by Bluemoon4610 » Wed Oct 09, 2024 7:58 am
Martin Samuel
Tuesday October 08 2024, 8.00pm, The Times
There was a lot of confusion on Tuesday morning over Manchester City and the Premier League. With both parties claiming to have won, many observers were unable to decide whose hand to raise. There is a precedent for this. An epic struggle after which both sides, too, declared triumph. It is, of course, King Arthur’s meeting with the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Those who know the film will recall the Black Knight is last seen with both arms and legs chopped off, yet still defiant. “Come back here and take what’s coming to you,” he tells the departing king. “I’ll bite your legs off.” Some might call him delusional, although Richard Masters, the chief executive of the Premier League, possibly has the Black Knight’s picture prominent in his office.
Not long ago Masters informed at least one club official after the league’s defeat in an arbitration hearing with Leicester City that he did not believe his rulebook contained loopholes. This despite headlines such as “Loophole leaves Leicester City free and clear on PSR rules and Premier League embarrassed” and “Leicester avoids PSR penalty thanks to relegation loophole”. Then there was the commentary of Nick De Marco KC, who successfully represented Leicester. “Some people say it’s a technicality, a loophole,” De Marco explained.
Anyway, to more recent matters. If the Black Knight genuinely is steering policy for the Premier League, it seems only right to look deeper at what those strategies may be. And best to start at the very beginning.
And this is pretty much the principle on which most of football’s financial regulation is based. None shall pass … Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Bayern Munich, Juventus, all of the clubs that had it their way for so long. Heaven forbid anyone passes them. The established elite were the ones that selflessly helped Uefa draft its rules, neatly pivoting so that the initial target — debt — became less of a crime than owner investment. One day, maybe, the former Manchester United chief executive David Gill will explain what was in it for all of the clubs, but we can certainly work out what was in it for his.
Anyway, when Jamie Herbert, the Premier League director of governance, gave evidence to the arbitration panel, he explained: “Following the financial difficulties faced by Portsmouth Football Club in 2009-10, which went into insolvency, the Premier League considered the introduction of financial regulations designed to require clubs to be profitable in order to achieve sustainability by limiting a club’s aggregate losses over three years.” And his version of events was accepted. No doubt Herbert believes it too. He was still completing his training at Bird & Bird in 2007 — so three years before Portsmouth’s collapse — when financial controls were first being discussed.
By then La Direction Nationale du Contrôle de Gestion was regulating football finances in France — Lyon won the league seven years straight as a result — and I wrote a column in this newspaper calling the plans of Europe’s elite clubs “protectionist”. The first time I referred to Financial Fair Play (FFP) in negative terms was June 30, 2008 — so again before Portsmouth went under — when Bayern were pressing to tie spending to turnover. So FFP, PSR (the Profitability and Sustainability Rules), APT (associated party transactions) and all the other initials used to disguise what is basically protectionism didn’t come in because its masterminds gave a damn for Portsmouth. It arrived because they were terrified of Roman Abramovich at Chelsea — and later Sheikh Mansour at Manchester City and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund at Newcastle United — and feared that they would muscle in on their patch.
And here’s something I wrote on February 17, 2020, about the rules and why they were introduced: “This was about resisting competition at the top of football’s pyramid, not helping the little guys. You want to stop Portsmouth’s fall happening again? Ban director loans. The reason the club got into trouble was that its owner, Alexandre Gaydamak, financed significant investment through loans to cement Portsmouth’s place in the Premier League and challenge for honours. Then, when his personal circumstances changed, he wanted that money back. The club did not have it because it was the product of Gaydamak’s wealth, not theirs, and the collapse began. In 2010 it was reported that Gaydamak was demanding £32million. One would think that if preventing the next Portsmouth was a priority of FFP, loans by owners — not a gifted investment, which is entirely different, because there is no payback — would be outlawed, but no.”
So that’s the history. And if you want to know why the Portsmouth origin story always goes unchallenged, it is because 17 years ago almost nobody gave a stuff or saw where FFP was going.
The Python’s target, plainly, was the human capacity for self-delusion and there’s plenty of that at the Premier League. Plenty of questions their supporters are not answering, too. Here’s a good one. The panel delivered its verdict on Wednesday, September 25. The Premier League made these findings public on Monday, October 7, a full 12 days later. By the end, City were threatening to release the report to the 19 clubs unilaterally, so frustrated were they by the Premier League’s delaying tactics.
Now, if the league had won big, if City’s gains were merely “discrete elements” as was suggested — why the hold-up? The league should have been shouting its triumph from the rooftops ASAP, surely? Instead, it was City driving to publish, City who were insistent on getting the material out. It was why they took a direct approach on Monday, contacting the clubs to dispute the league’s interpretation of the verdict. At one point there was fear that the Premier League might even try to delay the panel’s findings beyond 2024. This does not sound like the behaviour of winners.
Nor does the convening of an emergency meeting, now scheduled for next week. Equally, if City’s victories were inconsequential, why will the Premier League be calling each club “in the next 48 hours” to discuss the ramifications? None of it fits the narrative that we should all move along because there is nothing to see. The wound appears more than just a scratch.
There are two explanations for the hurried schedule. The first is that the league wishes to maintain its pretence of business as usual, as if this can all be wrapped up in a couple of Zoom calls. The second is that it is genuinely head-in-the-sand unaware of potential consequences, such as further legal action. When there was talk of the Conservative government hurrying through legislation on a regulator for football before the last election, here is what Masters, writing in this newspaper, had to say. “It is a risk to rush through complex legislation at the end of a parliament, especially when there is a danger of it unbalancing our national sport. The past tells us that rushed legislation is usually bad legislation.”
And yet, six months on, a rulebook that has been declared in part unlawful can be patched up in little more than a week? This is what got us here. The rushed, updated APT rules that were the panicked reaction to the Saudi takeover at Newcastle. It was interesting that the Premier League now seems to be rowing back on this bullishness, briefing that there would be no votes at the meeting, only discussions.
As for consequences, well surely an injunction from Manchester City is one. The tribunal is still sitting, in terms of legal considerations, still available for appeals and clarifications. If the Premier League thinks all that is needed is tweaks and tinkering it is possible it could be required to rule again. Being found to have abused a dominant position — as the league was — most certainly leaves it open to a further challenge. Again, not just a flesh wound.
Much discussion has centred on all the points Manchester City lost, as if this were a tennis match. When scoring a tennis match, each play is equal. A fabulous 27-shot rally is marked no differently to a bland return of serve into the net. It’s all 15-love, deuce and advantage. Legal hearings are not like that. Some shots do count more. A man charged with six counts of murder can be innocent of five and guilty of one. It’s the one that matters. Same with accusations around unlawfulness. City did not need to succeed in every challenge, just one. By bragging about all of its victories, as if these were tennis points, the Premier League put a positive spin on some significant reverses.
On Tuesday Christian Brueckner, the prime suspect in the abduction of Madeleine McCann, was cleared of sex offences involving five other girls and women. Yet were he to be charged, tried and found guilty in the McCann case, the verdict is still: he’s a monster. And this is not to equate crimes or procedures, obviously, just the basic principle. There is a reason that page 164 of the judgment — which begins: “For the above reasons we, Sir Nigel Teare, Christopher Vajda KC and Lord Dyson hereby award and declare…” — lists not the Premier League’s many successes in standing its ground, but the seven judgments that amount to unlawful, unlawful, unlawful, unfair, unfair, unreasonable, unreasonable. These are not discrete elements, as the Premier League claims, they are not 15-15 or 30-30. In law, some winners get more points than others.
The make-up of the Financial Controls Advisory Group (FCAG) that will first discuss the arbitration ruling makes for interesting reading. There is Tim Lewis, Arsenal’s executive vice-chairman, last seen storming out of the Manchester City directors’ box in disgust when his team conceded in injury time and representing one of the clubs that provided a witness statement on the Premier League’s behalf; Cliff Crown, the chairman of Brentford, one of the clubs that provided a witness statement on the Premier League’s behalf; Todd Boehly, the co-owner of Chelsea; Steve Parish, the chairman of Crystal Palace; Alistair Mackintosh, the chief executive of Fulham, one of the clubs that provided a witness statement on the Premier League’s behalf; Billy Hogan, the chief executive of Liverpool, one of the clubs that provided a witness statement on the Premier League’s behalf; Daniel Levy, the chairman of Tottenham Hotspur, one of the clubs that provided a witness statement on the Premier League’s behalf; and Ingo Bank, the chief financial officer of Manchester City.
Masters, rapidly emerging as a courtroom winner on a par with Rebekah Vardy, may also be in attendance, and — who knows? — there may be a rare sighting of the league’s chairwoman Alison Brittain. According to the Premier League: “The FCAG played a key role in the process that led to permanent rule amendments being proposed and passed at the December 14, 2021 shareholders’ meeting.” That would be the rules that have just been declared unlawful, then. Still, it’s another great victory for governance. Maybe they’ll vote to bite City’s legs off.
Last edited by
Bluemoon4610 on Wed Oct 09, 2024 8:04 am, edited 2 times in total.
