ONE, single, lonely thing has become abundantly clear to English football after a week filled with jarring acronyms and dense legalese and furious, desperate spin: Manchester City’s ongoing courtroom struggle against the Premier League is not going to conclude with either side winning.
At the end of all this, everyone involved is going to lose.
To recap: Last week, an independent tribunal handed down its verdict on City’s attempt to challenge the legitimacy of the Premier League’s Associated Party Transaction rules. Those are sponsorship deals struck by clubs with other companies linked to their owners.
Quite what that verdict was might best be considered a “choose your own adventure” situation. City claimed the judges had decided the rules were unlawful, and therefore celebrated what they saw as a decisive victory.
The Premier League claimed that, while the panel had identified a couple of minor, procedural discrepancies, the system had largely been upheld.
City were so incensed by that reading of the decision that their lawyers – who, by this stage, probably need a few days off – immediately sent a letter to the league’s 19 other clubs, dismissing the league’s conclusion, stating that the sponsorship rules had been thrown out, and suggesting their rivals should now direct all further communication to them.
The reaction to that was, well, what you might expect. Executives are now openly wondering whether the democratic approach that has helped fuel the league’s growth is sustainable.
Fulham’s Rodrigo Muniz topples during the match against English Premier League champions Manchester City at the Etihad on Oct 5. — AP
There are dark whispers of City’s rivals’ submitting warnings of further legal action in advance of a conclusion to the club’s unrelated and more significant case against the league.
It is worth pausing at this point to stress exactly what has brought us here. That has, to some extent, been lost over the last week, buried some way beneath the baroque legal complexities and the purposefully mangled language and the deafening roar of claim and counterclaim.
On the surface, it would appear that Manchester City would quite like it if the Premier League did not have any rules governing whether teams can sign hugely inflated deals with other entities that are either controlled by, or connected to, their owners.
If some other company should want to pay over the odds for a sleeve sponsorship or to be an official poultry farming partner, then that should be fine.
In much of the coverage of the case, this argument has been treated as if it is not – on some fundamental level – completely absurd.
Why would another company want to pay a hugely inflated price for a sponsorship deal? What is in it for them to strike a deal that is not, to use the correct term, vaguely related to “fair market value”?
What reason could there be for someone agreeing to such a deal, other than an owner attempting to funnel money into a club by the back door, thus immediately negating any and all financial rules the Premier League might like to have?
The response to this, of course, is that the rules exist to protect what some City supporters have derided as an elite “cartel” of clubs set on maintaining power at the expense of competition.
Nobody ever really bothers to ask what the alternative precedent might be, but just to be clear: The answer is not a great party of liberation, now that the oppressive regime of, um, Tottenham have been abolished.
No, it is – best-case scenario – a duopoly, in which Manchester City and Newcastle have so much more money at their disposal than everyone else that their rivals must choose between risking bankruptcy and risking irrelevance.
It is possible, of course, that Manchester City took up the cudgels against the Premier League on the issue of related-party sponsorships because the club truly believe those rules are unjust. (Nobody has really explained how.) It is certainly feasible that they did so because they know abolishing them is in their own interests.
But far more likely, on reflection, they decided to pick this fight as both a pathfinder and a warning shot.
Reading the verdict, it is quite hard to understand why City were so quick to claim such a unanimous victory.
The club have landed several significant blows, to be sure, but many of their challenges were summarily dismissed by the judges.
The overall picture, though, is more important than the detail. City succeeded in picking holes, however minor they may seem, in some of the Premier League’s rules.
That matters, because the case that will decide their future – the one examining the 115 charges of breaching financial rules, the charges they stridently denies – most likely will be determined less by right or wrong, by fact or fiction, and more by procedural shortcomings and legal technicalities.
City’s lawyers, now, have proof of concept. They know the Premier League’s rules are not watertight. The club can be sure, too, that the perception of reality is just as important as reality itself.
The actual outcome of a legal case matters substantially less than who is successful in claiming to have won it.
In that sense, the fire and the fury of the last five days are not a distraction but rather the point: a hint of what will happen if whatever verdict is handed down in the more meaningful case is not to City’s exact liking.
It is a taste of what is to come, if necessary: competing narratives in the news media, open mutiny behind the scenes, and the lingering threat that City is perfectly happy to take the whole edifice down if necessary.
This, then, is the reality that the Premier League face, one in which the best-case scenario involves imposing a draconian punishment on the team that have become their standard-bearer, and then (in all but the most extreme circumstances) finding a way to reincorporate that same club while it is in a state of open revolt.
The alternative, somehow, is less appealing still, a world in which City are free to pump as much money into their team as they like, but are still reliant for much of their prominence on a league that have ceased to work, where the idea of good faith is a ghost, and in which the risk of legal action from one club or another squats, brooding, on the horizon.
Those are the two choices. The coming months will bring one, or the other. There are no winners here. — NYT
