When Paris Saint-Germain visit the Etihad Stadium for a Champions League game on Wednesday, the fixture will carry more than the usual weight of a meeting between two of Europe’s wealthiest clubs. Nasser al-Khelaifi, the PSG president, was among those unhappy with the timing of the release of Manchester City’s guilty verdict by the Premier League a fortnight ago, but the trip provides a reminder that the outcome for his own club could have been far worse.
The two clubs are linked by more than their ownership by Gulf states. They were among the first sides found to have broken Uefa’s financial fair play rules in 2014, and by a margin that would make later offenders pale in comparison. Uefa’s investigators found that between 2011 and 2013, when the maximum permitted loss for clubs competing in European competitions stood at €45m (£38m), PSG’s deficit was €218m and City’s €188m. Both avoided charges by signing settlement agreements.
With hindsight, the terms look generous. Sanctions were limited to a financial penalty of €20m each, alongside more onerous restrictions on their spending in subsequent years, and both clubs were made liable to pay a further €40m if they broke the terms of their settlements. Uefa said in April 2017 that the two clubs had “fully complied with all the requirements”, though whether City stuck to those spending limits remains a matter of contention.
In 2020, after an investigation by Uefa’s investigatory chamber, City were suspended from the Champions League for two years for “overstating its sponsorship revenue” between 2012 and 2016. That punishment was overturned on appeal to the court of arbitration for sport, which found that “most of the alleged breaches were either not established or time-barred”.
Then, last month, the Premier League announced that an independent commission convened to examine more than 100 charges against City had found that between the seasons 2009-10 and 2017-18 the club was “significantly in breach” of Uefa’s spending limits and had “filed misstated accounts and concealed the true state of its finances”. City have appealed against the commission’s verdict. PSG, for their part, were fined a further €10m by Uefa in 2022 for not complying with financial rules since 2018, with another €50m suspended. Al-Khelaifi has been the club’s president and the face of its Qatari ownership since 2011.
Part of al-Khelaifi’s annoyance at the Premier League last month stemmed from the fact that the release of the independent commission’s core judgment on City overshadowed the general assembly of European Football Clubs in Copenhagen, including his keynote speech. City’s chief executive, Ferran Soriano, sat in the front row before hurrying away from television cameras. In his address as EFC chair, al-Khelaifi set out plans to make the organisation global and aimed barbs at Fifa’s president, Gianni Infantino, over the importance of good governance — a far cry from his attitude towards Infantino a decade earlier.
A 2018 investigation by the German publication Der Spiegel claimed that Infantino, then Uefa’s general secretary, played a key role in ensuring PSG and City avoided more severe sanctions in 2014. It reported that he met officials from both clubs for “secret talks, even supplying them with confidential materials” that involved suggested “compromises that he was unauthorised to propose”. Der Spiegel also published an email from Infantino to City’s chair, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, sent on 2 May 2014, in which he outlined the terms of a proposed settlement. “You will see that I’ve sometimes chosen a wording which ‘looks’ more ‘strong’,” Infantino wrote. “Please read the document with this spirit.”
Settlements with both clubs were agreed that month, although not before the head of Uefa’s investigatory chamber, Brian Quinn, a former senior official at the Bank of England, resigned amid reports that he considered the agreements too lenient. Uefa said at the time that in cases where clubs overspend and balance their books only thanks to money injections, a settlement agreement had always been the preferred solution, with the focus on limiting revenues coming from outside football. Infantino said his job entailed having discussions, having conversations and exchanging documents, drafts and ideas, and that he had carried out his duties in an honest and professional way while trying to defend the interests of football.
PSG insist they have “always acted in full compliance with the laws and regulations enacted by sports institutions”, while City’s protestations of innocence are well established. The two clubs, though, now find themselves on different sides of the divide. Al-Khelaifi will arrive in Manchester as the face of the establishment, with the EFC joint shareholders alongside Uefa in the commercial company that runs the Champions League. City remain the insurgents, still raging against the machine. Many of their supporters will continue to show disdain for Uefa by booing the Champions League anthem, though some may be quietly wondering whether their Abu Dhabi leadership could have followed the more diplomatic path taken by PSG.