- At last the cheats are revealed and the return to football can begin
- Will the Mancs be stripped of their titles and have points docked?
by Tony Attwood
The extreme delay in dealing with the crimes of ManC is obviously a consequence of allowing an entity into the Football League that is willing to threaten to bankrupt the rest of the organisation if it didn’t get its own way. It always seemed worrying that an accusation of not cooperating with financial reporting, (a charge that on the face of it could be cleared up in half a day), should take three years to reach a verdict.
But as we now know, this is all quite probably just the start. Two questions are raised with the first being: “do we all agree to the basic rules that we have here or not?” And then the second question being, “Can you answer that first question without bringing in a team of lawyers?”
Because if the answer to the second question is no, we are now in a new land. A Monty Python type land in which the accused says, “Are you my lawyer?” and bewigged gentleman replies “Yes. That will be £2000.”
The fact is, do we want to have a set of rules governing the way professional football is run, or not? Do we want a club with so much money available to it that it could, if it wished, take the rest of the league to court and bankrupt all the clubs? Indeed it is not even a question that they could do this, it is that they might threaten this.
Put another way do we want Arsenal FC to be run in accordance with the same rules as Torquay United FC? Or put yet another way, do we want the rule of law in which every organisation is treated equally, or not? And then following on from that, what are we going to do with those clubs who just ignore the rules because they’ve got so much money they can tie the rest of the league up forever in legal proceedings?
And here we get to the big point. Because if ManC were to win this battle, it would be the end of professional football in England as we know it. Professional football would continue in other countries but not here in England, because at every move ManC and its lawyers could change the rules to something else.
Now it can be argued that football can continue with the same club winning the league every year – Bayern Munich in Germany is the prime example. Or maybe two clubs (Celtic and Rangers in Scotland for example) sharing it across the seasons.
But the reason that it is the Premier League that the rest of the world wants to see, and why our grounds are so often sold out, is because until ManC bought their way to the top, the Premier League doesn’t have the predictability of most other leagues. That’s why we have the financial rules. If ManC were to win the legal argument we would have a league like Germany, and although it works there, I don’t think it would work in England because we have a history of over 100 years of competition and variation. And because we’ve always believed that the Premier League was a real competition.
Yes ManU won the league five times in seven years but at such a cost to themselves they are now on the edge of bankruptcy. Yes Arsenal won the league five times in the 1930s. But then it took them 43 years to win it the next four times. Newcastle, Wolverhampton and Huddersfield each won the league three times in six years or fewer, but none have won it since. These spells of success come and go – and that’s what we cherish.
Except that ManC wanted to make their run eternal, and would use all the oil revenues they could lay their hands on to do it, with no regards to the rules and no regards to any other club.
And that it why punishment now really is key. Because everything is on the cards here, not least including the much‑trailed potential destruction of the brand. Yes we have had clubs winning the league three times in a row but then there was no suggestion of any rule breaking. Now there is, and it is massive.
There is of course much more and I will try to cover this in coming articles, but here’s the very basic point: A set of rules exists within the Premier League about income and expenditure. Manchester City have been found guilty of breaking these rules over 100 times. How should they be punished?
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