Manchester City fans feel targeted by a cartel of football’s old elite.
Manager Pep Guardiola complains rivals want them punished but, as an exhaustive and exhausting disciplinary process drags on, City keep on winning.
Far more than just the four successive wins to start this Premier League season.
But five times the trophy has been lifted since the first leaks of City’s internal correspondence cast a cloud over their successes – all handed over by the very competition now trying to punish them.
What punishment could Man City face if found guilty?
City stand accused of deceiving and duping the Financial Fair Play system to fatten their balance sheet to fund the players who have delivered such dominance.
It has the potential to be the most complex, contentious, and consequential case in English football history with implications beyond football.
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We await the details of the “comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence” being presented by City to contest at least 115 charges.
This will not be known until the conclusion of the Premier League’s independent commission that began hearing the case in private on Monday.
Only the heavyweight legal squads assembled – with Lord Pannick KC representing City – could be seen entering and leaving the hearing in central London.
Should any charges lead to a heavy points deduction, or even expulsion from the Premier League, the reputational damage would cut deeply.
Not just at City, but for Abu Dhabi too.
State-owned?
While the club insists it is not state-owned, the takeover in 2008 was by Sheikh Mansour who has since risen up the United Arab Emirates (UAE) leadership to become vice president.
Key figures at the club also have roles with the Abu Dhabi executive body.
The Foreign Office even rebuffed a freedom of information request on the case by acknowledging it could “potentially damage the bilateral relationship between the UK and the UAE”.
The UAE is at the heart of the case and allegations over whether sponsorship income from state-linked companies was inflated and cash flows disguised to limit losses to comply with financial rules.
Did one manager – Roberto Mancini – have a legitimate, lucrative contract from a Sheikh Mansour club in Abu Dhabi or was it funnelling his City salary through a different entity?
Those specifics have not been laid out by the league in public but can be pieced together through previous leaks that City have never directly addressed.
The bundles of documents arriving at the start of the hearing reinforce why the hearings have been eagerly awaited.
But there is a need for patience.
The hearing could last months with a final verdict not until next year, even in spite of Guardiola saying last month: “Hopefully it will finish soon,”
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Why is it so protracted?
There are 35 charges alleging City failed to cooperate with league investigations for more than four years from 2018.
City previously clashed with the Premier League in court over attempts to stall the case and avoid handing over documents.
But now the case has finally begun, pitting the world’s richest football league against one of its most influential and successful members in circles beyond sport.
“The consequences are likely to impact not just English football but world sport more generally,” lawyer Simon Leaf, head of sport at Mishcon de Reya, told Sky News.
“Its importance to sports regulators everywhere should not be understated – with the ability for such bodies to enforce their own rules at stake.”
The only winners in this might be the lawyers, with bills going into the millions on both sides.
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There are not just the appeals that City could launch to contest any findings of guilt – as they did when they overturned a Champions League ban in 2020 in a separate UEFA case into financial breaches.
“Other clubs could potentially look at other avenues that may be available under the Premier League’s rules to pursue City if they are found to have been in breach,” Mr Leaf said.
There are the clubs that were pipped to the title – Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United – plus many more who could claim a legitimate competition could have seen them qualify for the Champions League instead of City.
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The Premier League will surely not want history rewritten.
And how many proven charges would it take to challenge the legitimacy of City’s titles?
City will hope that is a question that never needs answering and their glory is unstained with asterisks attached to the titles.
