Manchester City pulled no punches in describing the failings of their opponents. “The decision contains mistakes, misinterpretations and confusions fundamentally born a basic lack of due process”, they argued in a vituperative assessment. “There remain significant unresolved matters raised by Manchester City FC as part of what the Club has found to be a wholly unsatisfactory, curtailed and hostile process.” Where do you go after that?
Well, five years on from the above remarks, issued in response to charges from Uefa alleging breaches of financial fair play (FFP) rules – charges that were found proved but then overturned on appeal – City are still angry, but this time with the Premier League. On Monday their chief lawyer, Simon Cliff, took the liberty of writing to the 19 other clubs in the top flight to tell them not to trust the organisation’s word. According to Cliff, the league’s summary of the outcome of the arbitration brought by City over associated party transaction (APT) rules was “misleading and contained several inaccuracies”. The league’s plans to update their rules, meanwhile, were “an unwise course [which] would likely to lead to further legal proceedings with further legal costs”. The league should change tack, Cliff argued, as “it is critical for member clubs to feel that they can have trust in their regulator”.
It’s not common for messages from Cliff to be in the public domain, but if you have read correspondence from him that were part of the 2015 “Football Leaks” hack, the tone is strikingly similar. An extensive disclosure of private communications, one that led to Uefa’s FFP charges, among the leaked emails was a now infamous message from Cliff in which he observed that City’s chairman, Khaldoon Al Mubarak, had told Gianni Infantino, then Uefa’s general secretary, that he was phlegmatic about receiving a financial penalty from the governing body. “[Mubarak] would rather spend 30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue [Uefa] for the next 10 years,” Cliff wrote.
Why so combative? It’s an interesting question. Listen to City and they are clear about the reasons for their vehemence, namely that they have been subject to allegations and attacks that they should not have been, claims that were either sourced from illegal materials (the “Football Leaks” trove) or forced through due to regulatory hostility (see above). Mubarak himself suggested that their arch-critic Javier Tebas, president of La Liga, had made claims about City’s financial dominance because of the “ethnicity” of the club’s ownership.
It would be wrong to suggest that these feelings are synthetic, that City officials do not genuinely feel upset at what they see as persecution of the club while they raise standards on the field of play to unprecedented heights. At the same time, however, it is not hard to argue that this anger might also be an effective lobbying tool, especially in the court of public opinion. A strong rebuke is perhaps required if you hope to persuade people of your arguments when your same off-field opponent is charging you with 130 breaches of its rules. This language of conflict has certainly resonated with a strain of City’s online support that sees itself at war with football’s governing bodies and the “cartel” clubs who have historically held disproportionate influence over the game. Anger can rally the troops. It can also intimidate your opponents.
City’s consistently clenched jaw conveys a relentlessness that is consistent with that hacked Cliff message, that they are ready to fight and keep fighting to get what they want. Faced with this, it can seem like even the Premier League, the all-conquering behemoth so often painted as a big bully itself, is a comparative weakling.
Such an effect would surely be helpful because it currently appears that the collapse of the league’s present rule structure is what City are after. Reading between the lines of Cliff’s latest missive is the suggestion that trust in the organisation is already absent from its member clubs and that further legal action is inevitable. Part of City’s challenge in the APT case saw them take aim at the voting structure of the league, arguing that votes that led to rules being implemented led to a “tyranny of the majority”. This claim was rejected by the tribunal but invited the question of how else the league might adopt and enforce its rules. Perhaps by decree on the part of its champions?
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Any attempts to bring down the ancien regime might be more persuasive to the general onlooker if a convincing alternative was being put forward. Perhaps that was intended to be the European Super League, although it didn’t work out that way. Maybe Mubarak and Infantino can inflate the Fifa Club World Cup into a competition that both holds the attention of the world and doesn’t have to worry about competitive balance. But maybe, just maybe, there isn’t a plan. Maybe this anger, while empowering to those who wield it, is also just destructive, driven not simply by a desire for change but also a desire to stick one on critics.
When Mubarak made his remarks about Tebas in 2019, he argued that the Spaniard was part of a concerted effort to bring low not just City but the whole Premier League. “I know people don’t want to defend Manchester City – but for God’s sake start defending this league,” he said. At some point maybe City’s chairman will come around to holding the same opinion again.
