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One, single, lonely thing has become abundantly clear to English soccer after a week filled with jarring acronyms and dense legalese and furious, desperate spin: Manchester City’s ongoing courtroom struggle against the Premier League is not going to conclude with either side winning. At the end of all this, everyone involved is going to lose.
To recap: On Monday, an independent tribunal handed down its verdict on City’s attempt to challenge the legitimacy of the Premier League’s rules on so-called Associated Party Transactions. Those are sponsorship deals struck by clubs with other companies linked to their owners.
Quite what that verdict was might best be considered a “choose your own adventure” sort of situation. City claimed that the judges had decided that the rules were unlawful, and therefore celebrated what it saw as a decisive victory. The Premier League claimed that, while the panel had identified a couple of minor, procedural discrepancies, the system had largely been upheld.
Manchester City was so incensed by that reading of the decision that its lawyers — who, by this stage, probably need a few days off — immediately sent a letter to the league’s 19 other clubs, dismissing the league’s conclusion, stating that the sponsorship rules had been thrown out, and suggesting its rivals should now direct all further communication to them.
The reaction to that was, well, what you might expect. Executives are now openly wondering whether the democratic approach that has helped fuel the league’s growth is sustainable. There are dark whispers of City’s rivals’ submitting warnings of further legal action in advance of a conclusion to the club’s unrelated and more significant case against the league.
It is worth pausing at this point to stress, precisely, exactly what has brought us here. That has, to some extent, been lost over the last week, buried some way beneath the baroque legal complexities and the purposefully mangled language and the deafening roar of claim and counterclaim.
On the surface, it would appear that Manchester City would quite like it if the Premier League did not have any rules governing whether teams can sign hugely inflated deals with other entities that are either controlled by, or connected to, their owners. If some other company should want to pay over the odds for a sleeve sponsorship or to be an official poultry farming partner, then that should be fine.
In much of the coverage of the case, this argument has been treated as though it is not — on some fundamental level — completely absurd. Why would another company want to pay a hugely inflated price for a sponsorship deal? What is in it for them to strike a deal that is not, to use the correct term, vaguely related to “fair market value”?
What reason could there be for someone agreeing to such a deal, other than an owner attempting to funnel money into a club by the back door, thus immediately negating any and all financial rules the Premier League might like to have?
The response to this, of course, is that the rules exist to protect what some City supporters have derided as an elite “cartel” of clubs set on maintaining power at the expense of competition. Nobody ever really bothers to ask what the alternative precedent might be, but just to be clear: The answer is not a great party of liberation, now that the oppressive regime of, um, Tottenham Hotspur has been abolished.
No, it is — best-case scenario — a duopoly, in which Manchester City and Newcastle United have so much more money at their disposal than everyone else that their rivals must choose between risking bankruptcy and risking irrelevance.
The old elite of English soccer are, obviously, horribly self-interested, but no more so than its unlikely revolutionaries. To pretend otherwise falls somewhere on the spectrum from naiveté to sophistry. (This is beside the point, but it is probably easier for West Ham, say, to catch a Manchester United trying to save money than a Manchester City determined to spend it.)
If this subject seems like a strange hill on which the most successful soccer league in the world — and the team that has dominated its last decade — should choose to self-immolate, it is probably because it is. But then, like all the best arguments, this one is really about something else.
It is possible, of course, that Manchester City took up the cudgels against the Premier League on the issue of related-party sponsorships because the club truly believes those rules are unjust. (Nobody has really explained how.) It is certainly feasible that it did so because it knows abolishing them is in its own interests.
But far more likely, on reflection, it decided to pick this fight as both a pathfinder and a warning shot. Reading the verdict, it is quite hard to understand why City was so quick to claim such a unanimous victory. The club has landed several significant blows, to be sure, but many of its challenges were summarily dismissed by the judges.
The overall picture, though, is more important than the detail. City succeeded in picking holes, however minor they may seem, in some of the Premier League’s rules. That matters, because the case that will decide its future — the one examining the 115 charges of breaching financial rules, the charges it stridently denies — most likely will be determined less by right or wrong, by fact or fiction, and more by procedural shortcomings and legal technicalities.
City’s lawyers, now, have proof of concept. They know the Premier League’s rules are not watertight. The club can be sure, too, that the perception of reality is just as important as reality itself. The actual outcome of a legal case matters substantially less than who is successful in claiming to have won it.
In that sense, the fire and the fury of the last five days are not a distraction but rather the point: a hint of what will happen if whatever verdict is handed down in the more meaningful case is not to City’s exact liking. It is a taste of what is to come, if necessary: competing narratives in the news media, open mutiny behind the scenes, and the lingering threat that City is perfectly happy to take the whole edifice down if necessary.
This, then, is the reality that the Premier League faces, one in which the best-case scenario involves imposing a draconian punishment on the team that has become its standard-bearer, and then (in all but the most extreme circumstances) finding a way to reincorporate that same club while it is in a state of open revolt.
The alternative, somehow, is less appealing still, a world in which Manchester City is free to pump as much money into its team as it likes, but is still reliant for much of its prominence on a league that has ceased to work, where the idea of good faith is a ghost, and in which the risk of legal action from one club or another squats, brooding, on the horizon.
Those are the two choices. The coming months will bring one, or the other. There are no winners here.
Getting His Wings
The reaction to the announcement of Jürgen Klopp’s new job — global head of soccer for the Red Bull stable of teams — was both entirely predictable and probably a little overblown. In Germany, in particular, his decision was treated as a betrayal: the man of the people selling his soul for a corporate dollar.
This is, of course, both a little late — Klopp was not working for kindhearted socialists in his eight years as Liverpool manager — and a touch unfair. In his homeland, Klopp might be indelibly associated with Borussia Dortmund, but that does not mean he has any obligation to share the mores of a specific but voluble section of the club’s fans.
At the same time, though, he really has only himself to blame. As well as not always being unfailingly polite to referees, Klopp has always had a bit of a tendency to supply his detractors with plenty of petards with which he might later be hoist.
In 2016, for example, he said he had no desire to spend huge amounts of money on individual players. Two years later, he had spent the better part of $200 million on Virgil van Dijk and Alisson Becker. And, more relevantly, he once described himself as a soccer “traditionalist,” someone who was not naturally sympathetic to the aims of Red Bull’s sprawling, inherently commercial project.
Klopp is not the first person in soccer to find his principles more malleable than anticipated, and he will not be the last. Still, though, it is not hard to understand why those who treasure any ally they might find in the increasingly hopeless struggle to stop the sport from eating itself might have found this pill an especially bitter one to swallow.
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