Ten Manchester City grounds for appeal and why they won’t wash (MON AM)
The Manchester City appeal has been lodged and now – once again – we wait.
And, once again, we wait for an undetermined length of time as the 12 weeks plus 30 days ruling for such an appeal process was brought in this season, well into the independent commission’s process, and you can bet your boots City aren’t going to accept that it applies to them. It’s a rule, after all.
But we need not wait. We know they’re doomed. Here we run through ten grounds for appeal – some of which we would admittedly be surprised at being brought up in front of the board – and why each of the ten have no hope of getting them off the hook.
Rules of the Red Cartel At the centre of the ‘Red Cartel’ theory for your tin-foil-hat-wearing City fan is the belief – genuine or manufactured – that the three red giants, Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United, have used their historical dominance and political weight to control the Premier League as puppeteers to create financial rules which keep relative minnows as minnows.
They claim the trio actively lobbied for strict Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR) and Financial Fair Play (FFP) metrics to protect their commercial advantages. They ‘pulled up the ladder’, if you like.
Do these conspiracy theorists ever stop to ask themselves ‘why?’ The Premier League has moved into a different financial stratosphere compared to other top European leagues during this period of City dominance. It’s more powerful than it’s ever been if not because of City’s excellence then certainly not in spite of it. The Pep Guardiola era has been a huge boon.
Are the rules fair? Maybe not. But guys, they are The Rules.
Whatabout Chelsea? There was entirely reasonable frustration when Chelsea were handed a measly £10m fine – otherwise known as a quarter Garnacho – and a two-year suspended transfer ban for 74 rule breaches. They, like Manchester City, cheated.
But they didn’t cheat like Manchester City.
The Blues made £47m in hidden, secret payments to unregistered agents and third parties during the transfers of high-profile players like Eden Hazard, Willian and Nemanja Matic.
It’s fair to say Chelsea may not have won the Premier League in 2014 and 2016 without those payments as the core of those squads were acquired through illegal means. It’s also fair to say that they got off lightly.
But there are two key differences in the cases of Chelsea and Man City: 1) BlueCo self-reported the violations and cooperated fully with an investigation that the FA later admitted would probably never have happened had Chelsea not copped to it; 2) £47m is not £900m.
It was the government We all waited with bated breath to hear exactly what the ‘irrefutable evidence’ was that unblinking CEO Ferran Soriano promised would blow this case wide open, folks, as many City fans held the false belief that their hard truth was yet to be put to the independent commission, which a) would make no sense, and b) literally isn’t allowed.
So, they have already seen and dismissed it as an explanation ‘concocted well after the event in an attempt to obscure and conceal the realities of the disguised funding scheme’.
City will look to contend that it was the Abu Dhabi government – who own Etihad – rather than the City owners the Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG) that was funding the sponsorship deals, and thus no rules were broken.
A series of hacked emails sent by City executives effectively exposed this evidence for the proverbial it was, as officials discuss the flow of funds from ADUG through sponsors to City.
In a 2013 email, City’s then chief financial officer Jorge Chumillas asks Simon Pearce about the mechanisms of the deal with longstanding major sponsor Etihad Airways.
‘I need to understand the mechanism by which additional sponsorship flows through ADUG,’ he writes. ‘Is it ADUG Shareholder->ADUG->Etihad->MCFC? Or is it rather ADUG Shareholder->Etihad->MCFC?’
It’s like he was trying to explain how fraud works to a primary school child.
And if that wasn’t enough, City’s claim has already been spectacularly refuted by Etihad in an email to the US government in 2015.
At the time, Etihad Airways stated: “The assertion that the Abu Dhabi government paid for Etihad’s sponsorship of English Premier League football club Manchester City is false.
“In 2011, Etihad and Manchester City entered into a 10 year sponsorship agreement, which included naming rights for Manchester City’s stadium. Etihad funded this sponsorship from its own liquidity.”
Etihad added: “We are government-owned and have been since our founding. We are and have always been clear that we do not receive any subsidies from the Abu Dhabi government, and that we are financed through a combination of equity, shareholder and commercial loans.
“Our shareholder [The Abu Dhabi government]’s equity and loans are not subsidies under any applicable definition; they are the means by which the Abu Dhabi government has sensibly invested in a successful business model.”
Manchester City’s case destroyed by its own illegally inflated sponsor? That’s chef’s kiss perfect.
No Etihad contact ‘The Premier League is cooked’ and other similar social media responses followed the Etihad Airways BOMBSHELL that ‘at no time did the Premier League reach out to or engage with Etihad in the process associated with the commission’s opinion.’
How could the panel reach a verdict without contacting Manchester City’s primary sponsor?
Because the case centred on whether Man City accurately reported its financial data and complied with league rules, and the commission therefore evaluated the evidence provided by the club rather than auditing its sponsors, which would have served no purpose whatsoever.
Sheikh Mansour in the dark Though his name was redacted, reports claim the independent panel found that Sheikh Mansour – a member of the UAE royal family and owner of City – was unaware of the so-called ‘sham’ deals. No-one should be surprised by his surprise, if indeed he knows about it even now.
He has been to see two games in his 18-year stint as owner. Few people care less about Manchester City than the owner of Manchester City.
And yet, the club’s lawyers plan to use his ignorance as a defence, more on the grounds that him failing to notice nearly £1bn of his money being spent is implausible rather than his fandom of the club he owns, in fairness.
Is it implausible, though?
Firstly, we doubt Mansour is logging into his mobile banking on the regular to check his balance and curse himself for forgetting once again to cancel his second, superfluous Netflix subscription.
Secondly, £100m – on average what he was pumping into the club each season – is around 0.5 per cent of his £20bn net worth. For someone with a salary of £40,000 per year that’s 200 quid.
‘Sham’ misuse City aren’t at all happy with the commission’s use of the word ‘sham’ as ‘it is not simply a word for something which appears suspect, but is instead a legal term and that, in this case, it has been mis-used’.
According to a 1999 paper by James Kessler, ‘sham’ is defined in legal terms as ‘an act, document, or transaction that is deliberately created to give a false impression to a court or third parties regarding the true legal rights and obligations of the parties involved’.
Perfect use. Guys, you didn’t ‘appear suspect’; you were guilty.
Post-2018 sponsorship We wouldn’t pull at this particular thread, lads. We suspect the City lawyers don’t plan to either.
This was an early defence from backs-to-the-wall City fans on social media, who posited that because their club had maintained and even increased their sponsorship revenue after 2018 that there can’t have been wrongdoing in the nine-year period through which they were found guilty.
But the 2009 to 2018 timeframe was set by the leaked internal emails published by Der Spiegel in late 2018. Should ‘Football Leaks’ hacker Rui Pinto investigate 2018 to 2023 who knows what he might find? We all have a decent idea.
The ‘Premier League commission’ We can only imagine the glorious short shrift the INDEPENDENT investigators would give what has been a consistent suggestion of bias from Manchester City and their partners in response to the verdict should Lord Pannick KC grasp desperately at the slipperiest of straws as a last resort.
“Surprisingly for us, and for our lawyers, after nearly two years the Premier League Commission has introduced an opinion that supports the Premier League’s conspiracy theory,” Soriano said in his message to Manchester City staff, before Etihad Airways followed suit.
‘Etihad Airways has reviewed the Premier League commission’s published opinion relating to the disciplinary proceedings involving Manchester City, together with the Premier League’s public communication of its findings.’
Guys, it was NOT the ‘Premier League commission’. It was an independent panel made up of three individuals with extensive legal experience. The appeal board will be made up of three different individuals with extensive legal experience. They have no links with the Premier League, nor bias in any way towards it.
Success is ‘not paid by money’ The Rodri defence, which essentially amounts to ‘but we’re good footballers, who played in a great team under a brilliant manager’.
“What we did, they cannot take out of us,” he said.
“It’s something that is not paid by money. It’s paid with effort, with the damage, with, you know, being shoulder to shoulder every day.”
No-one is disputing the work of the sporting directors in building the squad either. The vast majority of people who worked for Manchester City did an excellent job. But it’s not their work that’s under scrutiny, and rather the means through which they were brought and kept by the club. In that way – obviously – success is “paid by money”.
If anything, Rodri is explaining why he and anyone else who was in the dark over City’s cheating should be absolutely furious with the club for tainting their success and making it so their hard work and quality count for nothing.
Whatabout Liverpool? What have the high and mighty, This Means More, pedestal-sitting club of all clubs been up to? To what degree have they flouted the FFP rules? Just how much money has the infamously tight-fisted John W. Henry been pumping into the club from his own pocket? We beg someone to ask Jurgen Klopp if he held a double contract at Anfield.
But no, Liverpool paid City £1m in compensation in 2013 after the Etihad club complained that their scouting system had been hacked that season. The Reds spying yielded a transfer haul of Mamadou Sakho, Iago Aspas, Simon Mignolet, Luis Alberto and Tiago Ilori, which was punishment enough.
