A £900m bombshell … and the rest
Morning.
There’s only one place to begin this morning and that’s the Premier League releasing a statement on the Man City charges. It dropped late yesterday afternoon, and suffice to say it’s a bombshell. If I wasn’t expecting them to be found guilty of 114 of 115 charges, I also didn’t expect the explanation to hit quite this hard.
The repeat references to ‘sham’ contracts, breaches of co-operation, breaking PL and UEFA rules, false evidence, and then this:
The purpose of these schemes was found to have been to artificially inflate the club’s revenues, and reduce its costs, by more than £900 million during the affected period, to appear to comply with financial rules. The consequence of this, as the Commission found, was that the club filed misstated accounts and concealed the true state of its finances from its auditors and football regulators.
£900m. Let that sink in.
Almost a billion pounds. That we know about.
I used the phrase industrial scale cheating when writing about this the other day, but to see it laid out like this is so stark.
£900m between 2010 and 2018, which is the period these charges and this investigation covers. Do we, as football fans and regular human beings, just take it as gospel that since then nothing like that has happened? Does that make any sense? Would it not be completely naive to think that they went straight in 2018, and none of this stuff ever happened subsequent to that? If you do think that, please get in touch as soon as possible, because I have some magic beans to sell you.
An industry like football which, despite the increased proliferation of incredibly wealthy owners, is not as especially profitable one. If you want to make real money, that lies elsewhere. Earlier this year, Arsenal’s finances showed we nearly broke even despite record revenues in the previous financial period, so football and ownership really isn’t about adding to the bank balance for these already rich people, oligarchs, hedge-funds and nation states.
The phrase sportswashing is one that has kind of lost some of its meaning, in no small part because of how well it has been carried out by certain clubs. What we can say with absolute certainty now is that nobody has done it better that Man City, and nobody has ever done it on this kind of scale. It’s also worth a little reminder about how much a billion actually is – a visual guide here (expect a lot of scrolling).
The entire foundations, and probably many of the upgrades too, of this Man City project have been built with this money, and that has enabled them to win things, to achieve success, to attract some of the best players, the best manager, and underpinning it is this massive financial fraud. Which is surely the best word for this.
If you produce and file incorrect accounts, hiding actual revenues to break the rules, is that not literally the dictionary definition of fraud? :: deceit, trickery, sharp practice, or breach of confidence, perpetrated for profit or to gain some unfair or dishonest advantage.
‘Some unfair or dishonest advantage’ … seems to fit. And then it occurs me that above and beyond breaking the Premier League rules and UEFA rules, this must have some legal implications too. Is it not against company law to do that? Would the Inland Revenue not immediately want to investigate because they have filed incorrect accounts, meaning there are probably taxation implications? What other payments to players and managers etc have not been properly declared, or fraudulently represented in the accounts?
And again, this is making the assumption that nothing, absolutely nothing, of this sort has happened since 2018. If there are no grounds for some kind of criminal investigation, I’d be amazed, because if we’re talking about £900m in the period between 2010 and 2018, how much more could it be, particularly in the inflationary times we’ve been living in since then?
City continue to protest their innocence, saying that they have irrefutable evidence that they are not guilty. And yet it seems that based on the investigation, based on the evidence laid out in the findings, it’s quite refutable indeed. It has, in fact, been refuted, and now we have to reckon with what is surely the biggest case of financial cheating in the history of football, if not professional sport itself.
They have until October 2nd to appeal, but there is no equivocation in how the Premier League have stated their case:
Now that the charges have been proved, the issue of sanction will be addressed separately in a further hearing with the independent Commission. In accordance with Premier League rules, that hearing will remain private and confidential until such a time as publication of the outcome is permitted.
The Premier League Board’s intention is that the full process (including any appeals and publication of relevant decisions) is concluded as soon as possible.
I honestly don’t know how this iteration of Manchester City can be allowed to continue in the Premier League. This goes way beyond a points deduction, surely the entire ownership has to be part of any punishment because of how systematic this campaign of cheating was. It wasn’t a rogue executive acting on his own volition, it came from the very top, and I don’t see how they can be allowed to remain owners of a club in a competition/competitions they have cheated, undermined, distorted and defrauded, all while being obstructive and uncooperative.
They continue to say ‘F*ck you’ to the Premier League despite the charges ‘being proved’, and that surely means any possible redemption for the club itself has to be predicated on them being removed. Quite how that can happen, I’m unsure, but for the sake of restoring any kind of sporting integrity to this competition, it cannot be off the table in any regard. The sporting sanctions obviously matter too, but in my opinion the punishment for the team, for the players and the ultimately the fans, cannot be greater than the one dispensed to the people who strategised and planned this enormous sham.
In the meantime, we all have to reckon with the consequences of what they have done. How they have impacted the game in the last 15-16 years, what we have watched and experienced as football fans regardless of who we support, with the knowledge that the financial doping which took place fundamentally altered the outcomes of games, of competitions, of entire seasons.
Everyone has been cheated. Everyone.
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