As The Guardian and every other newspaper in the UK, and many other countries around the world, have reported this morning:
Manchester City have been found guilty of the vast majority of more than a hundred charges related to breaches of the Premier League's financial rules, throwing English football into turmoil.
The serial champions now face the possibility of being relegated from the Premier League, or expelled from the competition altogether, after a verdict in the biggest disciplinary case in the history of the sport was finally delivered.
I understand football. I understand the desire to win. I get the passion for the game. I began watching it at Portman Road in Ipswich in the early 1970s. I still have to check Ipswich Town's results, and they very slightly change my mood.
As a consequence, I also hate cheating. In my time, I have yelled, with many others, at a referee who I thought had overlooked a misdemeanour that I believed to be glaringly obvious. For a true fan, the sense of, and desire for, fair play runs deep in football, as it does in any sport.
At the same time, I understand neoliberalism. I also understand corruption. I understand that they go hand in hand.
I appreciate that, for those who own and run football clubs, financialisation, moneymaking, fan exploitation, and many of the more dubious sides of the modern economy, from the exploitation of intellectual property rights to the use of offshore, and, in some cases, questionable accounting, are as much a part of football as the offside rule.
Now we see the consequence. The charges over Manchester City, a club for whom I have had very little regard since the days of Francis Lee and Mike Summerbee, have been hanging over the club for years. The verdict has now been leaked, but it appears damning. 115 charges of financial irregularity were laid against the club, and it has apparently been found guilty on 114 of these.
The question is, what happens now?
I stress, this really matters. It does, perhaps, matter much more than many people realise as yet. This is not just an issue for football. This is an issue about corruption, governance, fair play, competition in fair markets (which is an issue I referred to in this morning's video, and which is particularly pertinent in the context of these reports), and whether a regulator, and maybe the government, is willing to uphold the demand that fair play, the rules of a competition, and so justice that represents open access for all, will be upheld, or whether monopoly abuse backed by major financial interests will be allowed to rule.
Manchester City have had an extraordinary decade or so. There is no question that they assembled an exceptional team of players under the guidance of an outstanding manager. I am not saying otherwise. But the way in which they did that matters. As a consequence of this apparent finding, all their Premier League titles, European success and cup wins now look to be profoundly tainted.
The consequence is that so do all the competitions in which they have taken part. That makes the whole of European football look under threat on the basis that no such thing as fair competition has taken place.
And let's also be clear. The players and the managers are also now under a cloud as a consequence of their association. The question will be asked is whether they knew about what was happening. They might not have done so, but none could have avoided knowing about the allegations that existed for many years. I am not suggesting wrongdoing on their part. I am questioning judgement.
For these reasons, and presuming that after this length of time Manchester City has no reasonable grounds for appeal, and that such an appeal can be dealt with very quickly if it is necessary, action must be taken if fair play is to be seen to be happening, not just in football, but in our economy. Corruption must carry a price.
That price must be a significant and a severe penalty must be applied.
What should that penalty be? Clearly, that is for others to decide, but what I do know is that a fine, or the deduction of some points, even if they guarantee relegation this year, will be utterly insufficient. They are the sort of penalties imposed when a club has to declare insolvency, but what is happening in this case is much more serious than that.
It would seem that Manchester City knowingly and deliberately, over an extended period of time, abused the rules of football. It might just as well have had a 12th or 13th player on the pitch at all times, so blatant does the issue appear to be. If so, for the sake of football, for the sake of sport, for the sake of competition and for the sake of holding neoliberal capitalism and all that goes with it to account, the penalty has to be at an appropriate level. In this case that would appear to require relegation from the Football League. For the time being, this club needs to be playing in the Northern League, if they will have them, and there would be a question as to whether they will because they would very obviously distort competition there as much as they appear to have done anywhere else.
If there is one thing that I hope has characterised my work in all its iterations over many years, it has been a belief in honesty, sound ethics, good governance, and a distaste for anything that looks like cheating, dishonesty or outright corruption. My work on tax justice was dedicated to these issues. I believe that corruption, much of it based on neoliberal thinking, does much more than corrupt business. It corrupts the very essence of society.
There can be little doubt that the corruption of football in this country, which appears to have happened, is the clearest possible representation of how pervasive this corrosion of standards has been.
It is then not just because I support Ipswich Town, who are playing in the same league as Manchester City this year, that I now believe that the expulsion of Manchester City not just from the Premier League, but from the entire Football League at this point in time, is appropriate. A signal has to be sent out that corruption will not be tolerated. Nothing less than this will do.
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Bobby Robson said on many occasions:
The game is more important than the prize.
We do well to remember that. I think you’ve said much the same above.
I would not expect City to be relegated dtraight away, but be eventually given a substantial points deduction at the beginning of the new season after all appeals have been concluded. My guess is 2028/29 season and 30 points.
Bak to Portman Road, then….
Evidently not enough. There is precedence with Rangers and Juventus being demoted to lower leagues. Plus there should be a massive fine, say £100 million (as the owners can easily afford this) which should be allocated for the improvement of grass-roots football, in order to ensure a sufficient deterrence to this corrupt behaviour being repeated.
You’ve written a thousand words on a verdict you admit you’ve only seen leaked. Have you read the commission’s reasons? Do you know which charges concern sponsorship disclosure, which concern player remuneration, and which concern non-cooperation? Because nothing in your piece suggests you do. “A 12th or 13th player on the pitch” is a pub metaphor, not analysis.
You also seem unaware of how sport actually punishes wrongdoing. Everton and Nottingham Forest received points deductions for financial breaches. Juventus, after Calciopoli, a far graver case of match-fixing, were relegated one division, not banished to the amateur ranks. Marseille went down one tier after bribery. Even Rangers restarted in the fourth tier because of insolvency, not moral outrage. Your “Northern League” suggestion has no precedent anywhere, and you’d know that if you’d looked.
Nor do you grasp the basics: the Premier League isn’t even part of the Football League you want City expelled from.
Meanwhile, the Premier League is among Britain’s most successful global exports, generating billions, jobs and soft power. Justice matters, but proportionate justice matters more than your appetite for spectacle.
This isn’t insight. It’s just another grievance dressed up as a lecture on neoliberalism.
I agree leaked.
And I agree these therefore technically remain allegations.
But everything else you say is total nonsense. I offer analysis and suggestion as to punishment appropriate to the sake of the offences.
I strongly suspect you would condemn what you would call benefit cheating. Why are you so relaxed about this?
Where do you stand on match fixing versus City’s alleged transgressions? IMV what Juventus were found guilty of was far worse. Should they have been expunged from existence?
I think this more serious.
All you say of course, with your pedigree, is factually correct, but you do not advance the debate by stating what you believe ‘proportionate justice’ would be.
The Premier League is indeed a £billion (mostly extractive) business model which, if Man City’s punishment is no more than a cost of doing business, will see it rooted in cheating and corruption, leading ultimately to it’s devaluing as a sporting spectacle.
Sorry Hendry. Rangers were liquidated and a new club were admitted to the 4th tier of Scottish football and now play in the SPL. The scandal is that the football authorities, the media etc claim that it is the same club. It is not.
ps: I am not a Celtic supporter
Matt/Henry
Let’s be clear here alright. Nottingham Forest and Everton took their licks for that what they did – yes they complained but they took it. What about City who insisted I bet in using expensive lawyers to argue their case and just delayed the inevitable because they chose to break the rules they signed up to? This has been known in football for ages, it has been the elephant in the room for sometime with those in the very same game going on about one rule for them, another for everyone else. And this is all because of the low morality of the financial sector has inculcated football.
The belief in the system/Premiership must be protected – that is why Man City need to be punished because otherwise if they get away with it, others will have a go thinking the risk being worth it (the owner of my club likely to be encouraged too). And then what happens? Well, certain clubs and the banks who earn millions from them will see themselves as the exception as City did.
Compare if you will the way in which the Premiership is ran to those bastions of Neo-liberalism the Americans whose NFL league tries to equalize financial differences with salary caps, redistributing income etc. The whole reason being to stop monopolization apparently in the name of ‘competition’.
Football has become about maximizing winning to guarantee revenue streams. That sounds like a monopoly to me. That’s what these new owners think like, as well as the banks who fund them.
Honestly, they don’t like competition.
So, why are such people in charge of competitive sport?
The rules clearly aren’t working.
How can (affordable but also entertaining) football be given back to the fans? (Out of the grip of oligarchs, unpleasant business bosses, or foreign states?)
How can player welfare be protected? (Legal, financial, emotional welfare) eg Raheem Stirling,
How can the benefits of club academies and locally trained players, and clubs as community assets be enhanced?
How can ethics be returned to football at all levels?
I don’t have an emotional connection to football, but these problems have been talked about for years. As an example, take one Rupert Lowe, and his history at Southampton FC. Or clubs such as Man U, Wimbledon, Arsenal, Newcastle.
Like politics – too much money involved.
Thanks.
I like intelligent responses. This is.
First and foremost, City fans, and I speak as one, do not deserve the punishment of expulsion from football altogether. We, like the players and managers, believed what we were told. For my part, my love of football was very much on the wane before the Abu Dhabi takeover. Neo liberalism was the death of football even before that takeover not because of it. Though I would definitely have preferred to have achieved success organically that possibility had been all but destroyed by the concentration of wealth and power amongst a plutocracy of clubs. These sames clubs have designed these rules to stifle competition, as Villa and Newcastle are now finding out. Strip away City’s title, and the same three clubs would be the beneficiaries. City have helped rejuvenate top flight football this past 15 years. Were it not for City the Leicester miracle would not have been possible, as the old plutocracy would have retained their dominance. As for the ‘rules’, well, they are an arse. PSG are the best club in Europe with a similar model, just unconstrained domestically by a plutocratic straightjacket. The most successful club in European history were not even the best club in Madrid until Franco came along. There are no asterisks by their name because nobody at the time had thought to invent a way to stifle the competition.
By all means punish the club with demotion or whatever, but do not take away the entity that is Manchester City as their fans do not deserve that.
For my part I will always cherish the memories of Aguero in the 94th minute and Rodri in Istanbul, and whatever their wrong doing, I thank the owners for allowing me to experience those moments. Football once again is dead to me.
I’m sorry, but I disagree. The pain has to be real or nothing will change. That means the pain is necessary. And I would say the same of any club.
So presumably you agree with arresting Grannies and vicar’s for holding up pro PA placards?
If the law is an arse it’s an arse.
These same rules you are in wholehearted support of, designed and policed by the plutocracy btw, have evolved into the ludicrous situation whereby all clubs (outside the plutocracy, of course) are having to sell their top young players simply to balance books. The exact opposite of what a healthy footballing eco system should look like.
Politely, if you did want to prove yourself an idiot without any merit to their case, you just did.
Don’t call again.
I’m a United fan and even I get chills watching the Aguero goal.
City should be bombed back to the Northern Conference. They wont be. They should start the next ten seasons with 20 points deduction, 5 year transfer ban.
Any finicial fine isnt going to hurt them – theyre owners are richer than god.
I love football, but its become the apex of neoliberalism, so it also disgusts me.
It also seems insolvent from any sort of bubble burst.
The figures involved, transfer fees and wages are beyond obscesne. Most people cant afford to go its that expensive.
I like the transfer ban.
Make it out as well as in.
And 30 point deduction for three seasons running.
The Manchester City affair is the culmination of the hyper-commodification of the game in England. This curiously began in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster. The top clubs “ran away with the ball” with the FA rubber stamping Sky’s equivalent of the Danegeld. The Premier League is a hugely questionable enterprise. City are simply one component in that enterprise.
Exactly this. City are symptom, not the cause, and rather than conveniently pointing fingers at the upstarts who got too big for their boots, the whole rotten system needs to be questioned.
Excuses won’t work.
I’m a fan of Nottingham Forest FC – one of the eldest clubs in the English football league (1865), set up as a sports social club for both sexes, a club that lent Liverpool and The Arsenal their first shirts to get them started, the first club to wear red – Garabaldi Red – (from liberal anti-nationalist freedom fighters – not fascists). When Liverpool, The Arsenal and (yuk!) a certain other club from Manchester are called ‘The Reds’ I have to bite my tongue!!
In addition, Nottingham also has another club called Notts County set up in 1862, the eldest English club of all and this club has an ongoing relationship with none other than Italy’s Juventus to whom County lent their shirts to to get them started – there is an enduring relationship between those two clubs even today. As a Nottingham lad, there is much to be proud of about football, particular this ‘helping other people out’ business.
Contrast that with Manchester City and modern football. Forest has a dodgy Greek tycoon as the owner who goes through managers like tissues during a bad cold. Fans complain about spending £55 to have other fans laugh at them (entry into the premiership saw prices hiked). Something lurks behind my club and it ain’t pretty.
Reading Richard talking about Ipswich may make looking back rather rose tinted, but I’m sure in those days clubs grew and found home grown talent and it was somehow more equal and entertaining rather than going into huge debt to buy international mercenaries. Who benefits ultimately? I was a big Marco van Basten fan – but watching him on television play abroad was alright with me. Football is decoupled from its origins these days.
When Ipswich won the FA Cup for the first and only time the goal scorer can from the village of Westerfield on the edge of Ipswich, near which I was brought up. Times have changed.
Pharmaceutical companies also work in a neoliberal framework, where profits are paramount. You would think that customer health would come first.
The regulators fine pharmaceutical companies who flout the rules due to fraud and other violations. Many commentators suggest that this is an acceptable cost that enables them to do business. Accumulated fines over $1-billion since the year 2000 include:
Johnson & Johnson $25-billion
GSK plc $11-billion
Pfizer $11-billion
Teva Pharmaceutical Industries $10-billion
Merck $10-billion
Purdue Pharma $10-billion
Fines are a normalised cost of doing business here in the UK, for example, United Water has received nearly £9-million in fines since 2010.
Source: Violation Tracker Industry Summary Page (Industry: pharmaceuticals)
Source: Violation Tracker UK Parent Company Summary
Nothing’s “too big to fail”.
History, or rather Life itself, has constant unpleasant decay and reconstruction anyway.
And something that rotten has to go that way in my opinion to give rise to something else.
If it’s better remains to be seen but the lessons learned from its decay could help.
What should be done though in any case is for society / the government to take care of the ones not responsible, up to a certain degree.
E.g. in this case:
The millionaire footballers can do pretty well on their own.
The stadium staff and others much less likely.
Jock Stein, Celtic, 1967 European Cup. All the players came from within 30 miles of the stadium.An achievement which can be barely comprehended now.
Want to clean up footy? the answer is … all the players come from within 100 miles of the stadium and have had to have lived within that radius for at least… 10 years. (?)
Apply it to all European clubs. Oh and no more international transfers. & no foreign ownership.
As with just about everything – money contaminates – so strip it out.
I think that a little too tight, but some restrictions would most definitely help.
In the 1970s Premier League clubs were only allowed two work permits for foreign players.
And Ipswich had two
International transfers were brilliant at the start of the Premier league. What would my club have done without Cantona, Schmeichel, Kanchelskis, Keane, Irwin (the latter two are foreign remember)?
Maybe it’s gone too far now but we shouldn’t cut them out completely.
Arnold Mühren and Frans Thijssen.
They started it….
I think Spurs actually got in first with Ardiles and Villa, straight after their ’78 world cup win for Argentina.
Oh, to have those days back at Spurs…
Could mean this mean the end of the Premier League as we know it?
Everton getting sued by Burnley sets a massive precedent for potential legal action to come for others to take advantage of.
Arsenal, United, Lpool etc ‘the cartel’ will surely be looking at lost revenues in the period city have been successful.
You see, there is a rather unpleasant truth here – Chelsea bought their way into the elite in 2003 as did City in 2009 and the powers that be didn’t like that one bit.
So they created a string load of straight jacket rules to stop it happening again.
Newcastle probably the richest club in the world but can’t do a city/Chelsea because the rules now won’t let them. Rules that restrict anyon breaking in to the elite.
Sure you may get a Leicester happen – maybe – but unlikely.
And another thing no one dares talk about football corruption, no one dares talk about enhancement performance.
The City sin is the tip of the iceberg.
Being a Manchester United fan and seeing what the Glazers and now Ratcliffe has done to the club (and of course the decades long monetisation before them) is repulsive. Football, created by the poor but stolen by the rich is an old story made worse by all these foreign “investers” buying UK assets for either sportswashing or just plain old wealth extraction. Its digusting and this would be a good time to look at the whole thing again. This might be useful for those that broadly agree:
https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtNA_75590aaa-17cf-4e1c-976c-408263d92a3d
https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtNA_75590aaa-17cf-4e1c-976c-408263d92a3d
Much to agree with
I’ll be honest with you as a Manchester United fan, personally I can’t be bothered to get too wound up about this issue.
My club sold its soul to Mammon decades ago and over the last twenty years it has been fleeced by the Glazer family. Indeed there are some very dodgy connections behind the scenes which warrant further investigation.
https://jpo7.substack.com/p/is-manchester-united-secretly-owned
But the thing about City is a) they didn’t sell out their local fan base like United did and b) they invested a fortune in building sporting infrastructure in a very deprived area of east Manchester which will be there for decades now.
As such I think we’d be better off fining them rather than relegating them.
I really do think you should be bothered.
This is on a scale far beyond selling to the Glazers and Ratcliffe.
If you do not care about corruption – if it is proven – what do you care about?
We had all of this with Rangers and Enployee Benefit Trusts. Rangers were liquidated and relegated to the 4th Tier of Scottish football. They were allowed to keep their titles, including those gained in the EBT years. I imagine money will triumph over morals in the case of Manchester City. We will see.
Well done Richard for taking a stand against CHEATING. As a PE principal I saw cheating at all levels of different games . The minute you call it out you immediately hear the protestations of the guilty…it is CHEATING. You don’t deserve to win. Remember Onischenko..the swordsman who rigged his foil so it would register a hit ..when it was not so he could win gold for his country. He was known as Disonischenko….
Say it loud and clear..It is CHEATING..you don’t deserve to win…with appropriate punishment to dissuade others.
Thanks
Surely this makes a nonsense of this year’s results if Man City appeal and the final verdict is delayed for any length of time. If the outcome was that they were relegated or just had points deducted every other club’s results would be wrong.
Interesting to compare the “lenient” punishments in football, compared to other sports (say, cycling). Titles and medals removed – mostly impacting the individuals. Where there was institutional / systemic abuse (say Russian Olympic Drug involvement), the team was banned.
Man City is an institutional issue – though the players / their agents are likely to have known – and likely benefitted. In the Rangers/Servco case there was straightforward personal gain. Smaller clubs and their players and fans lost out. Can compensation be applied retrospectively (20 years?) in these cases – it probably can’t – and very difficult to be seen to be ‘fair’.
These ‘fair play’ rules are there to protect the positions of the established clubs – and let’s not forget that Celtic wanted Rangers protected (other Scottish clubs were hurt more and were less supportive of Servco). So, sure, punish Man City – but that is only slightly changing the deck chairs of the rigged football power structure. The German model seems slightly more fan friendly – but weren’t “ABB” also supporting the ‘break-away’ league? Perhaps the only way of achieving genuine change (like many things political) is bottom up. Perhaps fans should demand more – ethics, affordable participation, grassroots engagement and adequate funding to go to less privileged clubs for sustainability and improved / genuine competition.
BTW: I do recognise that the money in the English game has allowed the FA to fund grass roots football – and this has led to much improved facilities and coaching than in rest of UK (and there are players coming through with that helping the national team). Of course this can be achieved in other ways – and maybe we should include more ethics as well as football skills in their training.
I am old enough to remember the maximum wage, and Jimmy Hill. Clubs also owned the player’s registration, so that at the end of a contract they had to accept whatever the club would offer them, a form of modern slavery. The only way out was to play in another country.
The only problem with a level playing field is that it is the workers who pay for it
Our PM, who also happens to be an Everton fan, said today that he would be “concerned to lose” that lovely lot from the UAE and he actually went on to publically thank them:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/ckz6zq6gjpvgo
I would be more concerned if we didn’t lose them, along with the many other leeches buying up our assets, especially community assets like football clubs.
Much to agree with