the referee to the benefit of Bayern Munich.
We should note that without Abromivich’s largesse, the City of Nottingham would boast more European Cup wins than all of London’s great clubs combined. As it happens it only equals the capital’s European Cups / Champions Leagues achieved on the back of Clough’s genius as opposed to someone who pillaged Russian energy.
We should also remember that prior to their period of Ferguson domination from the early 1990s onwards, Man Utd had not won a championship for twenty six years. The Beatles were writing perfectly brilliant music when Busby took his fantastic team of Law, Best, Charlton from the ashes of Munich back to being Champions of England. Then no more for getting onto three decades.
It is not normal in the history of English football for only three clubs to be able to win the country’s football championship legitimately. Fortunes have traditionally risen and fallen. That is the natural ebb and flow of our national game. Until this current era and three of the country’s most popular clubs falling into the hands of US owners. They have de-facto created a monoply with no jeopardy by crushing the dreams of others. They have done it by convincing enough of the also-rans that the interests of a cash-laden Premier League align with their own and they will all profit in their different ways. There’s a lot of money in being a Premier League bottom feeder.
Indeed they have created an environment where only clubs owned by corrupt oligarchs and Middle Eastern Investment Funds can realistically challenge the Red Cartel.
Man City have in my opinion broken the financial rules governing the game. But there are few who understand the iniquitous nature of those regulations who do not believe they are a sham that serve as a protective shield around three clubs. The US owners of those three clubs have stolen football from the rest of the country.
You might expect these words to come from a resentful Newcastle United supporting malcontent and I am easily dismissed as having too much skin in the game as a lifelong fan to make an objective judgement. The same cannot be said of a growing number of ex-professionals and journalists among them Gary Neville, Paul Scholes and Nicky Butt of Man Utd’s golden generation and Martin Samuels of The Times. There are plenty others and none of them could be said to have ever been of our Black & White tribe.
## Did David Hopkinson just say the quiet part out loud?
Michael Martin
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Oct 2
Did David Hopkinson just say the quiet part out loud?
I, like most of us, will have listened to the excellent True Faith podcast with David Hopkinson. Out of it all one phrase in particular caught my attention.
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Of course there are many siren voices screaming for vegeance. Anfield for the upcoming visit of Man City is predicted to be a bearpit of injustice where the wronged Red Brethern will pour down their opprobrium on the visitors from up the East Lancs Road. Spare us the performative Kopite rage. This is the club of Heysel, tourists as fans and locking out all bar the most well-heeled with a Liverpool post-code and corporate dining in executive suites. The club of the European Super League breakaway farrago, a prime mover in the establishment of the grotesque Premier League, bullying local residents to demolish their homes to extend the Anfield Stadium, the foreign TV deals and a desire to move away from collective PL bargaining to upholstering their own finances, the club of barstool bores opining on a club they have never seen play live, the ersatz socialism on the back of a strangulated Shankly quote from more than half a century ago. The club that connived with an agent and a player under contract with three years to run to agitate for him to strike. These are not wronged innocents, these wannabe little red riding hoods.
Let’s pass on the fake outrage at a club with the temerity to want to compete.
Not that it is the self entitlement of fans in the stands of the Red Cartel or more likely on social media channels alone who are frothing at the mouth. There are plenty in the media who write with tedious pomposity - some as client journalists of the Red Cartel themselves but others wrapped up in their own myopia.
Writers who cannot see the investment of Abu Dhabi into superb stadia, training facilities and wider East Manchester regeneration compared to the rentier capitalism of the parasites across the city at Old Trafford with its creaking, leaking roof, degenerating training ground, abysmal treatment of lifelong season ticket holders, #1:5bn debt and tax exile Jim Ratcliffe, sacking ordinary workers with his hand out for tax payers money to pay for his New Trafford pipe-dream while he slags the UK off to any bigot that will listen to his crackpot musings. I know who I think has been better for football and their host city in the last two decades - its not the Reds of Trafford Borough.
I don’t defend breaking of rules. But neither can anyone defend the current system of one-eyed governance we have within the Premier League. Good rules need to be supported by a consensus. The health of English football, the old school notion of “the good of the game” depends upon a broad agreement the rules are fair and that extends from votes from PL club executives to broadcasters, players and crucially supporters. We are currently a million miles from that.
There is no doubt a slavvering appetite amongst many fans of the Red Cartel for a heavy penalty meted out to Man City. They aren’t after justice, they are seeking advantage. Many (not all) support those clubs for their self image, to bask in the reflected glory of the achievements of young millionaires at the top of their sport. They don’t follow those clubs for reasons of local affiliation, loyalty, community and tradition. Playing second fiddle to Man City or Chelsea or god forbid, Newcastle United, Aston Villa et al isn’t what they signed up for when they chose their clubs.
They aren’t cognisant of the impact the removal of Man City’s money could do to the eco-system of English football. Those well run clubs like Brighton, Brentford, Bournemouth have been selling their players and reinvesting the money … a reduced demand gives the Red Cartel best picks (as if they didn’t already have enough power) and at a lower price.
What the Man City case now says about the Premier League reputationally I’ll leave you to decide. By reputationally I mean within its own football public in England and across foreign territories which we have been lectured to the point of boredom are so important to us - as local fans are denied tickets to see their clubs so a tourist can fork out money working class folks from round the doors cannot.
Football should not be like this.
Keep On, Keepin’ On …
Michael Martin, @TFMick1892.bsky.social