Manchester City have lodged the appeal that had been expected against the Premier League verdict finding the club guilty of breaking the competition’s financial fair play rules, seven days after that decision first leaked out. The case, already the longest-running in football jurisprudence, has escalated sharply since, with the club and its associates mounting a wide-ranging defence and the fallout spreading well beyond the sport.
City’s position is unchanged. Announcing the challenge to the published verdict, the club said: “The club is innocent of the accusations made by the Premier League and a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence exists in support of all of its positions, relating to this case.” The verdict being contested was published in redacted form, without its appendices.
Support has arrived from within City’s commercial and public-facing network. Etihad Airways, the club’s key sponsor, is reported to be appointing a law firm that received a “most feared” industry award five years in a row to state its case. Pep Guardiola, now a global ambassador for the City Football Group, has joined Liam Gallagher and the actor Kevin Kennedy in backing the club publicly on social media, where supporters have been arguing points of commercial law while decrying what they call “the Red Cartel”.
Inside the club, chief executive Ferran Soriano told staff via video link that the verdict amounted to a mere “opinion” that fed into a “Premier League conspiracy theory”. Central to the dispute is the question of where the money behind City’s sponsorship income came from. Contrary to the club’s long-standing push-back — dating back to 2008 — against being depicted as a state-owned entity on the grounds that Sheikh Mansour’s ownership was as a private individual, it has now emerged that the money inflating City’s sponsorship coffers came not via Mansour’s investment vehicle but from the Abu Dhabi state government. Legal experts suggest that is likely to form the “comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence” City’s side argues is its winning hand — although the published verdict has already rejected that angle as “untrue”.
The dispute has also acquired a political dimension. On Thursday, the UK government’s treasury committee asked tax authorities what action would be taken in response to the verdict’s findings. There have additionally been reports of potential political pressure on the UK government from Abu Dhabi, a key trading partner, and calls from the Liberal Democrats for Andy Burnham to publish details of all his meetings with the club’s owners.
The case has stirred strong feeling among supporters. One reader objected to a system in which, as they put it, “the true victims of the crime (the fans) are also the victims of the punishment”. Another proposed expanding and revising the Gareth Bale Scale to read Infantino, Manchester City, Southampton, VAR, Argentina. A third wrote in to describe a Python program built to replay past seasons without City’s results, which calculated that Blackpool — relegated second from bottom in 2010-11 — would have finished fourth from bottom in that campaign had City’s matches been removed. The reader conceded that the exercise did not really make sense, but found it intriguing all the same.
Separately, Craig Bellamy reflected on the wider tone around the game after Wales’s 2-1 win over Norway. “I do think we could be kinder to each other,” he said. “I chose to live back down here because I wanted to be on the ground … it’s the people around me I’m conscious of. It’s just society … we’re such a small country, why can’t we have each other’s backs? Why don’t we look after each other more? The others can go at us. We’re too quick [to criticise].”