In the morning.
There’s only one place to start this morning and that’s the Premier League releasing a statement on Man City’s charges. It dropped yesterday afternoon and suffice to say it was a bomb. If I didn’t expect them to be found guilty on 114 out of 115 charges, I didn’t expect the explanation to be so heavy.
“Fake” contracts, breach of cooperation, breach of PL and UEFA rules, falsified evidence and then repeated references to:
The schemes were found to be aimed at artificially boosting the club’s revenues and cutting costs by more than £900m over the affected period in order to appear compliant with financial regulations. The result was, as the Commission found, that the club submitted distorted accounts and concealed the true state of its finances from auditors and football regulators.
£900 mln. Let that sink in.
Almost a billion pounds. What we know about.
I used the term industry-wide fraud when I wrote about this the other day, but it was harsh to see it framed like that.
£900 mln Between 2010 and 2018covers the period covered by these charges and this investigation. Do we, as football fans and ordinary people, simply take it as gospel that nothing like this has happened since then? Does it make sense? Wouldn’t it be completely naive to think that they went straight in 2018 and none of this happened after that? If you think so, please get in touch soon, because I have some magic beans to sell you.
An industry like football, which is not so profitable, despite the proliferation of incredibly wealthy owners. If you want to make real money, it’s somewhere else. Arsenal’s finances earlier this year showed that we are almost broke despite record revenues in the previous financial period, so football and ownership are not really about adding to the bank balance for these already rich people, oligarchs, hedge funds and nation states.
Sportwashing is a phrase that has lost some of its meaning due to how well it is practiced by certain clubs. Now we can say with absolute certainty that nobody has done it better than Man City and nobody has done it on such a scale. It’s worth a little reminder of how much a billion actually is – here’s a visual guide (expect a lot of scrolling).
All the foundations of this Man City project and probably many improvements were built with this money and it allowed them to win something, to be successful, to bring in the best players, the best manager, and this huge financial fraud is the basis of it. That’s definitely the best word for it.
Isn’t that literally the dictionary definition of fraud if you prepare and submit false accounts by hiding actual income to break the rules? :: trick, trick, sharp practice or breach of trust with the intent to gain profit or gain an unfair or dishonest advantage.
‘Some unfair or dishonest advantage’ … seems appropriate. And then it seems to me that in addition to breaking Premier League rules and UEFA rules, there should be some legal consequences. Isn’t it against company law to do so? Wouldn’t the Inland Revenue want to investigate immediately because they submitted incorrect accounts, meaning there are tax implications? To players and managers etc. what other payments were not properly declared or fraudulently shown on the accounts?
And again, this suggests that since 2018, no such thing, absolutely nothing, has happened. If there is no basis for some sort of criminal investigation, I would be amazed, because if we are talking about £900 million between 2010 and 2018, how much more could that be, especially with the inflationary period we’ve been living in since then?
The city continues to challenge their innocence, saying they have incontrovertible evidence of their innocence. And yet it seems that, based on the research, based on the evidence presented in the findings, this is indeed refutable. It was actually disproved and now we have to reckon with the biggest financial fraud case in the history of football, if not professional sports itself.
They have until October 2 to file an appeal, but there is no doubting how the Premier League put their case:
Now that the charges have been proven, the issue of sanctions will be discussed separately at the next hearing with the independent Commission. In accordance with Premier League rules, that audition will remain private and confidential until the results are allowed to be published.
It is the Premier League Board’s intention that the full process (including any appeals and publication of relevant decisions) will be completed as quickly as possible.
I honestly don’t know how this iteration of Manchester City can be allowed to continue in the Premier League. This goes beyond points deductions, surely all ownership should be part of any punishment given how systematic this fraud campaign is. This 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, misrepresented and cheated.
Despite the allegations being ‘proved’ they continue to tell the Premier League to ‘f*ck you’ and it must surely be based on their elimination of any possible buyout for the club itself. I’m not sure how that could happen, but for the sake of restoring any sporting integrity to this race, it can’t be off the table in any way. Of course, sports sanctions are also important, but in my opinion, the punishment for the team, the players and ultimately the fans cannot be greater than the punishment for the people who planned and strategized this massive fraud.
In the meantime, we all have to deal with the consequences of what they did. How they’ve affected the game over the last 15-16 years, what we’ve watched and experienced as football fans no matter who we support, knowing that the financial doping that’s going on has fundamentally changed the outcome of games, competitions, entire seasons.
Everyone is deceived. Everyone.