Premier League Financial Rules Discussion - including Man City Charges

I have slightly more hope that City might actually end up paying a price for their cheating than I did 48hrs ago.

That plan to sue the PL and the wording about getting the rules backdated points to them perhaps knowing that those 115 charges are coming in to land.

They know they can't legitimately get out of this so the tactic now is to change the rules. Seems like a final throw of the dice from someone who knows their number is up

The case is about the fair market value aspect thought isn't it?

Lets say that they win and sponsors could pay whatever they wanted and it's backdated.

There are no charges in the 115 over fmv?

The issue is still city said the sponsor was paying whatever, but the reality is they were paying a fraction and city were paying the rest. That's still fraud. Still against the rules.

What is the obvious thing I'm missing?

De Bruyne talking about playing in Saudi, rumours of Pep leaving leaving in summer 2025. Man City trying to counter an investigation with a counter-case.

Do Pep & KDB know the jig is up?

For KDB he's just at that age to be honest.

Pep on the other hand - unless he's heading off for a rest I can't see any reason he would leave the City setup other than him knowing the game is up.

There is no other club in world football that can offer him that kind of setup and control whilst also keeping his family in jobs at other football clubs… Pep is in deep. For him to walk is big

they need to get rid of the PL charges. if they are proven, you would expect relegation to league 2 and like a 5 year transfer ban + stripped of titles (as an aside, i dont think any titles should be redistributed).

that'll **** them as equally in the uefa competitions.

i'm hoping this is the last roll of the dice from them, and a futile one at that.

A thread on the financial growth of PL clubs over the last few years. One striking set of numbers was this;

Of course this rise is all down to Man City's "world class commercial team" and nothing to do with Ethiad pumping them full of money via inflated 'sponsorship' deals whatsoever.

United, Nice and City, Gerona have all been given permission to compete in the same competition next season as a once off by UEFA.

i honestly feel like this is all a bit mental. The football world is being taken for a bunch of absolute fools.

it's plain as day what has been happening. I saw a stat earlier that said the rest of the top 6's commercial revenue went up between 100% and 200% from 2009 until 2019. City's went up by over 1100%.

but we're supposed to believe it is all down to their brilliant commercial team.

And this is all while they have been purposely delaying the process, while trying to tell the fans (with a straight face) that they want this done as quickly as possible.

it's absolutely astounding that this has been allowed to go on so long.

Absolutely brilliant piece in todays Times.

Panicking powerbrokers now realise the scale of their error – unless these cuckoo owners are expelled from the nest, English football’s whole ecosystem faces collapse

Did they suppose the document would never leak? Did they not count on the brilliant investigative reporters at Times Sport, the best in the business? Did they hope that their perversion of the words of John Stuart Mill, in his wonderful tome On Liberty, would never see the light of day? Or do they no longer care about how they look, knowing that a proportion of Manchester City fans will take to social media to defend the indefensible, turning tribal allegiance into an advanced form of cognitive dissonance?

“The tyranny of the majority” is the breathtaking claim of City. They argue that their freedom to make money has been limited by the Premier League’s rules on sponsorship deals, which forbid related companies (such as Etihad Airways sponsoring a team backed by Abu Dhabi) from offering cash above the commercial rate determined by an independent assessor. They say they are being persecuted, held back by a cartel of legacy clubs that want to monopolise success at their expense.

I am guessing that all fans will see through this comedy gold. City have won the past four Premier League titles and more than 57 per cent of the available domestic trophies over the past seven years. According to my former colleague Tony Evans, this makes them the most dominant side in top-flight history: more dominant than Liverpool in the Seventies and Eighties (41 per cent), more dominant than Manchester United in the Nineties (33 per cent).

Indeed, they are almost as dominant as the emirate of Abu Dhabi, which understands the concept of tyranny quite well having engaged in human rights abuses of a kind that led Amnesty International to question its treatment of immigrant workers and to condemn the arbitrary detention of 26 prisoners of conscience.

But dominance is, as Einstein might have said, a relative term. City want more money than they have at present, more dominance than they enjoy now, more freedom to spend on players (their bench is worth more than the first teams of most of their rivals) so that they can win, what, 40 league titles in a row? That would indeed turn the Premier League from what many regard as a fairly enjoyable competition into a tyranny of the minority.

And this is why the story revealed by my colleague Matt Lawton will cause the scales to fall from the eyes of all but the most biased of observers. The motive of City’s owners is not principally about football, the Premier League or, indeed, Manchester. As many warned from the outset, this was always a scheme of sportswashing, a strategy of furthering the interests of a microstate in the Middle East. It is in effect leveraging the soft power of football, its cultural cachet, to launder its reputation. This is why it is furious about quaint rules on spending limits thwarting the kind of power that, back home, is untrammelled.

And let us be clear about what all this means. An emirate, whose government is autocratic and therefore not subject to the full rule of law, is paying for a squad of eye-wateringly expensive lawyers to pursue a case in British courts that directly violates British interests. For whatever one thinks about what the Premier League has become, there is no doubt that its success has benefited the UK, not just in terms of the estimated contribution to the economy of £8billion in 2021-22, but also through a tax contribution of £4.2billion and thousands of jobs.

Yet what would happen if the spending taps were allowed to be turned full tilt by removing restraints related to “associated partners”? That’s right: what remains of competitive balance would be destroyed, decimating the league’s prestige and appeal.

Remember a few years ago when leaked emails showed that Khaldoon al-Mubarak, the City chairman, “would rather spend 30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue them for the next ten years”. Isn’t it funny that such people love the rule of law abroad — seeing it as a vehicle for outspending counterparties on expensive litigation — almost as much as they fear it at home? It’s as though City have ditched any pretence to care about anything except the geopolitical interests of their owners. What’s certain is that the Premier League can no longer cope with multiple City lawsuits and has had to hire outside help. In this case, as in so many others, the rule of law is morphing into something quite different: the rule of lawyers.

In some ways you almost feel like saying to football’s now panicking powerbrokers: it serves you right. These people welcomed Roman Abramovich, then stood wide-eyed while state actors entered the game too. They surely cannot be too surprised that the logical endpoint for this greed and connivance is that the blue-ribband event of English football is now fighting for its survival. When you sup with Mephistopheles, you can’t complain when the old fella returns to claim his side of the bargain.

But the dominant sense today is the shameless hypocrisy of the owners of City. They said that they were investing in City because they cared about regenerating the area. They now say that unless they get their own way, they are likely to stop community funding. They said that the commercial deals were within the rules; they now say that the rules are illegal. They said that competitive balance was important for English football; they now want to destroy it. They said they were happy with the democratic ethos of Premier League decision-making; now they hilariously say it’s oppressive.

I suspect at least some City fans are uncomfortable with this brazenness and may even be belatedly reassessing the true motives of the club’s owners. What’s now clear is that cuckoos have been let into the Premier League nest. Unless they are properly confronted or ejected, they could now threaten the whole ecosystem of English football.

The chickens are truly coming home to roost and Citys mask has finally slipped. Its unconscionable that they will get away with it.

i think it's telling that even the City fans online are really only falling into 2 general camps.

There is one section of them who are now just claiming that they are tired of all of this, and just want to be allowed to enjoy their success without having to worry about financials; that they are the victims in this, and merely just want to enjoy football.

Then there is another section who are blindly screaming that this is their chance to destroy the Premier League and expose it for being run by a cartel of traditional big clubs.

There is very little attempt in their fanbase to actually address what has happened, apart from merely saying 'we trust the club'.

Sportswashing in plain sight, and they don't even know it's happened to them, or they know it, and simply do not care, thus proving that sportwashing is a very effective thing.

By financial misdemeanors do you mean bribes?

Rangers went out of business because of their unpaid tax bill, the club was liquidated. A new club was formed that had to apply to join the Scottish football league. In Italy, Parma went out of business due to financial collapse, like Rangers they joined the bottom tier of the league as a new entity.

Clubs have been relegated for being found guilty of corruption:

Juventus and Fiorentina were caught trying to influence the appointment of referees for their games.

Marseille were found guilty of match fixing to secure the league title.

In Portugal, Boavista were relegated for match fixing and bribing match officials.

There has been no suggestion that Man City have influenced match officials, if they were then it would be game over for the club. However, it's not hard to imagine that there may be an investigation into the Premier League match officials that freelance in the UAE and Saudi Arabia but that could open another kettle of fish.

Thanks for that. The powers that be deleted the post in the other thread.

For those that haven't read Der Spiegel's article from 2022, here's the link.

Rules and polices are not law, but in the spirit of the game you obey the rules and polices of the competition you're playing in. You don't challenge the lawfulness of them, I'm sure lawfully, a business can use their employees for tasks when they please, then can send 10 employees off to a job, while in PL you can only use 5 subs , I'm sure in ''law'' you could challenge that, and win , but it's not in the spirit of the game to do that. It's basically what City are doing, challenging the spirit of the game, in a court of law , simply because they want to be able to do as they please.

Keith Wyness, former CEO of Everton:

"Given the time this is taking, the Premier League will be fully prepared.

I think what we’re seeing is City going to these extreme lengths because they fear expulsion is really an option if they’re found guilty of these 115 charges. They’re throwing everything they possibly can at this.

I would ask City fans to look beyond blind club loyalty and really think about this. Put pressure on your club, because this is going down the wrong road for football."

Absolutely agree.

You would hope that eventually there'll be a breakaway league that insist upon it, given the dissatisfaction amongst local support.

uefa dont allow those types of transactions for their FFP calculations. maybe chelsea dont care now as they are in the conference league. have uefa sanctioned any club recently for FFP breaches?

but its mad how the clubs kept that loophole open.

they are all far too self-serving which makes me inclined to support the appointment of an independent regulator.

Obviously all the podcasts, talksport etc are full of the Man City story this week and the likes of Kieran Maguire and Stefan Borson are doing the rounds which is good. However not one that I can find have had a sports lawyer on to try and get some sense of the chances City might have of winning this lawsuit. I find that odd.