- Which club is up for the Crazy Cock Up Cup?
- When the BBC calls Man City contracts a sham, it is time to take notice
By Tony Attwood
The news is no news – mostly. Manchester City have appealed, the appeal board is saying nothing, and the club says the case against it contains “clear material errors, of law, principle and fact… The Club is innocent… We will continue to respect due process…
In essence the Mancs argue that they have no control over how its sponsors finance commercial deals. Now that is a clever move since they are arguing that if a company wants to give it $100m but doesn’t have the money, it is quite legal for the company to secure funding from its own government to pay for the deal.
And that is a clever move because in this case the government in Abu Dhabi is already financing both the club and the companies.
Against this the League argues the sponsorships were granted as soon as Manc was bought by its current owners allowing it to grow its revenue at around ten times the speed Arsenal and clus of similar size could grow their commercial revenue.
Such ploys have already been revealed by “Rui Pinto” via “Football Leaks” whose revelations were based on emails etc major clubs and players who were then convicted of tax fraud. Mancs then paid a $70 million fine, and took on board various limitation but seemingly kept on keeping on, as it were, until they were investigated again, got another fine and another ban, although that was appealed.
Now the current answer to the accusations – that the club sys its sponsors like to dish their money around and the club is simply happy to receive it, isn’t really enough because of late we have seen sponsors use “sponsorship” as a way of putting far more into clubs than normal “sponsorship” is thought to be worth, by others. Indeed upping the level of sponsorship money is the most obvious way of by-passing the rules limiting how much can be given to a club. If ManC are innocent in this case, there is no limit on how much money a sponsor can give to a club.
So the club argues that it is not their fault if the sponsor wants to splash far more than is normal in supporting the club. But the league’s rules imply that such sponsorship donations have to be “commercially reasonable.” Indeed without a “commercially reasonable” clause, anyone could make sponsorship payments of anything, and thus all other rules would be pointless.
To sort this the league compares the money Arsenal get for front-of-shirt and training-kit sponsorship, and what ManC are getting. An d then they ask, “is it reasonable for ManC to be getting so much more money than Arsenal in terms of sponsorship fees, when taking into account the club history, size of stadium, appearances on TV etc?”
If ManC are found innocent then all clubs will know that massive variations in sponsorship fees that can be accepted. If ManC lose the League will not want to relegate them since that would affect the players who are not considered at fault in this dispute.
But the club would be guilty of using a disguised funding scheme and there might also be questions over the contracts that the players have, but action by the League and indeed the FA is unlikely until such matters are resolved in the appeal hearing. But the club has claimed its evidence is irrefutable, and thus if the club is found guilty of anything it will be denying the validity of the FA’s ruling.
Mr Burnham has said he would be concerned if the owners of the club were forced to sell it, after making such an investment in Manchester, although Downing Street officials suggested that this didn’t mean the PM (a Manc supporter) was trying to seek special treatment for the club.
What many are noticing is that it took eight years to get to the point we are at now, and if the League and its legal team can’t put together a sure fire case in eight years, they might be considered not up to the job especially after the ManC was found guilty by an independent commission who worked for eight years and produced 7,000 pages of witness evidence.
