Say citeh are relegated. The PL will wait to decide this until the last minute to give citeh the least amount of time before the start of a new season to mount any type of offensive. Get the playoff final concluded. Announce the decision. Announce that the second finalist is also coming up. Schedule out several weeks later. Tickets printed/mailed. PL may get stuck with a monetary penalty, but there will be no way to allow citeh back in.
I hope you're right but they are already taking the prem to court around the rules about sponsorship. If they are kicked out this would be a massive personal humiliation on a global scale for some very rich people. I am sure at the very least they'd be asking their very expensive lawyers to look into it. In the past other clubs have looked into legal challenges around relegation and point deductions (it's happened in the lower divisions). They usually didn't because of the members club thing. They risked being kicked out of the club and never allowed back in if things went badly. But I am not sure Abu Dhabi cares. Unlike Shef U or Everton's owners they don't actually need the prem. It might be better for them, and their reputation, to blow the whole thing up. Then they can tell a story about the corrupt premier league rather than being cheaters.
or ... they could realize that to further their sportswashing agenda, they should hire the best spin-doctors in the world and make their acceptance of a harsh punishment as further proof of how the UAE is a great country, a global leader, who graciously accepts the punishment of a terribly misguided UK entity, promise that no such infraction will ever happen again - and here's half a billion quid for the UK football pyramid to prove they are the good guys.
That, unfortunately, is more likely, I'm afraid... As long as they get some significant punishment for their infractions...we'll see...
speaking of which .... by the often very good Barney Ronay ... [note: l-o-n-g article] https://www.theguardian.com/footbal...e-poses-perilous-threat-to-the-premier-league Arsenal clash is part Super Sunday but more importantly Tribunal Day Seven and the stakes could scarcely be higher Dance while the world burns. You have to hand it to English football. It is above all endlessly adaptable. Everything is content. Never stop selling. Even if the thing you’re selling may just turn out to be the ground beneath your own feet. The days leading up to any big soaraway Super Sunday showdown tend to bring an avalanche of messages from gambling companies describing their latest match-day lures. With Arsenal due at the Etihad on Sunday afternoon the gambling emails have once again flowed like wine, albeit with a topical twist this time. As of Wednesday (also known as Tribunal Day Three) you can access a range of bets tailored breathlessly to City’s financial charges, as though this is all actually just another football match, including HOT MARKETS on deductions, fines and even relegation (a miserly 6-1: these people really do know their wishful-thinking demographic). There is at least a bracing degree of honesty in all this. For the broadcasters it is a trickier subject. How to deal with this thing, in the week when it finally became a thing, one that undermines so many other things, not least your own relentlessly upbeat entertainment product? Come Sunday afternoon the chat around the lighted plinth will be about bottling or not bottling, about whether Arsenal were too pleased with the robotically cautious 0-0 in this fixture last season. It will be about how the league’s best defence deals with Erling Haaland, who has scored 8.5% of all Premier League goals this season, and who also has 82% of City’s tally, which may just, as the Inter game in midweek suggested, be a possible weak spot. This is clearly a good thing for everyone concerned, not least the unsuspecting teatime TV audience. The profitability and sustainability rules (PSR) procedure is opaque, tedious and unresolved. Nobody comes to sport for this. Can’t we all just enjoy the frowning men in puffy gilets analysing the second‑phase mid-block counterpress? The difference now is that as of Monday morning this thing is finally in the building, walking the halls, rattling the door handles, whispering through the keyholes. A Sunday afternoon meeting with the team City beat to the league title by the finest of margins four months ago, while also being accused of overreaching the finest of margins, provides its own unavoidable note of irony. Above all it is a reminder that this remains a hugely perilous point in the history of a league formed out of legal squabbles, chicanery and greed a third of a century ago. Zoom out a little and City’s charges are arguably the greatest existential threat to the Premier League since its inception. At which point it is probably a good moment to take a look at where we are with this thing. Perhaps the most notable aspect right now is the sense of two entirely opposing views on how it may play out. City have understandably drawn down the shutters on this topic. But the club is by all accounts hugely confident of being vindicated. There is talk of “irrefutable” evidence proving City’s innocence, a phrase used so often you wonder whether someone in the comms team doesn’t know what “irrefutable” actually means, which is unarguable, open-and-shut, beyond question, and not simply slick, aggressive and produced by an £8,000-an-hour king’s counsel. One suggestion is City are supremely confident in their own resources, the bewigged legal super-group at their disposal and a track record in making these things go away. Another theory is the club have been advised certain key notes of evidence in the public domain – and disputed by City – will turn out to be inadmissible. This would certainly explain that confidence. Because the leaked evidence, taken at face value, is undeniably compelling. The charges themselves fall into five basic categories. - Inflated sponsorship income offered by organisations linked to the club’s state ownership. - Issues, including image rights, that relate to player and manager remuneration. - Failure to meet Uefa’s financial fair play regulations. - Breaches of PSR. - And what are essentially allegations of bad faith, a failure to supply accurate information on time or to help progress the investigation. The evidence out there – which City dispute – is most compelling on the key front of sponsor income. Der Spiegel’s 2018 investigation, supported by leaked documents from the Portuguese hacker Rui Pinto – and again disputed by City – suggested club officials solicited top-ups from state-owned entities in Abu Dhabi to avoid openly breaking the rules. Uefa’s financial rules have always been the enemy of ambition for City’s owners. “We will need to fight this,” Ferran Soriano, City’s chief executive, allegedly writes of FFP in one leaked memo, “and do it in a way that is not visible.” There is alleged talk of “creative solutions” to get around the rules and the launch of “Project Longbow”, a nod, apparently, to Agincourt and Uefa’s Gallic bogeyman, Michel Platini. The alleged narrative behind all this detail is that City’s sponsors were not in fact real commercial parties but compliant bodies covertly routing money from the ownership. An internal email sent by the club executive Simon Pearce in April 2010 – which City dispute the validity of – talks of making up a shortfall in income via “alternative sources provided by His Highness”. One document section carries the heading: “Supplement to Abu Dhabi partnership deals.” Asked about changing the date of payment for some Abu Dhabi‑centred sponsorship deals, Pearce replies: “Of course, we can do what we want.” City dispute the truth and relevance of all this. There will, of course, be those who say this is all beside the point, that the rules should not exist in the first place, that they run contrary to the idea of a free market. This is an argument that works only if you have little understanding of what a market actually is. State subsidies, inflated value, Neymar being sold for €220m to the state of Qatar, a politically motivated ownership pumping in excess funds to serve its propaganda purposes. None of these things suggest a functioning free market. This is the opposite of that: state intervention, a market distortion, the command economy. The real point is that while this may seem obscure, historical and procedural – accounting irregularities: spare me – it is utterly key to what happens on the pitch, and central to everything City have built. This is a success that can be plotted almost exactly against the flow of money out. Over the period the main charges relate to, 2009-18, City’s net spend on transfers – according to Transfermarkt – was about £900m, almost £400m more than Manchester United in second place, and five times as much as Liverpool and Arsenal. From 2016-18 they massively outspent every other team, the key period in building the current Pep supremacy, laying the foundations for five league titles in the past six seasons, for the team that will face Arsenal on Sunday. Nothing wrong with that, of course. This is all energy, all ambition. But the rules are also there for a reason, and even the tiniest of margins either way, a few spare millions, can make a massive difference to success on the pitch. By the time City’s seminal, dynasty-building title arrived in May 2012, leaked internal calculations – which City dispute – suggest that £127.5m had been pumped in as “supplements” to their Abu Dhabi partnership deals. Which would certainly go a long way towards buying Sergio Agüero, Mario Balotelli and Yaya Touré, architects of that defining moment. More recently, Guardiola’s team have won the league on the final day or by a point three times while, it is alleged and denied, enjoying the benefits of breaking rules their immediate opponents obeyed. European leagues have been depleted, talent and expertise lured away. Signing Kevin De Bruyne involved digging out an extra £25m, forcing Wolfsburg to sell, stretching the margins in your direction. This is exactly what Newcastle, for example, are not being allowed to do right now. If rules have been broken it not only depletes the spectacle, it undermines the basic notion of what sport is. On this basis it isn’t hard to see the argument for stripping City of titles if they are found guilty. Otherwise, why do the rules even exist? The fact remains City have yet to suffer significant punishment on any front. In the more recent Uefa case, key elements of evidence were found to be time-barred. Deals have been made with no less a figure of unquestioned rectitude than Gianni Infantino, Uefa’s general secretary at the time. The problem facing City, and indeed the Premier League, is that their current accusers are not Uefa but a collective of other clubs with their own competing desires for success, glory and profit. With that in mind it is still hard to see any outcome that genuinely benefits the Premier League. Three things can happen from this point. First, City are found guilty and punished to a significant degree. This would represent a potential disaster for the Premier League, which would find its entire recent history discredited, its broadcast rights undermined and integrity open to question. It would also leave a champion club, the richest in the world, in a state of open, vengeful warfare with their own co-members. Hello? Is that the Super League? Yeah. Are we still on? The second outcome is City are found to be innocent. No matter how legitimate or how transparent, this would also be disastrous for the Premier League, hobbled with ruinous legal fees, sucked into internal unhappiness, menaced by conspiracy theories on all sides. How does the league survive either of these verdicts intact? There are already splits and schisms. For the first time there are suggestions out there of other ways to organise elite club football. How strong does that union really feel, in a league where the generational champions are at war with their own governing body? The third, and by far most likely, outcome is a qualified compromise, acceptance of some things, dismissal of others, and punishment that allows everyone involved to live with the outcome. The panel is, of course, entirely independent and concerned only with the truth. On the other hand, football, for all its self-importance, remains a very small player. Manchester City are an arm of an influential nation state with whom the UK did £25bn of trade in the previous financial year. What would be the most normal outcome here? Justice in a vacuum? Another defeat for commerce and money in the face of pure sporting principles? Which world, exactly, are we living in? In the current one the fudge looks a very decent bet.
Once again I hope it plays out the way you are predicting. Buy my guess is if they'll just disinvest claiming it's all the racist neo-colonial premier leagues fault.
This feels like the most likely outcome since both of the other two are existential threats to the prem and the current model of club football. But is there a deal that will satisfy all of the parties? Can Liverpool and Arsenal accept a deal where City admits to cheating but still gets to keep their titles? Will Newcastles' owners be happy if it turns out they should have just bought whoever they wanted and then cooked the books, instead of following the rules like they did? Not sure the other clubs can accept a guilty verdict that also allows city to keep their titles and their position in the league.
https://www.football365.com/news/ma...tly-unprecedented-premier-league-legal-battle We will reportedly learn the outcome of Manchester City’s colossal associated party transaction (APT) legal case against the Premier League ‘in the coming days’. In June, a legal dispute between Man City and the Premier League over APT rules began. The hearing could have huge ramifications on the Premier League as City reportedly challenge the validity of the rules under UK competition law. The hearing lasted until June 21 and the separate court case relating to the 115 charges against the champions got underway earlier this month, with a verdict not likely until 2025. It is believed that Pep Guardiola’s side want to scrap APT rules, which were first introduced in December 2021 following the Saudi-led takeover of Newcastle United and were strengthened earlier this year. The rules are designed to ensure any commercial deal or player transfer between a club and entities with links to that club’s ownership are conducted at fair market value, so that club revenues are not artificially inflated. If an arbitration panel declares the APT rules invalid, then clubs would effectively be free to do any commercial deals they wished without any independent judgement being made on whether those deals were for fair market value.
It would be hilarious if City were punished and Abu Dhabi walk away. Won’t happen mind. You could imagine tho, almost any fan base willing to sell part of its soul for a decade of glory despite subsequent punishment/relegation etc…
other than the ones who completely refuse to accept that their owners have ever done a single wrong thing and the PL rules are ridiculous.
Frankly, if City were to win and the APD rules amended in their favor, I could see a queue of potential suitors for PL clubs. If I were FSG and City won this trial, I would be tempted to sell to the highest bidder the next day.
nope. if City win, it basically = there are no rules and the biggest wallet wins every time, so there is no true sporting competition whatsoever. other than Saudi or Qatar, who has anywhere near the cash needed to compete with AD?
another good piece from the Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/footbal...er-city-should-either-be-vindicated-or-damned There can be no Goldilocks result – Manchester City should either be vindicated or damned Let’s start by going back to December 2016. And a gathering of the world’s media in London to hear lurid details of how more than 1,000 Russian athletes cheated across 30 sports with the help of spies, a cocktail of steroids mixed with whisky and vermouth, and massive state interference. First the law professor Richard McLaren tells us that London 2012 was “corrupted on an unprecedented scale”. Then he reminds us that, at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, an agent from the FSB, Russia’s security service, was disguised as a plumber and used a mouse hole in the walls of an anti-doping lab to switch drug-tainted samples for clean ones. “It is impossible to know just how deep and how far back this conspiracy goes,” McLaren tells us. “Coaches and athletes have been playing on an uneven field. Sports fans and spectators have been deceived.” We know what happened next. Unprecedented crimes led to unprecedented punishments. Dozens of Russians were stripped of their medals and their country’s flag, anthem and officials were banned from the Olympics, the first time that had happened to a country. Now just imagine if McLaren had instead said: ‘You know what? We should only drop Russian athletes 15 places in this year’s world rankings. But they can keep their medals and compete next year.’ He would have been laughed out the room. I bring this up because the biggest sports trial since Russia was in the dock has just got under way, with Manchester City facing 115 Premier League charges, but already there is a sense of fudge in the air. The thinking goes like this: the stakes are so high for both sides, as well as Britain’s relations with Abu Dhabi, that no more than a fine, or a points deduction large enough to stop City getting into Europe while avoiding relegation, is on the cards. Would anyone be surprised, as my colleague Barney Ronay wrote in Saturday’s paper, if we got a result that allowed everyone involved to live with the outcome? I respect his logic and instincts. I just don’t see how we get there. The charges are so serious and egregious, and grouped in such a particular way, that it is hard to see how such a compromise will be found without eyebrows being raised and questions asked. Take, for instance, the 35 charges that relate to City’s alleged failure to cooperate with Premier League investigations between 2018 and 2023. Logic dictates that City will either be found guilty or cleared on all counts. Similarly, the Premier League alleges that between the 2009-10 and 2017-18 seasons City made 54 breaches of rules requiring accurate financial information “in utmost good faith” and between the 2015-16 and 2017-18 seasons breached the Premier League’s profitability and sustainability rules (PSR) seven times. Could we get a clean sweep of innocent or guilty verdicts here too? It is probably more likely than not. And if there are dozens of guilty verdicts, a slap on the wrists won’t wash. Remember, too, that Everton were docked six points last season for just one PSR offence and for supplying information that was “materially inaccurate” and “less than frank”. That also sets a precedent. City deny all charges and say they have a “comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence” to support their claim of innocence. If they prove it, then the Premier League and its clubs will owe them a huge apology. However if the most serious allegations are proved – that, essentially City cooked the books with hugely inflated sponsorship deals and gave secret payments to Roberto Mancini and Dimitri Seluk, the agent of Yaya Touré, both of whom deny the charges – then City must face an unprecedented punishment. And if it means stripping the club of league titles, just as those Russians also lost their Olympic medals, then so be it. We are still far from that point. Especially as City have shown the tenacity of a rottweiler in fighting the various cases against them. However the butterfly effect of being able to outspend rivals by so much at the start of a 14-year period when City won seven Premier League titles, six League Cups, three FA Cups and the Champions League is undeniable. Without such a huge investment, who knows if stars such as Yaya Touré and David Silva would have arrived at City in the same week in 2010 and then led them to the title two years later? And don’t forget, either, that the club faces serious allegations in individual seasons too: one of the campaigns in which City are accused of violating PSR rules is 2017-18 – when they won the title. Whatever the final verdict, which is due next year, one prominent lawyer I spoke to last week said it showed how setting up a global independent body for football finance – think a World Anti-Doping Agency – might not be a bad idea. Remember before Wada was formed, the International Association of Athletics Federations had to pay the 100m star Katrin Krabbe for a loss of earnings even after she failed a drugs test for clenbuterol. Krabbe admitted taking the drug but won as the German athletics federation’s rulebook did not list the drug as banned. Since then, thankfully, the system changed for the better. The argument is for another day. In the meantime, let us resist the idea of a Goldilocks punishment in the City case – one that is deliberately at the right temperature for all sides – as a potential solution. City should be either vindicated or damned.
UTD and Leeds are unique as their success was not won based on financial doping (as far as I know) and they both had longer term success. I’d even put Newcastle in this group. City and they’re fans are vastly different IMO as they’ve not had success prior to Abu Dhabi investment.
Not had success prior to Abu Dhabi? Are you on drugs???? 1985-86 Full Members Cup Runners Up!!! That’s the sort of success that doesn’t come easily, but only through graft and hard work. Not a success prior to Abu Dhabi?…pffft… I suppose you’ve forgotten all these heroes, have you?