On February 6, 2023, Manchester City accused the Premier League of more than one hundred violations of the competition rules.
As champions in six of the past seven seasons, the eventual verdict of an independent commission will have a seismic impact on the Premier League, regardless of which way their decision goes.
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Each of the 115 (or more accurately 129) charges is related to the competition’s financial fair play rules, which are complicated and ever-changing — with both sides fighting tooth and nail over the details of each alleged breach.
A key evidence in the package is the internal emails of Manchester City, published through the German newspaper Der Spiegel, which recommends possible irregularities. These formed the basis of a UEFA case opposite to the city, where the club was discovered guilty, before being cleaned in July 2020 through the Arbitration Court for Sports (CAS). You can read the complete resolution here.
In the last case, the Premier League has accumulated what he thinks is more evidence thanks to the dissemination procedure. City insisted on the procedure that they have violated any regulation.
This is now over and the panel of 3 other people left to make their judgment. It is expected to be resolved before the end of the season.
But it is worth explaining exactly what it will be ruling on, so here is an explanation of the charges, broken down, using all the publicly available information and rulings about City’s case and graphic illustrations of the key points.
These rates pass in nine seasons, the longest duration of the alleged violations. A complicated thing is that the regulations of the Premier League on this issue are subtly reviewed, which means that the data that the city had to supply may have replaced each season.
In general, this responds to the request of clubs to publish monetary data to demonstrate their club in the FFP. It is a crime.
The graph below, like all the others in this article, is based on the judgment published through the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), with its context and the page referred to above.
Fifty -four rates are a lot, but they are through the same principle.
Each individual accusation in this segment, for example, in 2014-2015, the city is accused of having violated six main legislation, considerations of the main points of what it is to provide information. These come with separate monetary fields such as income, connected parts and operational costs. In fact, the city would have violated five or six clauses every year for nine years.
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But that 54 separate cases, there is a broader key question: were all those figures precise? maintain, or point only to a part?
Initially, Manchester City were found guilty by UEFA’s adjudicatory chamber, which stated it was “comfortably satisfied” that City “did not truthfully declare their sponsorship income as payments purportedly made by sponsors were in reality payments from (owners) ADUG or (Sheikh Mansour).”
City then called the case, arguing that UEFA, a European football director, misunderstood the emails.
In the CAS case, though found guilty by the initial panel, the appeal committee found that they could not consider the legitimacy of the alleged payments from Etisalat because they were time-barred — a barrier which is not expected to affect the Premier League, according to legal experts consulted by The Athletic.
Two of CAS’ three-man panel dismissed the main charges that City had received disguised payments through Etihad and Etisalat, finding that all claims relating to payments from Etisalat were time-barred, as were some of those from Etihad, and that in any event, the charge of providing incorrect information had not been established.
The Premier League is unlikely to be blocked by time-barring rules in the same way UEFA was, while it is also understood that the legal process of disclosure has resulted in it gaining additional documents than those UEFA had.
If the commission concludes on the “balance of the probabilities” that the city has not provided precise monetary information, on the false statement of the origin of sponsorship money, the club will be guilty.
This is another alleged example of failing to share correct information for FFP purposes but differs slightly. Rather than being accused of injecting funds into the club by disguising it as sponsorship deals, here City are charged with hiding money being paid out to players and coaches.
In fact, this has the merit of being off the books, which means that parts of the salaries would have the FFP ceiling. The Premier League alleges that this happened between 2009 and 2016.
The maximum high profile examples discussed in the leaks of Der Spiegel are related to the alleged bills made to the manager Roberto Mancini and midfielder Yaya Toure his days in the club.
In Mancini’s case, City’s manager signed a deal with Abu Dhabi club Al Jazeera, detained, as City, through Sheikh Mansour, which would pay him £1. 75m consistent with the year for at least 4 days of year-consistent paintings. The Premier League will claim that this constituted a component of their city salary, club leaders (including the chief money officer and finance chief) share emails similar to Al Jazeera’s invoices. Mancini and City have denied any reprehensible acts.
With Toure, the questions relate to image-rights payments allegedly made by Sheikh Mansour’s Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG) rather than City themselves, and subsequently were not declared as salary. As with Mancini, club and player deny any wrongdoing.
The precise issue here is a little less safe; The Research of the Premier League is based on the data collected instead of the revealed emails. Accusations can be divided into alleged violations into 3 seasons: 2015-16, 2016-17 and 2017-18.
Arguably, this is where it is more accurate to use 129 charges rather than 115 to describe the total number of offences allegedly committed by City. The Premier League has charged them with breaching seven PSR rules in each of those three seasons — during early explanations of the case, these were grouped as a total of seven charges rather than added together to make 21.
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The Premier League has committed to the media in any facet of the case since February 2023, adding confirming the existing number of rates.
While Everton and Nottingham Forest have also had the task of seeing PSR’s regulations, their conditions are not directly comparable to those of the city: those two clubs were subject to a releasing books of the updated Premier League of the loss of 2022222222 -23, where the regulations of the regulations are entirely much broader.
Be that as it may, the Premier League’s historic PSR regulations imply spaces in which you can look for reprehensible acts across the city.
For example, rule E. 53. 2. 2 indicates that a PSR evaluation is “in most wisdom and beliefs of productive clubs, an exact estimate of long -term monetary performance. ” If one of the rates already discussed is maintained, it is transparent how the city can be in violation.
Regulations E. 54-57 are related to the transactions of the similar parts, which are applicable to the sponsorship agreements related to Abu Dhabi, the city would have been beaten illegally.
Finally, rule E. 59 relates to the restriction of “losses in excess of £105 million”; again, if the rates in the past discussed are confirmed, a recalculation of the city’s PSR filings is confirmed with the new figures, can you locate them?in violation of this legal total.
However, these charges are different, from the 2013–14 season and continue through 2017–18. In a sense, this is basically UEFA’s handover, but the Premier League has its own regulations that require clubs to also adhere to continental clubs, that’s the legislation that the city would be violating.
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The Premier League has not explained exactly which UEFA rules it is referring to. For example, Rule B.15.6, as it stood from 2014-15 until 2017-18, simply reads: “Membership of the league shall constitute an agreement between the league and each club to be bound by and comply with the statutes and regulations of UEFA”.
But it is very likely to relate to the option that if the PSR numbers of the genuine city are other public declared, they break the restrictions of maximum UEFA decomposition, as well as those of the Premier League.
This is undeniable to explain, 35 is another much higher number.
Simply put, the Premier League accuses City of breaking numerous rules related to “acting in good faith” since its investigation began in 2018 — the charges relate to each of the seasons from 2018-19 to 2022-23, inclusive.
They turned out to have passed through UEFA.
Specific rules City are alleged to have broken include the failure to release documents to the Premier League by insisting they are confidential, and not providing “full, complete, and prompt assistance to the (Premier League) board”. City expressed their surprise at this during the initial public comments following the charges, “given the extensive engagement and vast amount of detailed materials that the EPL has been provided with”.
To get some sense of the mood of this process, one witness who had already been spoken to by City’s lawyers described it as “hardcore”, “aggressive”, and “no-holds-barred” — though this is more illustrative of the enmity between the two sides rather than specifically related to non-cooperation.
Initially, the CFCB audience discovered that City had breached article 56 of its legislation for not providing requested data and, at one time, advancing in the case where you should know that the property of the club “is false. “
City appealed to CAS, stating they did not need to authenticate the leaked emails and arguing they went beyond what was needed in helping the panel.
However, the case showed the decision of CFCB, pointing to having witnesses, whole copies of revealed emails and prevailed over the identity of the mysterious “Mohamed”.
With closing arguments made on December 6, the three-person commission is now compiling its verdict. The identity of that panel has been tightly guarded.
There is no established timeline on how temporarily you will have to make a decision, unlike the PSR instances of last season that involve Everton and Forest. These instances took a month to succeed in their judgments, while the city’s case is much broader and more complex.
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However, all parties expect a resolution to be published before the end of the season. The procedure that governs a very unprecedented case, is not transparent if the city, so guilty, will obtain its sentence or if this will be ended at a later date. City denied any representable act at all times.
Both sides have the right to use any verdict. English (and European) awaits you.
(Main photos: Getty Images; Design: Eamonn Dalton)