"The Negreira case in the spotlight": Why is Manchester City facing severe punishment while Barcelona escapes it?
The newspaper raised intriguing questions
A Spanish press report on Monday linked the Negreira case to the crisis engulfing Manchester City, accused of 114 breaches of financial fair play rules, and demanded that Barcelona be punished.
The newspaper "AS" described two different cases carrying the same social and sporting weight, consequences that reach far beyond the borders of any single country.
The whole of football hangs on the outcome of both. Manchester City have already been tried over 114 breaches of financial fair play rules, though no final ruling or punishment has yet landed. Those rules exist to ensure every Premier League club paints a fair and accurate picture of its finances.
The charges cover the club's financial transactions between 2009 and 2018.
Running to considerable length, the ruling details five breaches of UEFA's financial control regulations.
UEFA punished the English club in 2020, banning it from competition for two years and imposing a 30 million euro fine for falsifying sponsorship data. The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) then reduced the sanction to a financial fine.
The Negreira case
Barcelona's Negreira case is another scandal that has haunted football in recent years, still awaiting judicial and sporting rulings.
A court will decide the first. UEFA and its independent disciplinary committee will decide the second.
Four months ago, Real Madrid delivered 50,000 pages of documents to UEFA's headquarters in Nyon, laying out the case and their arguments.
They also supplied additional material giving UEFA grounds to continue an investigation that has never been officially closed.
Real Madrid want Barcelona sanctioned and the titles they won between 2001 and 2017 stripped. Both options remain on the table. The first is in its final stages of investigation and court hearings in Barcelona. The second sits under UEFA review and analysis.
The Manchester City crisis
The Premier League and its clubs did not hesitate. Circumventing financial controls, they insist, is unfair competition against the rivals who play by the rules.
That is why the complaint stuck. From the start it was clear that no direct payments were made to secure an unfair edge on the pitch. City simply broke the rules everyone else follows.
Only the sporting disciplinary system can punish Manchester City, because none of this counts as a legal offence in the world of business and companies, football clubs included.
No lawsuit stands a chance of success. The breaches include paying unofficial salaries to players and coaches, with part of those wages allegedly coming from external parties linked to the club's Abu Dhabi owners. They also cover breaching the Premier League's permitted loss limits by disguising owners' donations as commercial income, and failing to cooperate properly with league investigators. These are the charges that convicted them, and none of them can be punished in court.
Even so, English clubs have already begun organising campaigns to demand compensation from Manchester City for the financial fallout of the breaches, and they mean to take those claims to court. Spain does not rule out the same route given the scale of what has happened, however much the official bodies play it down.
The Negreira case is a different beast. Barcelona are defending a direct accusation of trying to influence match results through the refereeing system by bribing officials.
The line has been repeated again and again: "It is the most serious incident that professional sport has witnessed worldwide."
Barcelona's situation in Spain
Unlike the Manchester City case, Spain's sporting authorities could take no action because the statute of limitations had expired.
The courts, though, keep the case open. UEFA never closed it either, choosing to wait for the court's decision. Now Real Madrid want an immediate penalty and have handed over 50,000 pages of documents.
Set against events in England, the question writes itself: why is the sporting route open there and closed here in Spain? Is Real Madrid the right party to carry the fight, or should the official institutions have pushed harder?
UEFA is watching Manchester City closely, and its final decision may take months. Relegation, points deduction, the certainty is this: the English club will face punishment from the Premier League itself, on top of economic and social fallout, because plenty of rivals will not sit quietly by.
Integrity and ethics sit at the heart of the Negreira case. UEFA could have suspended Barcelona under Article 7 of its regulations for the mere intent to disrupt the natural order of the competition, a step that could still come at any moment.
Insiders who have served on disciplinary committees describe a clear path forward, and a fairer competition once the fallout from all this plays out.
UEFA preferred to bide its time and wait. The events have now surfaced through a report from Real Madrid.
Barcelona may find themselves in that spot once the Spanish football world grasps the gravity of what happened.
Take Juventus, administratively relegated in 2007 for their influence over referee appointments. Nobody ever proved they paid anyone, but the manipulation of refereeing decisions was proven beyond doubt.
