By Tony Attwood,
I must admit my gratitude to The Athletic publication, for it is they, more than any other media operation that have pursued the Manchester City case without once backing off. While some publications saw what ManC have been up to as a blip on the landscape the Athletic have seen the ManC case as one changes the football world.
Indeed just asking, as they have done, “What will City’s punishment be?” focuses us back on the big question: “Will individual clubs follow up the Premier League’s case, whenever it eventually comes to a close, with compensation claims of their own?”
Certainly I think they should, not least because of a detail that some writers have missed. A detail that as the Athletic points out, shows ManC accused of “not providing accurate financial information in each season from 2009-10 to 2017-18.”
And that’s before we get to “refusing to co-operate with Premier League investigations between 2018-19 and 2022-23, when they won four more.”
Now the point here is that just as the Premier League can take legal action against ManC, so can individual clubs, and the feeling I get in chatting to one or two people is that this is exactly what they will do. All it needs is for one case to show ManC guilty of rule-breaking and everyone else will join in. ManC will either start paying up, or go into liquidation.
In legal chitchat what we get to is “A class action”, where various people and/or organisations come together to fight one opponent. It could end up with claims for hundreds of millions of pounds. Or more,
There is a precedent here as Burnley went after Everton after the Toffees breached the rules. And if you’ve ever been in a court hearing of this type, precedents can be very powerful in legal proceedings. The Independent reckon four clubs (including Arsenal) getting ready to go down this route, using the same approach that Burnley used in taking on Everton; only on a grander scale. Indeed the need for rule breakers to compensate those they have harmed is established, and unlimited.
At the moment it seems different clubs have differing views on what their claim might be, but the potential damages from ManC for supplying misleading financial data could be quite large. So could claims for non-cooperation.
And because this went on over years there could be a lot of cases to be heard and they will back up and up. From football results to commercial deals and transfers, from entry to competitions to TV money, everything, it will be argued, has been based on ManC allegedly spending more money than they have admitted.
Arsenal, so laughed at for coming second over a three year period, got £50m less than ManC. A case from Arsenal against the Mancs for some of that prize money must surely now be on the table. But there is more because the implications are huge in terms of damaging the reputation of clubs that have not broken any rules. Even Tottenham can make a claim for missing out on Champs League places because of the Manc cheating. Even Tottenham!!!
So we finally come to the key point. In the very near future, as the Athletic puts it, ManC “will be employing more barristers than players” to fight each match they “won”. The Athletic calculate that in the seasons 2009 to 2018 there are “42 instances where a club would have earned more in merit money” if ManC had been found guilty in subsequent trials. And here’s one I will quote exactly from the Athletic, “Extend the City-free exercise to today and a rather startling scenario presents itself: Tottenham, not West Ham United, would have gone down last season.” That shows just how far this runs. That ManC operation has a lot to answer for!
And there is yet more as the Athletic argues that the Manc action then had a Euro-wide knock-on effect in pushing up transfer fees, and perceptions that they had to go further and further to try and catch the ManC spending. As they say as an example, “Without City on the scene, there’s a world where Messi’s contract is renewed at a lower rate… “
Of course we can’t read futures nor change pasts, but these examples, and there are many more in the Athletic, reveal just how much impact the Mancs have had on the delicate balance of football. Just as Abramovich at Chelsea changed the behaviour of other clubs and Qatar taking over PSG did the same, so we had it in the Premier League. And now it is time to start sorting it all out.
