This is an updated version of an article I wrote for The Conversation in response to the fallout of the financial fair play charges brought against Manchester City by UEFA. I was approached by Routledge to produce a revised article to capture the latest developments in the ongoing saga and what it might mean for Manchester City, the Premier League and football in general. The brief was to position the piece in theoretical thinking, to appeal to both general and academic audiences. This version was set to appear as a chapter in a Routledge edited book series on “How events transform society”.
With over a decade of sustained success and counting, Manchester City supporters are enjoying football’s equivalent of winning the lottery.
Prior to the 2008 takeover of the club by Abu Dhabi based City Football Group, the less illustrious of Manchester’s main rival clubs had won the top flight title twice, in 1937 and 1968. Since Roberto Mancini brought the Premier League trophy to the Etihad Stadium in 2012, City have been crowned league champions six more times and, at the time of writing, are in a two horse title race with Arsenal.
Add to this three FA Cups, six League Cups and the Champions League, it is fair to say City’s middle eastern owners have established their position among football’s elite, prompting Arsenal manager and former Manchester City employee Mikel Arteta to state: “They have raised the bar to levels not seen before in football. They have earned the right for everyone to look at them as an example.”
However, it is questions about how the club has gone about its business to create this golden era that has raised not just the levels Arteta speaks of but eyebrows too, attracting unwanted attention in the process.
SOFT POWER OR SOFT DISEMPOWERMENT? In terms of nation branding, defined by Rookwood & Adeosun (2023, p. 575) as “activities a given state engages in to alter perceptions of the country by re-aligning its image through particular means or events in the interest of self-promotion to the world,” Manchester City, on the one hand, has proven a powerful tool for Abu Dhabi to present itself on the global sports stage.
On the other hand, scepticism has never been too far away with research suggesting that what appeals to the owners of some of the world’s biggest football clubs are so-called soft power gains (Reiche, 2015), leading to an increasing trend for countries whose political and human rights records have drawn criticism in the past to invest heavily in elite sport (Grix & Lee, 2013).
The likes of Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, China and Russia have aligned with elite sports and mega-sports events over the past 20 years in the pursuit of improved international relations and geopolitical acceptance – or what is now commonly referred to as sportswashing.
On the contrary to soft power gains, acquired via what Grix and Lee (2013, p. 522) call the politics of attraction that leverages sport to enhance “image, credibility, stature, economic competitiveness and (they hope) ability to exercise agency on the international stage,” is soft disempowerment. That is, according to Brannagan and Guilianotti (2015, p. 706), “those occasions in which you may upset, offend or alienate others, leading to a loss of attractiveness or influence.” The notion of soft disempowerment, they add, “enables us to examine how social actions may have positive and negative outcomes that are empowering and disempowering respectively.”
It is at this theoretical juncture where the thus far highly successful Abu Dhabi backed gamble on Manchester City could collapse like a house of cards.
In February 2023 City were charged with 115 financial breaches, including breaking the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules (PSR) across nine seasons from 2009 to 2018. Among the swathe of charges, unequivocally denied by the club’s owners, it is alleged City did not provide accurate financial information. The Premier League then referred the case to an independent commission.
These charges came three years after City escaped full censure following a 20-month legal battle with European football’s governing body UEFA. That case ended when the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) – an international body established to settle sports-related disputes – found in favour of City’s appeal against sanctions for “serious breaches” of Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations committed between 2012 and 2016. The Premier League is said to be revisiting some of these same charges under its own PSR edicts.
The CAS decision saw a two-year ban from European competition overturned but came up short of full exoneration with a €39m fine reduced to €10m. This, said CAS, reflected the club’s culpability to the lesser charge of failing to co-operate with UEFA’s Club Financial Control Body.
A more serious allegation of “dishonest concealment” of revenue attracted from sponsorship deals, otherwise known as financial doping, was thrown out much to the relief of the club. At the time, manager Pep Guardiola insisted his club “were damaged” and “the presumption of innocence wasn’t there” (Jackson, 2020). Others had little sympathy with Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp describing CAS’ decision as “bad for football” and Tottenham boss Jose Mourinho branding it a “disgrace”.
As City officials thanked CAS for its “due diligence and due process” claiming “validation of the club’s position” (Pollard, 2020), clarification from CAS outlined how it found in City’s favour based on insufficient evidence and that UEFA did not do enough to satisfy its burden of proof.
In addition, UEFA scored an embarrassing own goal as some alleged breaches could not be heard due to its own five year statute of limitations having elapsed meaning any evidence from 2012 and 2013 was ruled inadmissible.
While a club statement responding to the latest charges said it “welcomes the review” by an independent commission “to impartially consider the comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence that exists in support of its position,” it is believed the Premier League has built a more robust case than UEFA.
TIME WILL TELL
A notable distinction between the Premier League and UEFA investigations is that the former is not compromised by time barring and therefore, specific legal challenges notwithstanding, all charges will be pursued regardless of when they are said to have taken place. Indeed, the time it is taking for the Premier League’s case against Manchester City to be heard has been cause for frustration and not least by supporters of Everton and Nottingham Forest football clubs who have also been charged after City under the Premier League’s PSR but have already been punished with points deductions during the 2023/24 season.
Of course, there is significant difference between the magnitude and complexity of the case against City to that of most other clubs implicated. Chelsea’s exuberant spending in the Boehly-Clearlake Capital era has also attracted attention and Leicester City were charged in March 2024 accused of breaking spending rules during their last three seasons in the Premier League. But if the 2024 January transfer window is a measure of how seriously clubs are now taking the Premier League’s new tough stance, it could be that Manchester City is yet to have its most profound impact on the richest domestic league in the world.
With Premier League clubs spending under £100m in January 2024 compared to over £700m a year earlier, it appears the league’s sudden desire to sanction overspending is having a chilling effect on transfer activity. This is a principle reason FFP and PSR regulations were introduced, to ensure transfer and wage spend was not outstripping revenue and that clubs act responsibly to comply with a break even requirement.
There is no precedent for allegations of this magnitude in football and it has been suggested that sanctions for serious PSR breaches could include anything from a transfer embargo to a points deduction, to expulsion from the Premier League. Hitting the world’s wealthiest clubs with a financial penalty would seemingly be futile.
From the soft power gains of success in the higher echelons of club football, to potential alienation from the fallout of soft disempowerment, Arteta’s words about Manchester City and levels not seen before might very well assume different meaning. If found guilty, reputational damage for the club whose parent company’s pan-global interests stretch from Manchester to Mumbai, Melbourne to Montevideo and New York to Yokohama, could reverberate much further than the stands of the Etihad Stadium.
Featured image by Daniel0685 via Flickr (CC 2.0)