Manchester City hearing into alleged breaches of Premier League financial rules begin in London, on Sept. 16. Lord David Pannick is seen outside the International Dispute Resolution Centre as the Manchester City hearing into alleged breaches of Premier League financial rules.John Sibley/Reuters
On Tuesday, after years of wrangling, Manchester City went on trial.
At issue are 115 instances in which the Emirati-owned club is accused of fiddling the books so it fell on the right side of the Premier League’s spending rules. There are so many charges that some of the charges have to do with avoiding earlier charges.
The British media is calling this the ‘sports trial of the century,’ because that’s the only way they’re going to get anyone interested in it. It will be held in private and go on for months.
Whatever happens, someone will appeal. If the appeal doesn’t work, they’ll appeal again. Eventually, everyone will get tired of looking silly.
At best, City gets a tongue-lashing and pays a fine. At worst, it will lose some of the eight EPL titles it has won over the past 13 seasons.
That would be like sentencing a bank robber who’s 35 today to jail back in his 20s. Only a business as upside-down as sport could come up with a punishment so out of time.
A punishment with dissuasive power would be suspending City for a year or two, and making the club start again in the third division. But better a compromised Premier League than a boring one, so that won’t happen.
The point of all this isn’t getting people to play by the rules. It’s to pretend there are rules.
For instance, what rule was the British government playing by when it decided it didn’t like a buddy of Vladimir Putin owning Chelsea Football Club and told him to sell it? That’s the old sort of sports rule – I’m bigger than you, so I make the rules. Currently, it’s getting a revamp.
Sports hasn’t had many rules since it burst its natural boundaries around the turn of the century. Until that point, it was a largely domestic resource dotted by local franchises that were easy to control.
If you didn’t do what the league told you to, it would kick you in the shins. If you kept ignoring the league, it would threaten to pull your licence. Back then, the local owner needed the franchise – it was probably his or her biggest business. In many instances, it was their only business.
City is owned by the royal family of the United Arab Emirates, and therefore by the UAE itself.
What sort of stick is the Premier League – a business dwarfed in size and geopolitical importance by its franchisee – waving around here?
One of the involved parties can try padlocking the gate to a practice facility. The other can turn off a measurable percentage of the world’s fossil-fuel exports.
If it came down to it, City’s owners will go all the way on this. They didn’t buy a soccer team so they could go to games. They bought such a thing for the same reason they buy Western art – it adorns their grandeur.
Nothing boosts their international status more than hiring a thousand screaming Fleet Street lawyers to take on the Premier League and, by extension, Britain. International diplomacy is a tired pastime next to the headline-grabbing fight to determine how many points Manchester City will need to make up to win another title next year.
The Premier League has pulled quite a trick – it has managed to turn the most valuable sports team in human history into the underdog.
Why else do you think this trial is happening in secret? It isn’t out of concern for privacy. It’s to protect the blushes of the league.
Whatever happens, it won’t matter. City’s owners have already lost hundreds of millions of dollars on their English toy. What’s a fine to them? Who cares about a championship already won and celebrated?
This isn’t business. It’s statesmanship. It’s the commodification and repurposing of the biggest cultural assets on Earth.
Last month, the NFL announced it would allow private equity to buy minority, non-voting shares in its clubs. I’m sure that will end well for it.
Because while the NFL is well capable of getting an out-of-pocket heir who’s never heard the word ‘No’ to bend to its will, try doing the same thing to a bunch of hired killers off Wall Street who dabble in governmental overthrow.
The last time a league really got one over on an owner was L.A. Clippers’ boss Donald Sterling.
Sterling made two mistakes – he was awful on tape, and he didn’t own anything important except the basketball team. He was a franchisee. That made him easy to push around. Still, the NBA could not have pushed him out on its own. It needed the players’ co-operation.
Soon, those sorts of owners – guys who bought cheap and made a bundle – will be gone. They are being replaced by sovereign funds, ultrarich dilettantes and quasi-gangsters.
A housing-market analogy applies – you aren’t selling your property to someone who wants to spend years there building a family. You’re welcoming in prospectors, strip miners and people who want to leverage sports for its political power. Every new dollar you make, you lose a little control.
How do you imagine that will end?
There’s not much point in debating it now that it’s happening, but leagues would like to pretend to legislate it every once in a while.
Hence, the Manchester City trial: ‘We took you on because you’re so rich, and now we would like you to pretend you’re slightly less rich.’ Or something to that effect.
In the end, the rule doesn’t change, in sports or in life – everyone’s equal, though some are more equal than others.
What’s changing is who gets to apply that rule. It used to be leagues pressing owners to press players. Now it’s owners, followed by players, with leagues coming up the rear carrying a mop. They’re there to clean up the mess.