I think there is provided it comes with some additional elements.
Firstly, no parachute payments. Secondly, any fine is essentially “deducted” from their revenue figures for SCR purposes. And any state affiliated sponsorships are banned so bye bye that Etihad pipeline of cash.
That puts them in a big financial hole that has to be filled with player sales and so weakens the squad. But you’ll also get quite a few wanting to move anyway. Couple that with a couple year transfer ban too, including out going loans to avoid them stashing players for a PL return.
They may well still walk to promotion but that probably isn’t a squad that comes up and immediately makes the CL again first season back, especially if they can’t buy anyone. So now they’re back to having to earn their place like others do. They’re essentially reset to where Newcastle and Villa are in terms of their owners having money but the club having to sustain itself.
In essence I think that’s what the punishment should be aiming for. You can’t chuck them out the football league and a standard fine doesn’t mean anything. They need a punishment to reset them back to a time before the money and success was there and make them earn their place back at the way every other club is having to do, within their means and within the rules.
Given your criticism when it comes to politics in the UK, your confidence that this procedure around Cheaty will be dealt with in a correct and fair manner, and that they will get a just punishment down the line, is astounding to be fair…
But let’s hope that you are right, fingers crossed.
So why on earth, in an era when two of the Premier League’s pre-eminent clubs are owned by the vice president of the United Arab Emirates and the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia respectively, would the PGMOL allow its leading match officials to take lucrative assignments in the UAE Pro League and the Saudi Pro League?
The optics? Not great. Everyone knows that Sheikh Mansour, vice-president and deputy prime minister of the UAE, owns Manchester City. Less well known is that the UAE Football Association has held talks with City Football Group chief executive Ferran Soriano about a “framework of joint cooperation” and that the UAE Pro League’s main sponsor is the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), whose board members include City chairman Khaldoon Al-Mubarak.
In that context, allowing a group of PGMOL officials to fly to the UAE last week to take charge of a match between Sharjah and Al-Ain — Oliver as referee, Stuart Burt and Cook as assistants, England as VAR — looks inadvisable in the extreme. Not because of doubts about integrity among the officials or the authorities in the UAE, but because having referees on the payroll of another league, with close links to the ownership of Premier League clubs, inevitably brings an extra level of scrutiny that match officials really could do without.
Potentially. We cannot rule out though that they are just such belligerent dickheads with a “we can do anything we want” attitude that they refused to comply for long enough that they got themselves in so deep that there isnt really a way to turn back anymore.
But of course, given the good faith clause that all clubs are required to operate under (the “fuck city” clause), that bad faith engagement is by itself making the case for them worse than the original charges were.
Why relegate them to the status of Villa or Newcastle. What have those clubs done wrong to deserve equivalence with City? That’s a let-off. And why can’t they be banned from the football league? That’s what I believe should happen because then the punishment will fit the crime. Let them languish in the National League, which they will win and then maybe think about letting them back into League 2. With their financial strength it will only amount to a four year punishment for the worst financial cheating offences in football history.
There is currently a fraud investigation into one of the US’ largest health insurance companies. The claim is they have hidden profits, allowing themselves to present as far closer to breakeven than reality, by inflating payments to sister companies. This is particularly problematic in the health insurance field because it allows them to justify charging patients more (because look at the cost of doing business…we can barely make a profit) and gets around Obamacare requirements forcing them to spend a certain % of their revenue on healthcare or be required to reimburse account holders for excess premiums. Now rather than pay a portion of their profits back to patients, they just pay that money to a sister company and claim poverty.
Why is that relevant? Soriano isn’t a football guy. He came into football with a background in running multinational conglomerations and arguing that there were huge advantages for a football club to incorporate that sort of structure. He even wrote a book about it while he was at Barca. He came to City with a fully fleshed out plan of not just a multi club model, but an approach incorporating a vast interconnected series of non-footballing companies the money could be moved about amongst to the football club’s regulatory advantage.
What is fascinating about that is if you watch the whole sequence City dont score immediately from receiving the ball from the kick off. QPR win it back one more time, counter and end up with a throw in a few yards into City’s half. On that they send one guy forward and make a half hearted attempt to launch the throw towards him (not even really in the corner) and its from there that City’s winning goal comes from.
It’s pretty clear that especially with them down to 10 men, this was just a shit team being shit
You can be sure, what we are toiling with in here, so are the lawyers for the PL.
The problem is the root of the offending, is contemptuous of the law, they have treated the law as a child they can befool and navigate, and as an originating breach, are all species of fraud. It could not be any worse for City.
Once the PL have dealt with them, I expect individuals to start being named who will have breached their professional obligations also, lawyers and accountants will be struck off, and I expect, some with Corporate responsibility, potentially looking at custody. This isnt to do squarely with breaching FFP, its the manner in which they have done it, with utter contempt for the law, and that always gets hammered. What other response is there when the behaviour complained of directly undermines the essence of the rule of law.
City are truly fkced here, and Im asking myself to what extent they are even viable anymore.
It’s not saying they get relegated to the status of Newcastle or Villa. The measures I suggested would see them out of the PL for at least a season and out of Europe for at least two. That is about as close to resetting them back to where they were before all this as you’ll probably get. It’s then on them to battle with the same finical challenges clubs without that historical wealth then face forcing them to earn their place like they should have done originally.
If you kick them down to the National League the PL will essentially be killing that club. You can’t run that stadium and that training ground on a National League budget. The cost to run Leicester’s training ground alone is the same as the average League One clubs budget for the year and City’s costs will be far higher than that. I just cannot see the PL willing kill one of their own clubs, especially a “big six” club at that.
So a resetting of their position in the pecking order that relies on them being clever, not just rich, seems like a fitting punishment to me. You can argue over the redistribution of trophies or cancelling titles if you wish but the reports that have come out suggest other PL clubs aren’t interested in pursuing that route.
It’s got to hurt, impact more than just one season and punish them both on and off the pitch but it can’t be a death sentence in all but name.
The PL membership changes each year and absolutely will be fine without a Manchester side that were a footnote until recent cheating. You are beginning to sound like a cheaty apologist and it’s unbecoming. If they don’t effectively kill cheaty then they are in fact signalling open slather on others cheating; the only way to protect the PL is to punish cheaty so badly (1b pounds fine to be held on trust for suing sounds fair plus all titles stripped (although this excludes their more recent titles) and them ejected from the PL and refused re-entry for at least 10 years (ideally to be spent out of the FL).
The club absolutely can survive that; what they end up as is another question and so what? A strong argument can be made that they don’t deserve to exist anymore. Mancunian fans can support Oldham, Salford, Maine Road FC or some other bunch of cunts.
