Win or lose, Manchester City case poses perilous threat to Premier League power

Arsenal clash is part Super Sunday but more importantly Tribunal Day Seven and the stakes could scarcely be higher

Fri 20 Sep 2024 20.00 CESTShare

Dance while the world burns. You have to hand it to English football. It is above all endlessly adaptable. Everything is content. Never stop selling. Even if the thing you’re selling may just turn out to be the ground beneath your own feet.

The days leading up to any big soaraway Super Sunday showdown tend to bring an avalanche of messages from gambling companies describing their latest match-day lures. With Arsenal due at the Etihad on Sunday afternoon the gambling emails have once again flowed like wine, albeit with a topical twist this time. As of Wednesday (also known as Tribunal Day Three) you can access a range of bets tailored breathlessly to City’s financial charges, as though this is all actually just another football match, including HOT MARKETS on deductions, fines and even relegation (a miserly 6-1: these people really do know their wishful-thinking demographic).

There is at least a bracing degree of honesty in all this. For the broadcasters it is a trickier subject. How to deal with this thing, in the week when it finally became a thing, one that undermines so many other things, not least your own relentlessly upbeat entertainment product?

Come Sunday afternoon the chat around the lighted plinth will be about bottling or not bottling, about whether Arsenal were too pleased with the robotically cautious 0-0 in this fixture last season. It will be about how the league’s best defence deals with Erling Haaland, who has scored 8.5% of all Premier League goals this season, and who also has 82% of City’s tally, which may just, as the Inter game in midweek suggested, be a possible weak spot.

This is clearly a good thing for everyone concerned, not least the unsuspecting teatime TV audience. The profitability and sustainability rules (PSR) procedure is opaque, tedious and unresolved. Nobody comes to sport for this. Can’t we all just enjoy the frowning men in puffy gilets analysing the second‑phase mid-block counterpress?

The difference now is that as of Monday morning this thing is finally in the building, walking the halls, rattling the door handles, whispering through the keyholes. A Sunday afternoon meeting with the team City beat to the league title by the finest of margins four months ago, while also being accused of overreaching the finest of margins, provides its own unavoidable note of irony.

Above all it is a reminder that this remains a hugely perilous point in the history of a league formed out of legal squabbles, chicanery and greed a third of a century ago. Zoom out a little and City’s charges are arguably the greatest existential threat to the Premier League since its inception.

At which point it is probably a good moment to take a look at where we are with this thing. Perhaps the most notable aspect right now is the sense of two entirely opposing views on how it may play out.

City have understandably drawn down the shutters on this topic. But the club is by all accounts hugely confident of being vindicated. There is talk of “irrefutable” evidence proving City’s innocence, a phrase used so often you wonder whether someone in the comms team doesn’t know what “irrefutable” actually means, which is unarguable, open-and-shut, beyond question, and not simply slick, aggressive and produced by an £8,000-an-hour king’s counsel.

One suggestion is City are supremely confident in their own resources, the bewigged legal super-group at their disposal and a track record in making these things go away.

Another theory is the club have been advised certain key notes of evidence in the public domain – and disputed by City – will turn out to be inadmissible. This would certainly explain that confidence. Because the leaked evidence, taken at face value, is undeniably compelling.

The charges themselves fall into five basic categories. Inflated sponsorship income offered by organisations linked to the club’s state ownership. Issues, including image rights, that relate to player and manager remuneration. Failure to meet Uefa’s financial fair play regulations. Breaches of PSR. And what are essentially allegations of bad faith, a failure to supply accurate information on time or to help progress the investigation.

The evidence out there – which City dispute – is most compelling on the key front of sponsor income. Der Spiegel’s 2018 investigation, supported by leaked documents from the Portuguese hacker Rui Pinto – and again disputed by City – suggested club officials solicited top-ups from state-owned entities in Abu Dhabi to avoid openly breaking the rules.

Uefa’s financial rules have always been the enemy of ambition for City’s owners. “We will need to fight this,” Ferran Soriano, City’s chief executive, allegedly writes of FFP in one leaked memo, “and do it in a way that is not visible.” There is alleged talk of “creative solutions” to get around the rules and the launch of “Project Longbow”, a nod, apparently, to Agincourt and Uefa’s Gallic bogeyman, Michel Platini.

The alleged narrative behind all this detail is that City’s sponsors were not in fact real commercial parties but compliant bodies covertly routing money from the ownership. An internal email sent by the club executive Simon Pearce in April 2010 – which City dispute the validity of – talks of making up a shortfall in income via “alternative sources provided by His Highness”. One document section carries the heading: “Supplement to Abu Dhabi partnership deals.” Asked about changing the date of payment for some Abu Dhabi‑centred sponsorship deals, Pearce replies: “Of course, we can do what we want.” City dispute the truth and relevance of all this.