Since 2018, Manchester City F.C. has been implicated in a major financial scandal, following the publication of leaked internal emails alleged to reveal that the club had committed systematic, deliberate violations of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play (FFP) and the Premier League’s Profit and Sustainability (PSR) rules. The FFP rules are a set of regulations established by UEFA to prevent professional football clubs spending more than they earn in the pursuit of success, and in doing so not getting into financial problems which might threaten their long-term survival. The PSR rules are a set of regulations established the Premier League for the same purpose. In response to the leaked emails, UEFA and the Premier League opened separate investigations into the club’s financial behaviour.
UEFA announced that it was opening an investigation in 2019. The investigation concluded in February 2020, with City being found guilty of “serious breaches of the UEFA Financial Fair Play Regulations”. However, City’s appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport successfully overturned the ban in July that year. Then, in 2023, the Premier League charged Man City with 115 breaches of its financial regulations, spanning a nine-year period from 2009 to 2018. And in September this year, the Premier League announced that it had found Man City guilty of all 80 charges related to financial wrongdoing, and 34 of 35 charges of failure to cooperate with the league investigation. The verdict is currently being appealed by the club.
The case has garnered significant interest from sports media, players, managers, and fans during its course. Following the verdict, Man City co-chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak released a statement in which he said that “nothing has changed”. But few are buying his claim, which is no more believable than when Theresa May tried to claim the same thing after her party was forced into an embarrassing policy U-turn during her disastrous 2017 general election campaign. Meanwhile, other Premier League clubs are reported to be planning legal action against Man City to seek compensation for potential sporting and sponsorship losses, during the period in which Man City were found to have violated Premier League rules.
The verdict of the appeal will be published early next year and no punishment will be handed out before then. But it seems highly likely that the appeal will fail, and it therefore makes sense to start discussing punishments now. The possible punishments are: (1) a massive points deduction resulting in enforced relegation from the Premier League; (2) retrospectively revoking Premier League titles won during the infraction period; (3) multi-million-pound or billion-pound monetary penalties; (4) forced sale of the club; (5) expulsion from the football league; (6) multi-year transfer bans; and (7) forced compensation being paid to rival clubs (as mentioned above). In my view, if the appeal fails then punishments (1)-(4) should all be imposed on the club, but not necessarily punishments (5)-(7).
Given that Man City deliberately broke Premier League rules, it seems to me a no-brainer that they should be kicked out of the Premier League. Similarly, as they won their titles as a direct result of breaking these rules, it seems a no-brainer that they should be stripped of these titles, and that should be forced to pay back any money they made as a result of winning them. This raises the question of what should happen to these titles if they are taken from Man City. One suggestion is that they are awarded retrospectively to the team who finished second in the league. But I doubt fans of the affected clubs would derive much pleasure from ‘winning’ a title retrospectively in this way. Better to say that nobody won the league in those seasons, to create a clear historical record of Man City’s cheating.
Those who are opposed to meting out such punishments argue that they will impact most on innocent people, namely the players and coaches employed by the club, and the club’s fans. I have little sympathy for the players or coaches in this situation. As the charges have been hanging over Man City since 2018, most of them would have known – or should have known – that this scenario was always likely to occur when they joined the club. I do have a lot of sympathy for the fans however, as none of this is their fault, and most fans will have supported the club since long before 2018. Personally, though, I would rather the team I support didn’t win any trophies at all rather than won them by cheating, as cheating in sport rather seems to defeat the object.
The punishment that would have the biggest long-term impact would be the forced sale of the club. Man City is currently owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, an Emirati royal and the Vice President and Deputy Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates. As such, it is effectively owned by a nation-state. This creates a number of issues. In recent times, oil-rich nation states have used ownership of high-profile football clubs to project ‘soft power’ and distract from domestic human rights records. This includes Man City, Paris Saint-Germain, and Newcastle United, which are effectively owned by the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia respectively. This has distorted transfer markets and wage structures, making it difficult for traditionally fan-owned or privately-run clubs to compete fairly.
State ownership introduces diplomatic complications and makes clubs vulnerable to shifting international relations. And treating historic community institutions as geopolitical assets strips the soul away from local football culture. The same goes for treating football clubs as corporate assets. Football clubs should be owned and controlled by their supporters. The most positive thing the Premier League could do in this situation is to force Sheikh Mansour to sell Man City to its fans. Sadly, though, I don’t see that happening. Football is a microcosm of wider capitalist society, whereby services that should be publically owned by the people who use them are instead increasingly put into private hands. We need a socialist revolution in football, just as we need a socialist revolution in society as a whole.
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