Manchester City’s initial finding of guilt on the Premier League’s 100-plus charges has been met with defiance rather than contrition. Khaldoon al-Mubarak, the club’s chairman, issued a statement on Saturday that remains the only official comment from any party, and it was notable for what it did not contain: any acknowledgement of culpability, or even any recognition that the charges have legitimacy. Al-Mubarak’s position is that the verdict is not the end of the story but the buildup to it, with a clinching piece of evidence still to come.
He made that case in strikingly personal terms. “This club matters to me,” al-Mubarak said, before adding “Here’s what I said to my family,” and going on to say: “There are so many things that I would like to be able to share with you to help you understand why we feel so confident.” There was also dark talk of “media reporting”, with its implication of lies and fake news. As the Guardian’s Barney Ronay writes, that is not a standard line after being found almost unanimously guilty.
What happens next is genuinely unclear, and understandably so, because this has never happened before. The common assumption is that sanctions will arrive first, perhaps as early as midweek, followed by an appeal and then whatever comes next. Someone is suing someone, and it will be neither cheap nor quick. For now, the scale of City’s punishment is the only story in town: a verdict means nothing without the hammer of actual consequences, and the triumphalism of those personally invested in seeing City fail could yet prove premature.
The suggestions for that punishment range widely. Among the more lenient is a combination of a major fine, a one-season points deduction and a transfer ban — punishment that looks like punishment but means everyone feels vaguely vindicated and the show carries on. Bloomberg has most recently reported suggestions of political pressure from City’s owners, with the idea floated that the United Arab Emirates government wishes to see its investment protected as a quid pro quo for its trading partnership with the UK. At the other end of the scale is the suggestion that the Premier League will press for major sanctions as a way of heading off a disastrous round of internecine litigation — club-on-club action that would risk torpedoing the competition.
Ronay’s own proposal sits between the two, and speaks directly to the core of the charges. If the verdict holds, he argues, the punishment should include a lengthy ban on City having any kind of sponsorship. That would address the allegation that state-owned companies were used to funnel in direct investment, and would force the club to grow its revenue by more standard means.
City’s bullishness is presumably based on information from their legal team. It is hard to see how the combined 89 charges of failure to provide accurate information or to cooperate with an investigation can be overturned on appeal — but it is far from impossible. The next stage after an appeal would be the high court, where different rules on evidence and the law may apply, and where the long game may be to get to. It may even work, as it did at the court of arbitration for sport in the Uefa case. Or the plan may simply be to spin the process out.
Whatever happens, the league itself will not escape scrutiny. The written judgment is likely to heavily criticise the Premier League’s governance, and rightly so. The charges have been doggedly pursued, but how did an organisation that maintains its serial champions have been cheating for a decade and a half allow that entity into its competition in the first place, and how did it fail so completely to regulate it? The Premier League has, in Ronay’s description, always basically been a TV rights agency masquerading as a regulator: as long as the show rolls on, the show rolls on.
The same question applies to who is permitted to own a club at all. One thing was obvious years before the current state of emergency: countries should not own football clubs, and sovereign wealth funds should not own football clubs. There is an irreconcilable conflict of objectives there. English football hovers like a locust cloud over every other league, and the reeling-in of talent and expertise is hugely destabilising — all the more so given that City and Chelsea have between them spent more than £3bn on transfer fees.
One version of the endgame is that City’s owners could be forced by the football regulator to sell up, and the shockwaves would reach well beyond the game. A significant amount of the UK property market’s enduring value is built on the idea of inviolable property rights, and London alone is said to have more than £4bn worth of value bound up in dark money. More directly, this remains an existential threat to the league, not least because of the depth of ill-feeling: City’s owners clearly hold a deep hostility towards their fellow Premier League members, who are portrayed as partial and culturally biased. Nothing is over, nothing is done — and it might just be a good time to hoist the flag and get that old Super League ship rolling again.