Football now has a gigantic problem: why can ManC hve their case heard in secret?

 

• Newspaper delves into schizophrenia and the issue of cheating in football
• Why the Premier League has taken on the fight against domination by one club.

By Tony Attwood

Manchester City are accused of breaking over 100 fair play rules – but we still don’t know the outcome.

As that headline suggests, if a sport cannot govern itself, if its regulations can simply be ignored if you’re wealthy enough, then surely it is simply no longer a sport, but it has become a political activity.

We know Manchester City have been found guilty of most of the 134 disciplinary charges brought against them by the Premier League.  But there is one thing we don’t know, and we really should know, and that is what gave ManC the right to have the multiple cases against them heard in secret.    Games are open to people to watch – so why are hearings secretive?

Surely the whole point of football is that it is a game in which those of us who care about it and spend money watching it either by going to game or on Sky, have some sort of say about what goes on.  Even if that say is just whether we turn up or not.

But the moment football goes secret then we are all lost – and that is what has happened now.  Football events are being ruled on where we can’t see them.

The fact that the case has been running in secret for so long has encouraged some commentators to think that this is normal and reasonable – but that is nonsense.   There is no reason why any of part of any case involving a football club should be secret, as long as football itself is open to the public.  There are no highly personal and confidential issues involved – of course not.  The whole fundamental of football is that it is a public affair, with games played in public and player registrations made public.   The issue is simply “are they cheats?” and the fact that they keep on holding matters in secret suggests 100% that they are.   Because people with nothing to hide do not keep things secret – especially where openness is the rule.

As the Guardian said, “We do not even have an official confirmation that the three-person judicial panel has reached a verdict. All of football is acting as if they have, however, and that reports of a big win for the Premier League are correct,” but of course really we don’t know.  We all know ManC are accused of breaking over a hundred financial fair play rules, but we don’t know anything else – because of this secrecy.

If these assumptions that ManC have been found guilty are accurate, then the next  thing to watch out for is news of an appeal. Under Premier League rules, the Mancs would have two weeks from the moment the verdict is announced, to put in an appeal.   But that of course depends on the verdict being properly announced.  Once we are into the world of secrecy, we have no idea what is going on.  Do we get to know the result of the case at the same time as them?

We also know that the process that follows the lodging of the appeal should be completed in under 12 weeks – but again now we are in the world of secrecy who knows?   Any organisation that turns away from openness in dealing with its members can’t really be trusted to follow any of its rules – so no of us know.

Once the appeal has been heard – which should happen in one block of no more than five days (but now the rules have gone out the window, who knows) – and a verdict reached, the appeal panel are also expected to publish written reasons behind their decisions. We should also see the written reasons from the original judicial panel too, but yet again the unique scale of this case has meant that normal procedures have not always been followed, and the date of publication for these reasons remains unknown.

If City do appeal, what happens?

Appeals can only be against the decision and not against  the punishment – which is to say, they need to show that the judges got it all wrong.  In such a case the Mancs  would be allowed to submit new evidence, but only if they had not had it available to them before, because someone was hiding it, or the issues were simply unknown.  Verdicts then normally follow within 30 days.

If an appeal fails, what then?  That is where we reach some very uncertain ground.

According to Premier League rule W.97, “the decision of an Appeal Board shall be final”, but that is not quite right since arbitration is allowed.     For this can only be undertaken if the court had abused the legal process.  Now this could be argued since the Mancs went through arbitration with the League in relation to the associated party transaction rules. City and the Premier League reached a settlement in the preliminaries to that case which stopped the case from going to court.