- Why the Premier League has taken on the fight against domination by one club.
- Manchester City: what happens next? If they lose can they survive?
By Tony Attwood
The Daily Mail has had a couple of bashes at dealing with the current turmoil in football. One reads, “Man City could still lift the Premier League title THIS season despite being found guilty of ‘vast majority’ of rule breaches – with hefty legal delays expected over appeal process.”
And that could be right, although it wouldn’t be a spectacle the League would want to see, so the chaps running the show are probably mor focussed on the headline that reads “Sheikh Mansour and his people must be told they have NO RIGHT to run a football club here. After the humiliating Man City verdict and years of shamefully playing the victim, it is time they sold up.”
Meanwhile, the Guardian feels there is a bigger picture where it says, “Ever feel you’ve been cheated? Consequences could be profound after Manchester City guilty verdict.”
So it goes on as the media change their headlines by the hour, and no one quite knows which way to turn, or what to say. The media are pretty sure that most people are against Man City for no reason other than the fact they are foreign, but actually, the vast majority of the stories are that Manchester City are a bunch of cheating crooks who ought to be boiled at sunset and never allowed back into English football. (I may have overstated that a but that’s the gist.)
But there are articles in other parts of the media saying nothing can be done because the club hasn’t really broken any rules and it’s everyone else’s fault for not writing the rules properly in the first place. Stories of this nature appear in the media that recently got rather fed up when it was pointed out that Arsenal don’t actually foul far more than every other team. For them, another anti-Arsenal story is right up their street. But anti-Manc? No, they are not sure.
But it is fair to say there is a lot of dislike for the owners of ManC, for even if they have acted within the rules, it wasn’t English to have behaved like that, and it really wasn’t cricket either (possibly because it was football, and well, we know what footballers are like.)
Meanwhile, no one is pointing out that Arsenal came second in the Premier League three seasons running and if there was some cheating going on, surely we would properly have come top, so can we have three more titles please?
And herein lies the problem. Opinion has been heated up, and I don’t just mean opinion within Arsenal. There seems to be a fair amount of opinion in various newspapers and on blogs that ManC have been jolly naughty, behaving as they have, and none of this is right. Which basically translates into the feeling that you don’t get this sort of thing with cricket and no one can agree on what to do now.
It is also an opportunity, of course, for newspapers to bash administrators (a favourite sport), pointing out that, “It has taken more than two years, but a judgement finally appears to have been reached on the 115 charges levelled against Manchester City over breaches of Premier League financial rules,” with lots of reminders that the “hearing finally got under way on 16 September 2024.”
But it also appears that “We are not at the end of this process, however,” which will keep the sports journalists happy as they can speculate like mad for weeks and months. In fact there is already quite a bit such as …
- But what does this mean for City’s titles?
- What about their Premier League’s status – shouldn’t it have spotted something was wrong?
- Will there be an appeal?
- And how long will it be before this saga does come to an end?
- Can ManC get compensation?
Of course it is all a bit of a mess because we’ve not been through anything like this before, and thus far no one has thought about this particular point: whatever settlement we get in the end, will everyone accept it? If ManC get their titles taken away, will they accept this, or simply claim they won the titles? Will other clubs willingly play ManC knowing now the sort of tricks they can get up to? Can the clubs that didn’t get European places because of ManC cheating get compensation for loss of earnings? Will European clubs be willing to play ManC knowing now the sort of tricks that the club can get up to?
In fact, will European clubs be willing to play any English clubs knowing now the lackadaisical way in which the game is run in England? Will England be willing to select ManC players for the England team? Will teams from other countries be willing to play Manc in European competitions in the future?
And that, of course, is just the start – a list of questions a couple of us dreamed up while contemplating this mess. I am sure you can come up with some more.
