Football is an angry place just now. Consider that the Premier League's ruling on Manchester City's financial activities covers nine seasons – a period ending in 2018 – and you can perhaps imagine why. The judgment finally released this Tuesday says City cheated and continued to cheat, in what now looks a fairly high-handed way.
They secretively used money from the club's Abu Dhabi owners to bypass the financial restrictions that their competitors were under – and in doing so, they built a team good enough to produce an unprecedented 100-point season. For some people, the intricacies of football accounting are riveting enough to make this fascinating. The majority rely on others to explain where City have gone wrong and how it benefited them. Still more have already reached saturation point: the seasons are complete, City were the best team, nothing can change that, so why should I care?
Legal claims from rival clubs
Lawyers for other Premier League and EFL clubs are already tooling up to answer that question. If, the theory goes, the presence of Manchester City in the Champions League (due to unfair advantages gained by fraud) deprived other teams of such rewards, they will seek redress. The scope of that is wild.
If a club has missed out on a place that produces a minimum £50m in Champions League prize money, they have been unable to invest that figure in their team. Or let's say your side got relegated by a single place. That's an even bigger financial loss: generally experts estimate the cost of Premier League relegation around £100m. And so on.
Clearly when calculating damages it's in the clubs' interests to estimate as provocatively as possible. But these two examples show how rivals might reasonably itemise huge figures given the scope of City's alleged breaches.
Historical spending and the rules
Perhaps the financial concerns of football clubs doesn't get your heart racing. You may take the broader view and say teams with the most money have always used it to be the best – why are City suddenly so different? It's unfair that rules came in that prevented them doing what teams have always done.
Nottingham Forest signed Trevor Francis in 1979 with a transfer fee of one million pounds that was nearly double the previous highest fee. He scored the winner in the European Cup final a few months later. Was that win bought? Or what about free-spending 1990s side Blackburn Rovers? Or Manchester United, the league's biggest spenders in their era of dominance.
Perhaps they shouldn't have been able to do it, but the rules City have allegedly broken are those they agreed to with their fellow Premier League clubs, and they are necessary. A great example of what happens when lavish spending in sport is unregulated is LIV Golf. That was a breakaway tour with no heritage to trash, but the freedom to spend is also freedom to change your mind at any moment. Imagine if that approach had been adopted with one of our great football clubs, which would now disappear.
What comes next
We don't know yet what sanctions will be proposed. City might yet be exonerated. Given the judgement's ruling on how obstructive the club have been to the commission's investigation, it seems unlikely they will come quietly.
If you liked the football City played in the last decade, that memory is still yours. You can't buy success, that's why people love competitive sports like football so much, but based on what we've seen of the accounts, money did everything it could do to create their era of dominance. Just because they could have done this without breaking rules in an another era (not that Gulf states would perhaps have been wealthy enough in another era), in this era, I'm afraid, it's not allowed. You can't count your offside goal because previously the offside law didn't exist.
What City are ruled to have done has also inflated the costs in which all football clubs operate – almost, at many levels of the pyramid, beyond endurance. You can have empathy for City fans, you can say you don't mind a bit of lawbreaking, you're just here for the football, you can argue others have done similar historically, in other ways. But if you are engaging with the meat of the issue with the evidence we have, you can't believe they are in the right.
