Can We Just Punish Manchester City, Please?

A disclaimer on this blog to start everything off, but I’m a Liverpool fan. This means I have had to Steffon Diggs-stare at sky blue season after season while Manchester City self-funds every purchase through backdoor sponsorships. The complete dynasty that has formed at the top of the Premier League is very much thanks to, at that time, the unparalleled introduction of oil money from the UAE royal family. The introduction of cash also may have led to the 115 charges of financial fraud under Financial Fair Play (FFP), like the self-funding. Let me rephrase, that definitely did, because who would have guessed being owned-by-proxy by a blood money state leads to questionable financial decisions.

And hey, we finally have a hearing date for Manchester City. Well, more like we know there is a date. At some point there will be a hearing. And only certain people know what the date is. The hearing date is more like an idea than an actuality. It’s like gravity. Sure, it’s just a theory (RIP MatPat), but it exists. Maybe.

This comes on the back of the charges brought against Everton and Nottingham Forest for failing to balance their books and avoid £105 million losses for a three-year span; these are known as the Premier League’s Profitability and Sustainability Rules (PSR). Everton has already been charged with and applied with a ten-point deduction, which in any other year would be an SMU-like death penalty scenario. Good for Everton, the teams at the bottom of the table this year are triumvirate of terribleness. Sure, Everton has appealed, but a double hit would probably kill them.

Manchester City Blatantly Cheats

I know that these are different charges for different issues and for different reasons. It’s like how I get how planes work (I did take physics in high school for two years because I enjoyed it so much), but I still hate flying because something is just wrong with it. That’s similar to how I feel about the situation the Premier League world finds itself in. And unlike Everton and Nottingham Forest, Manchester City are actively hiding and fighting any investigation. Everton, at least, has shown that there actual consequences even if you’re cooperating, even if its just a ten point hit. Nick Harris has a great Twitter thread on why everything is happening this way:

Manchester City has a vested interest in making sure this case never comes to fruition. It already got banned from the Champions League for two years, until that was overturned by a soft European court (the US takes down soccer criminals, and the EU lets them thrive). And that’s without a hearing on these 115 charges. The Chief Investigator of the case even said that Man City just doesn’t respond. City has recruited an army of lawyers to fight UEFA and anyone who tries to ramp up the investigation. They are the pied piper of lawyers who somehow have even fewer morales than the Purdue Pharma lawyers (that isn’t true, but I really hate Man City).

If you want to understand the extent to which Manchester City has blatantly flaunted the financial rules, German newspaper Der Spiegel has about a thousand articles detailing the extent of the financial fraud. This includes paying a former coach through Al Jazira, a UAE club whom needed to be coached “four days a year” and receiving marketing sponsorships from nonexistent Abu Dhabi-based firms.

Crime and Non-Punishment

Which brings me to this: can we just punish Manchester City already? Everton is currently on a death spiral into the Championship by loss of points, with Nottingham Forest not far behind. You’d expect the guy who went to law school and passed the bar to understand how investigations work. But with City continuing to win, while pushing other teams to the side, it’s getting ridiculous.

And you can’t just vacate these wins and call it even. Because Manchester City has been winning, and winning a lot at that. Last year, it won the treble – meaning it won the FA Cup, the Premier League, and the Champions League, the competition it was previously banned from. Sure, when Manchester City is found guilty we can just say Inter were actually, technically the winners of the 2023 Champions League. But they weren’t. Maybe we can just saw Liverpool technically won the Premier League all those times they lost by a couple points. But Liverpool weren’t. And this will continue, where teams not using a state government as a financial crutch are consistently losing out to a team that will not be punished if the corral of lawyers has anything to say.

In another life, I wrote that Baylor deserved the death penalty because there was an institutional problem that could not be cleaned up by firing a few people. Manchester City sits in the same realm. This is an institutional problem that is consistently preventing other teams from winning. Sure, the response is “get good” or “skill issue.” But that argument falls apart when you realize Manchester City has spent about a half a billion dollars alone on its back 4. (Chelsea also spent a crazy amount. Chelsea is also under investigation, but hasn’t that club been through enough? That’s like kicking a blind guy after running into a well-positioned rake on the ground.)

In my opinion, nothing is going to happen to Manchester City. The one way to actually go to jail is to fuck with rich people’s money. But what happens when two corrupt, megarich entities meet in a legal battle? The entire ecosystem feels as plastic as Manchester City’s fans and UAE oil byproducts. But at this point, just punish them or stop dangling this carrot over world soccer.

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