Manchester City have written 3 interconnected stories this week, and sports media customs dictate that we start with the last one: City secured the name of the 2022-23 Premier League on Saturday. Arsenal’s 1-0 defeat to humble Nottingham Forest thankfully knocked out the Gunners. of scope. It is City’s 7th EPL win since 2012, and the 5th in seven seasons under Pep Guardiola.
This required a comeback, necessarily 8 Arsenal issues at the beginning of February; but in the end it was comfortable and disappointing, because since the end of February, City are perfect. Guardiola’s team – led by record holder Erling Haaland, boosted by the wonderful Ilkay Gundogan and Kevin De Bruyne, bolstered by Rodri and a revamped defence that became the league’s top productive in the latter part of the season – has gone through the most competitive football league in the world without paying attention to the refreshing narratives Arsenal had provoked.
City beat the Gunners in mid-February to stay within contact distance, then sent them in April to finish that two-horse race. In between, there was a steady stream of victories, some professional, some progressive, that made Saturday’s conclusion seem like the inevitable conclusion.
The Cityzens have become the most productive undisputed team in this sport, and so they also wrote the moment of 3 stories. They ousted Real Madrid in the Champions League semi-finals with mastery personified. They danced at the time in the European final in 3 seasons, and this one, for sure, they will win.
But the third story remains inevitable. It looms over all successes and obscures the good looks of football.
According to several sets of credible allegations, an integral component of the machine’s base traps.
The third story this week is that City reportedly launched a legal war with the Premier League, questioning the legality of an investigation into more than a hundred alleged breaches of the league’s currency rules. The Premier League made the allegations in February, after a year-long investigation that City allegedly tried to obstruct at any and all stages. The alleged violations, which the club has continuously denied, date back to 2009 and paint a picture of the nefarious accounting and other illicit practices that contributed to City’s rise from an afterthought to a state-owned giant.
The club’s only hope, now, is to fight the strong accusations and get into the main technical points, but, in a way, significant damage has already been caused.
The evil was first revealed in 2018, when German media outlet Der Spiegel published a four-part exposé of City’s manipulative dealings. In 2008, the club was bought through Abu Dhabi’s ruling circle of relatives; Suddenly, it fed off the unlimited wealth of the petrostate. But soon after, he realised that European football’s new spending limits, dubbed Financial Fair Play (FFP), would hamper the owners’ plan to turn City into a competitor to the EPL and Champions League. So they devised a ploy to break the rules.
The FFP imposed a spending limit on players in the income of a given club. The city, according to the leaked emails, has necessarily begun inflating the price of sponsorship contracts with Abu Dhabi’s state corporations in order to be able to report higher revenues and spend more on moving fees. and wages, all within the rules.
For example, according to a series of emails published through Der Spiegel, City had signed a sponsorship deal with Etihad Airways, the UAE’s national airline based in Abu Dhabi, which paid the club £67. 5 million a year. But only 8 million of those pounds came from Etihad; the rest would come from the corporate holding company that Abu Dhabi officials had used to buy Man City. The FFP’s regulations had been designed to prevent billionaires from pumping dumb money into a club, and City brazenly dodged the regulations to do just that.
Along the way, club officials showed insensitivity to anyone who dared to question them. Instead of seeking to prove their innocence, they would respond by stating that “the attempt to damage the reputation of the club is fixed and clear”. And they would spend without limits on tough lawyers to fight the charges. When UEFA, European football’s governing body, found Man City guilty of “serious infringements” and banned City from the Champions League for two seasons, the club took UEFA to the Court of Arbitration. for Sport (CAS) and won.
But he did not win because he was innocent, but because a statute of limitations had elapsed and UEFA’s evidence was not entirely conclusive.
Meanwhile, the Premier League’s own investigation was underway and much more thorough.
The people reportedly refused to cooperate with her; However, after a maximum of 4 years, it has produced a remarkably long list of alleged breaches, adding false accounting and undisclosed invoices to managers and players. The city will fight them all: it would pay a single lawyer on par with the salaries of the maximum lucrative. Players in world football, but the clouds will remain. And they can be permanent.
The case, which can take years to litigate, can produce a number of penalties. It can also produce another victory for the City, of course, in technical or other aspects; however, the Premier League would not have accused a member of such blatant cheating without falsified evidence. And nothing that was leaked in 2018 has been refuted. City have spoken out in the past against the publication of such “documents out of context”. that they were “allegedly hacked or stolen,” but nothing that Portuguese hacker Rui Pinto bought, in a series known as Football Leaks, turned out to be illegitimate.
So there is a blemish, a potentially immovable stain, on all this success. The alleged violations have not won seven titles, of course, but they have enabled all seven by allowing City to pay billions of dollars, more than any other club since 2008. Put in combination a team two games from a treble.
They don’t necessarily discredit the genius of Guardiola, or De Bruyne and others. Manchester City, the players and staff, will travel to Wembley for the FA Cup final on June 3 and to Istanbul for the Champions League final a week later, unbothered by irregularities above them. They will celebrate all the triumphs, and we will celebrate their effect on sport, because it is irreversible.
But for Manchester City, the club, and Manchester City, the public entity, asterisks, or worse, can happen.
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