Going Down

If there is one thing we can be confident about after the Premier League's official announcement of Manchester City's guilt, it is that the club will face a severe, condign punishment. Given precedent, the breadth of the charges and their duration, and considering City's systematic non-cooperation, it would be incredible if they got off with a slapped wrist. The club hierarchy's continued belligerence suggests that they know this: they must get the judgement wholly reversed because otherwise they are going down. Relegation is the most likely outcome for three reasons. First, stripping them of their titles opens a can of worms in respect of teams that missed out on silverware or Europe or who were relegated. This is simply too complicated to correct, given the long period the offences covered, and would leave the Premier League open to years of litigation. It would also lead to reasonable calls for an investigation of City's practises since 2018 so that all disadvantages were corrected. The club's insistence that there was no wrong-doing suggests that whatever they were up to before 2018, they haven't changed their behaviour since. Indeed, if they had, that would be tantamount to an admission of guilt.

Second, it would be embarrassing and ridiculous if a City squad, assembled on the back of a dodgy history, went on and won the league this season. This points to a hefty points deduction that would guarantee relegation (a nice round 100, to match their 2017-18 record-breaking season, would be poetic justice). Third, the duration of the offences suggests that not only should the punishment be hefty but that it should endure for a number of years. We're not going to see City crowned as winners of the Championship in 2028. Additionally, the disruption and consequent resentment that relegation by a single tier would cause means that being forced to regroup much further down the FA pyramid is more likely. Some have suggested that the best way to cleanse the club would be for it to be formally wound up and then re-established, which has happened to other clubs, though usually due to bankruptcy. This would mean entry at no higher than level 7 (the Northern Premier League) and thus at best a 6 year journey to get back to the EPL. Ironically, this extreme case of "Cityitis" is one that not a few City fans themselves might accept, given their tendency towards gallows humour and the previous sojourn in the old Division Two (tier 3).

It's important to stress at this point that the fans are innocent. If there is one thing that characterises English football at the top level it is that fans have no say in the operation of the clubs they support. Likewise, the players and coaching staff are innocent. Even if some, like Roberto Mancini, lacked curiosity about the legality or ethics of their employment, you cannot blame workers when the bosses have been fiddling the books, no matter how many bonuses those workers earned as a result. No one seriously thinks that the judgement on Manchester City reflects badly on a generational talent like Kevin De Bruyne, or that Rodri should be summarily stripped of his Ballon d'Or. And if Erling Haaland elicits a common response among football fans beyond Manchester today it is not schadenfreude but pity that he may have wasted his prime years on a tainted project. But is that any worse than a player who signs up for the Saudi Pro League because he would rather have the money than the medals? 

The one person outside of the club's executive tier who has come in for a healthy serving of schadenfreude is Pep Guardiola, on the dubious grounds that "he must have known", as if head coaches were routinely involved in a club's financial management, or on the equally dubious grounds that his support for the UAE's sports-washing makes his support for Catalan independence hypocritical (hypocrisy is failing to practise what you preach, not the holding of inconsistent positions across unrelated matters). You cannot put an asterisk against Guardiola's achievements at Manchester City unless you also put one against his achievements at both Barcelona and Bayern Munich. In all three cases he has enjoyed an unfair advantage, namely the wealth and influence of the clubs he worked for, and the consequent sympathetic treatment (and occasional outright bias) by politicians, officials and journalists. Guardiola is an elite coach precisely because he only works for elite clubs. He isn't about to parachute in to Coventry to try and rescue them from relegation. 

Football does not actively seek to balance the natural endowments or historic advantages of individual clubs, in the way that the US NFL partially does with its draft system, for example. In every football league there is an elite stratum of clubs that dominate. In Scotland, a team other than Celtic or Rangers hasn't won the league since Aberdeen in 1985, and there were only 14 such interruptions of the Old Firm duopoly over the course of the twentieth century. England is unusual in that its elite is both large and historically mutable: consider the varied fortunes over time not only of City but of clubs like Chelsea, Aston Villa, Everton and Leeds. This meant, it was always going to take more resources (and the very best available players and coaches) to crack the EPL. Qatar has made a comparable investment in PSG, but that was always about achieving success in the European Champions League, not dominating the relatively small pond of Ligue 1. For Abu Dhabi the sports-washing rewards of dominating the English Premier League, the most popular in the world, were higher, but so was the risk.

UEFA isn't innocent as it could have properly sanctioned Manchester City years ago and nipped the problem in the bud. The EPL isn't innocent either, even if it has taken an ethically robust and courageous position now. We shouldn't forget that it only introduced its PSR rules at UEFA's prompting and would otherwise have been happy for wealth to continue to have its way with the league, as had been the case since its formation in 1992. The UK government isn't innocent as the  nominally arms-length Football Regulator is clearly a waste of space, happy to wave through foreign states taking over English clubs with only the flimsiest of "fronts", as it recently showed with the Saudi takeover of Newcastle United. The government's public appetite for foreign investment, as much as our cultural discretion around footloose capital, has always meant a willingness to turn a blind eye if the money was big enough, something that Andy Burnham has rather clumsily made clear in his concerns that the Abu Dhabi United Group might pull out of Manchester entirely.

Manchester City aren't the only top-flight English club to have broken the rules. Everton, Nottingham Forest and Chelsea have all been found guilty in recent years. But City's case is egregious: an industrial scale operation. That said, it does make the indulgence of Chelsea, who were systematically and persistently dodgy during the Abramovich years, look even more peculiar in retrospect. If we have learnt one thing, it is that sponsorship deals are intrinsically suspicious. It always puzzled me that Arsenal never seemed to generate as much commercial revenue as its peers, despite having a global fanbase (a fact reinforced in the reaction to this year's league title), but it is unlikely to be the only club playing by the rules. After all, the directors were as guilty as others of disguised payments under the old maximum wage regime (Alex James had an undemanding second job as a "sports demonstrator" at Selfridges), and they were no stranger to "bungs" in later years, albeit in George Graham's case the club was effectively defrauded.

Opinion on what should be done is slowly settling on two basic options: a time-limited expulsion of the club from the Premier League (or demotion far enough down the pyramid to have the same effect) versus the permanent expulsion of the owners from the domestic game. As the Prime Minister's intervention has indicated, the latter could have much wider economic ramifications, which is why I think the former is currently more likely, though the balance of probability may shift if the owners continue to be obstreperous beyond their initial appeal. The chance of a state-engineered takeover of the club is zero while we have a government terrified of nationalisation. If there is one thing that neither the English Premier League nor the Football Association want to see it is more supporter involvement in the running of clubs, not because of their contempt for the swinish multitude but simply because they realise the game depends on the willingness of the rich to piss away millions, or even billions, of pounds on vanity projects. Football is a money-pit. 

The pioneers of the EPL were deluded in thinking that it could be made profitable (the cannier simply saw the opportunity to fleece fans through the novelty of sentimental share ownership, and later foreign investors through takeovers). While some owners still shamelessly extract dividends and load their clubs with debt (the other Manchester way), the imperatives of competition and supporter expectation mean that more money typically goes in than goes out. Were the Abu Dhabi United Group to leave the stage, Manchester City would struggle to acquire new owners willing to spend as much money, licitly or illicitly. That would be healthy for the game, but it would throw the club's achivements over the last quarter of a century into starker relief, as it became just another mid-tier fallen giant with hopes of one day "doing a Leicester". My guess is that the Abu Dhabi United Group will retain ownership but take a back seat as a new "clean" board is put in place. City will become just one of many assets in their portfolio. Meanwhile, City fans will have the pleasure of a derby with FC United of Manchester in the Northern Premier League, assuming the latter don't get relegated this season as well.