The City case should be a starting point for naming and understanding the ways in which football has been colonised by economic and political power and how we might resist them.
By David Goldblatt , author of The Ball is Round and ‘Reboot Fifa‘ advisory board member
That Manchester City, its owners and executives, are very, very guilty is not now in question. Though the fact that the club and its lawyers have managed to keep this fact in abeyance for so long – despite, as they would say, the comprehensive and irrefutable evidence of their transgressions – is testament to both the legal power they have been able to mobilise and their astonishing barefaced cheek. They are not, however, the only guilty parties in this sorry affair, and it is worth recalling alongside City’s own malfeasance, their enablers and allies.
The Premier League, by which I mean both its chief executives and the rabble of owners and representatives that serve on its board, are guilty of the most breathtaking and unforgivable political naivety. First, in 2006 when they approved the sale of Manchester City to the then exiled Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawarata. And then, when they couldn’t stomach Shinawarta, they rushed through a no-questions asked sale in 2008 to Sheikh Mansour of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Yet even the most cursory understanding of Sheikh Mansour’s political and dynastic life, let alone a basic grasp of how politics works in the UAE, would have made it transparently clear that City was always an explicitly political project wired right to the heart of the UAE state. Between then and 2023, when the recent inquiry to City was launched, the Premier League entirely failed to regulate or investigate the club in any serious way at all.
UEFA did at least tried to regulate City, punishing them in 2013 for breaking the newly created FFP (Financial Fair Play) rules but the punishment was no more than a slap on the wrist and in truth it may have emboldened the club; the content of the huge cache of internal emails revealed by Football Leaks in 2016 and 2018 suggest as much. Armed with this information UEFA went back a second time and in a ruling not entirely dissimilar to the Premier League’s found City very guilty of pretty much everything – paying staff off the books, inflating sponsorships, refusing to cooperate with the investigation, ad nauseam.
However, the Court of Arbitration, the ersatz sports court created by the international sports federations to keep their business out of national criminal courts, saved City’s skin at appeal. They ruled that the leaked emails would not be taken as primary evidence, that the statements of City’s executives (all now shown to be a tissue of evasion, deception and outright lies) would be permitted, and in any case UEFA had waited too long to prosecute the case, making many of its charges redundant.
How Manchester City’s fans enjoyed that ruling. Perhaps as much as the Premier League title that they won that year? Either way it was just one of many opportunities for a significant part of the fan base on social media to attack the football regulators and any journalist who had reported negatively on the club’s behaviour. As with all contemporary bullies, they performed a conjuring trick, making themselves appear the victims of injustice rather than the perpetrators of fraud. The pile-ons, the personal attacks, the vacuous whataboutary, and the wincing self regard of these rubes and dupes will not be missed.
It is irresistible not to linger for a moment on the question of a suitable punishment. A case can and has been made for monetary fines, transfer embargoes, and points deductions. Given the kind of punishment handed out for microscopically insignificant infractions at Everton, Leicester and Nottingham Forest, etc. it is hard not to see why City should not be bankrupted, reduced to long term penury, excluded from the transfer market and punished sufficiently to ensure relegation, at the very least. Given the degree to which the club has abused the sponsorship system, some have made the case for banning them from receiving any sponsorship, for a decade perhaps? Call me small minded, but I would like to see Al Mubarak and Ferran Soriano paraded in shame at every Premier League ground for a season in the open-topped bus that carried the team while they celebrated their treble win in 2023 but now painted funereal black. We can but dream.
Sadly most of the pig sticking is going to be confined to the court room. Almost immediately after the judgement was made public City’s Premier League titles were all given an asterisk on their wikipedia page. Some would like to see the titles taken away though I imagine that the Premier league’s commercial department must feel rather queasy about what that means for the brand. More worryingly is what kind of intra-club litigation that could unleash as sides pipped for the title, or forced into relegation by City seek financial redress.
It seems to me a moot point as to what happens to the club’s official record, Whatever punishment is meted out to City it will barely touch the consolidated wealth and power of the UAE and its factotums. One wonders if it will even give them pause for thought. The club’s intention to appeal the Premier League’s decision, and the ever louder and more brittle bravado from Al Mubarak suggests not yet at any rate.
In any case, the authoritarian states, oligarchs and billionaires that now own most of the biggest football clubs in the world are not going away. They may not for the moment attempt to undermine football governance with quite the alacrity and passion of the UAE but eventually they will; that is how they operate in all spheres.
So enough hand wringing; we need to take the opportunity to make decisive reforms in the way in which commercial football is regulated and owned, and those reforms need to be global, and enshrined in the statutes of every football confederation and federation from FIFA down.
Football federations and leagues also need to up their legal and forensic accounting game. Football, of all things, really ought to have clocked that results are to a great extent determined by the calibre of the assembled talent. The way UEFA’s hapless legal department were out manoeuvred by City’s barristers was a text book example of the imbalance of regulators and regulated. So no more skimping. If Chelsea can spend more than a £100 million on Morgan Rogers, football can spend the same and more to ensure that it outguns the oligarchs and the hedge funds.
It goes without saying that neither nation states, nor their sovereign funds nor indeed any arm of national government should, by statute, be allowed to own football clubs; indeed they should not be allowed to hold a single share, never mind majority stakes. Those that are currently owned by such entities should be given a reasonable period in which to expedite a sale after which they would be excluded from competition.
Whatever the letter of the law we need to actually implement these measures. The kind of regulatory process – like the Premier League’s owners and directors test which ruled that the Saudi sovereign wealth fund PIF was not politically directed and was therefore a perfectly reasonable owner of Newcastle United – needs not merely to be rewritten, but applied with some modicum of attention to the realities of how political power works in this world. That might even be the starting point for naming and understanding the ways in which football has been colonised by economic and political power and how we might resist them.
Josimar regularly opens its columns to independent guest contributors who wish to comment on the most pressing issues in world football. These columns solely reflect the opinion of their authors. Their publication does not constitute an endorsement on Josimar’s behalf, but a way to encourage and promote debate within the football community.
