City Scandal Should Be a Watershed Moment for European Football

It won’t be, but the concluding phase of the Premier League’s case against Manchester City should be the catalyst for a wholesale reckoning. Because while it’s never been more popular or as lucrative, football at the top of the English game is fundamentally broken.

If Chelsea’s admission of tens of millions of pounds in illegal payments to agents that helped facilitate their title wins in 2014 and 2017 hadn’t forever tainted that period in the League’s history — even while it’s greatest story, that of Leicester’s unfathomable triumph in 2016, was sandwiched in the middle — the City scandal will ensure that an entire era of the Premier League, from 2009 to the present day, will be littered with asterisks and overshadowed by corruption and malfeasance.

The scale of these ructions probably wasn’t foreseen by the traditional “Big Five” when they drew up plans for the breakaway Premiership in 1991. A natural inequality had, of course, always existed in the English game but the financial clout of Sir John Moores’ Mersey Millionaires, for example, relative to smaller clubs wasn't comparable with or as impactful as the gulf that exists today between the Premier League’s real “haves” and the other “have nots”.

The boom-and-bust cycle that saw Manchester United and Tottenham, for example, relegated in the 1970s — even Chelsea and Manchester City went down in the early years of the Premier League era — or allow for a team like Watford to win promotion one year and finish second the very next season in the early 1980s was intact.

For a little over 100 years, that natural cycle had ensured that dynasties like those of Huddersfield Town in the 1920s, Arsenal in the 1930s and Liverpool in the late 1970s and 1980s were either short-lived or were ultimately finite. Even the richest club in the land in the 1960s only won the title in 1963 and 1970 and managed just one FA Cup before largely disappearing from view until 1984.

The inception of the Premier League and the slow-moving explosion in wealth it ushered in upended that natural order and has led to the annual honours and financial spoils being concentrated in the hands of a small few.

The lid to Pandora’s Box was opened the moment Roman Abramovich and his unprecedentedly obscene wealth assumed power at Chelsea in 2003. It was thrown wide open, and the chaos that has ensued in the 17 years since was unleashed, when Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG) were allowed to purchase Manchester City.

What was tantamount to a nation state, with effectively bottomless coffers at their disposal, taking control of a 130-year-old football club in a league characterised for over a century by parochial ownership and deep community ties… What could possibly go wrong?

It allowed ADUG to assemble arguably the greatest team in the history of the domestic game, managed by the world’s most celebrated manager. Pep Guardiola, an elite coach of elite teams (because those are the only ones he chooses to manage) would never have taken the post at the Etihad Stadium were they not one of the biggest clubs in the world but, having done so, he added 15 major trophies to City’s honours list, vaulting them above the likes of Everton in the ranking of England’s most successful clubs.

But those achievements, particularly their treble-winning success in 2023, have aptly been likened to Lance Armstrong’s PED-fuelled Tour de France victories — the result of “financial doping”, in the words of Arsène Wenger, on an industrial scale.

It was perversely ironic that that clutch of Premier League, Champions League and FA Cup triumphs was won just weeks after the Premier League announced that they had referred City to an independent commission charged with 115 breaches of League rules, transgressions that enabled Sheikh Mansour and Abu Dhabi United to amass a footballing empire and a team capable of sweeping all before them on the domestic and Continental fronts.

What is equally perverse is that it took the League five years to bring the charges against City and another three before a verdict was reached — an eight-year span in which, in addition to the Champions League, they won the English title five times, the FA Cup three times, and the League Cup four times. As they sit on top of the pile during this international break with a 100% record, they will, of course, be in contention to win any or all four of those competitions before the rest of the appeals and sanctioning process has run its course.

Given the precedent established by the Premier League’s censure of Everton (let’s not forget that they recommended the maximum penalty of a 12-point deduction) and Nottingham Forest, Manchester City should have the book thrown at them and hard. Their punishment should be massive in scale and commensurate not only with the extent of their apparent cheating but also the levels to which they obfuscated, denied and impeded the League’s investigation into their wrongdoing.

Nothing should be off the table, including expulsion from the Premier League. A points deduction that merely guarantees relegation to the Championship would only see them back in the top flight within a year, able to continue on as nothing had happened. Which is why massive fines and a multi-year transfer ban should also be on the menu when the commission into the sanctions to be meted out meets in the next few weeks.

And if Everton are unsuccessful in their appeal against Burnley’s claims for compensation based on the Blues’ 2022 PSR breach, the worms will already be out the can when it comes to a litany of similar lawsuits that can be brought against City by a host of clubs who were denied titles and qualification for the Champions and Europa Leagues during the period in question. Everton, in 2009 and 2014, would, of course, be among the aggrieved parties and have a case for pursuing lost revenue in the tens of millions.

Let’s not pretend, though, that the rules that eventually became PSR in 2014 and SCR as of this season are not wildly anti-competitive and are what prompted ADUG, under the auspices of chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak, to bend, break and circumvent in the first place those spending limits in a bid to rival and then overtake the traditional Premier League powerhouses of Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool and, the later-comer, Chelsea.

Though supported by a majority of member clubs, including the likes of Everton, Newcastle United and Aston Villa who have either broken the “Big Six” stranglehold on the top four or are hopeful of one day being able to, they amount to the cabal that attempted in 2021 to form the controversial European Super League (ESL) pulling the ladder up behind them and ensuring that no one could ever conceivably “do a Leicester” again.

Even remaining as perennial Champions League qualifiers has become a Herculean task as the Magpies (despite being backed by a Middle Eastern sovereign wealth fund of their own) and Villa have discovered over the past couple of years. Being forced to sell their best players — to Big Six clubs, it should be noted — to remain PSR and now SCR compliant means that they are no threat to the latter’s hegemony and could struggle to finish in the top five this time around.

In its current guise, the Premier League as a 20-team sporting competition is a farce; rather it is a two-tier corporate environment with a small elite able to vastly out-spend the rest and hoover up the best talent, thereby keeping a proverbial boot on those below them who might one day become pretenders to their throne.

Limits based on squad cost ratios simply favour those clubs who have, through repeated qualification for the Continent’s most lucrative tournaments, amassed the highest revenues, the biggest commercial and sponsorship deals and the widest global followings. It’s why the Champions League and, arguably, the Premier League that Everton helped found before it, is one of the worst things to have happened to football.

Importantly, top-to-bottoming anchoring, that would have benchmarked each team’s spending capacity to the revenue of the bottom side, was rejected by the member clubs last year. Such a measure would have represented a big step towards a more competitive landscape but would have put English clubs at a disadvantage to the biggest in Europe who would not be operating under the same constraints.

It’s why, for the health of the future game, SCR in England should be scrapped and standardised squad cost ratio rules that include such anchoring and meaningful salary caps should be imposed across all five of the Continent’s biggest leagues as a matter of urgency.

Because while true equality will never be possible between clubs like Manchester United on the one hand, with their massive worldwide following and designs on a 100,000 seat stadium, and Bournemouth, and their 11,000-capacity Vitality Stadium, on the other, the rules should allow for the latter to operate on a more level playing field than the status quo.

And the framework of regulations should encourage rather than stymie clubs who operate on the sound, live-within-your-means financial footing being employed by The Friedkin Group at Everton, even if we’d like to see a good deal more ambition and envelope-pushing from our American overlords.

It should better reward the likes of Brighton, Bournemouth and Brentford, shining examples of clubs who have sought to narrow what is, in reality, an unbridgeable gap between themselves and the richest teams by implementing innovative recruitment strategies and player-trading policies that have helped make the Premier League as competitive as it has been outside that top five or six for the past couple of years.

All of that would require both Premier League and that cabal of its richest clubs acknowledging what has long been lost — that their raison d’ětre is sporting competition not a collection of rival businesses competing as much for sponsorship revenue as they are for silverware. That the Champions and winners of the domestic cups will, with rare exception, come from that small handful of massively-resourced teams. Pigs might sooner fly, but we live in hope.

First, though, the Premier League’s rules around spending and their enforcement mechanism must be shown to have the same teeth that they did when Everton and Forest were on the end of them. Manchester City cannot be allowed to escape with a mere slap on the wrist like Chelsea. They need to be summarily dealt with and a serious conversation had about the health and future of the Beautiful Game.