Win or lose, Manchester City case poses perilous threat to Premier League power

Dance while the world burns. You have to hand it to English football. It is above all endlessly adaptable. Everything is content. Never stop selling. Even if the thing you’re selling may just turn out to be the ground beneath your own feet.

The days leading up to any big soaraway Super Sunday showdown tend to bring an avalanche of messages from gambling companies describing their latest match-day lures. With Arsenal due at the Etihad on Sunday afternoon the gambling emails have once again flowed like wine, albeit with a topical twist this time. As of Wednesday (also known as Tribunal Day Three) you can access a range of bets tailored breathlessly to City’s financial charges, as though this is all actually just another football match, including HOT MARKETS on deductions, fines and even relegation (a miserly 6-1: these people really do know their wishful-thinking demographic).

There is at least a bracing degree of honesty in all this. For the broadcasters it is a trickier subject. How to deal with this thing, in the week when it finally became a thing, one that undermines so many other things, not least your own relentlessly upbeat entertainment product?

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Come Sunday afternoon the chat around the lighted plinth will be about bottling or not bottling, about whether Arsenal were too pleased with the robotically cautious 0-0 in this fixture last season. It will be about how the league’s best defence deals with Erling Haaland, who has scored 8.5% of all Premier League goals this season, and who also has 82% of City’s tally, which may just, as the Inter game in midweek suggested, be a possible weak spot.

This is clearly a good thing for everyone concerned, not least the unsuspecting teatime TV audience. The profitability and sustainability rules (PSR) procedure is opaque, tedious and unresolved. Nobody comes to sport for this. Can’t we all just enjoy the frowning men in puffy gilets analysing the second‑phase mid-block counterpress?

The difference now is that as of Monday morning this thing is finally in the building, walking the halls, rattling the door handles, whispering through the keyholes. A Sunday afternoon meeting with the team City beat to the league title by the finest of margins four months ago, while also being accused of overreaching the finest of margins, provides its own unavoidable note of irony.

Above all it is a reminder that this remains a hugely perilous point in the history of a league formed out of legal squabbles, chicanery and greed a third of a century ago. Zoom out a little and City’s charges are arguably the greatest existential threat to the Premier League since its inception.

At which point it is probably a good moment to take a look at where we are with this thing. Perhaps the most notable aspect right now is the sense of two entirely opposing views on how it may play out.

City have understandably drawn down the shutters on this topic. But the club is by all accounts hugely confident of being vindicated. There is talk of “irrefutable” evidence proving City’s innocence, a phrase used so often you wonder whether someone in the comms team doesn’t know what “irrefutable” actually means, which is unarguable, open-and-shut, beyond question, and not simply slick, aggressive and produced by an £8,000-an-hour king’s counsel.

One suggestion is City are supremely confident in their own resources, the bewigged legal super-group at their disposal and a track record in making these things go away.

Another theory is the club have been advised certain key notes of evidence in the public domain – and disputed by City – will turn out to be inadmissible. This would certainly explain that confidence. Because the leaked evidence, taken at face value, is undeniably compelling.

The charges themselves fall into five basic categories. Inflated sponsorship income offered by organisations linked to the club’s state ownership. Issues, including image rights, that relate to player and manager remuneration. Failure to meet Uefa’s financial fair play regulations. Breaches of PSR. And what are essentially allegations of bad faith, a failure to supply accurate information on time or to help progress the investigation.

The evidence out there – which City dispute – is most compelling on the key front of sponsor income. Der Spiegel’s 2018 investigation, supported by leaked documents from the Portuguese hacker Rui Pinto – and again disputed by City – suggested club officials solicited top-ups from state-owned entities in Abu Dhabi to avoid openly breaking the rules.

Uefa’s financial rules have always been the enemy of ambition for City’s owners. “We will need to fight this,” Ferran Soriano, City’s chief executive, allegedly writes of FFP in one leaked memo, “and do it in a way that is not visible.” There is alleged talk of “creative solutions” to get around the rules and the launch of “Project Longbow”, a nod, apparently, to Agincourt and Uefa’s Gallic bogeyman, Michel Platini.

The alleged narrative behind all this detail is that City’s sponsors were not in fact real commercial parties but compliant bodies covertly routing money from the ownership. An internal email sent by the club executive Simon Pearce in April 2010 – which City dispute the validity of – talks of making up a shortfall in income via “alternative sources provided by His Highness”. One document section carries the heading: “Supplement to Abu Dhabi partnership deals.” Asked about changing the date of payment for some Abu Dhabi‑centred sponsorship deals, Pearce replies: “Of course, we can do what we want.” City dispute the truth and relevance of all this.

Related: Manchester United confident on financial fair play despite £113m loss

There will, of course, be those who say this is all beside the point, that the rules should not exist in the first place, that they run contrary to the idea of a free market. This is an argument that works only if you have little understanding of what a market actually is. State subsidies, inflated value, Neymar being sold for €220m to the state of Qatar, a politically motivated ownership pumping in excess funds to serve its propaganda purposes. None of these things suggest a functioning free market. This is the opposite of that: state intervention, a market distortion, the command economy.

The real point is that while this may seem obscure, historical and procedural – accounting irregularities: spare me – it is utterly key to what happens on the pitch, and central to everything City have built. This is a success that can be plotted almost exactly against the flow of money out.

Over the period the main charges relate to, 2009-18, City’s net spend on transfers – according to Transfermarkt – was about £900m, almost £400m more than Manchester United in second place, and five times as much as Liverpool and Arsenal. From 2016-18 they massively outspent every other team, the key period in building the current Pep supremacy, laying the foundations for five league titles in the past six seasons, for the team that will face Arsenal on Sunday. Nothing wrong with that, of course. This is all energy, all ambition. But the rules are also there for a reason, and even the tiniest of margins either way, a few spare millions, can make a massive difference to success on the pitch.

By the time City’s seminal, dynasty-building title arrived in May 2012, leaked internal calculations – which City dispute – suggest that £127.5m had been pumped in as “supplements” to their Abu Dhabi partnership deals. Which would certainly go a long way towards buying Sergio Agüero, Mario Balotelli and Yaya Touré, architects of that defining moment.

More recently, Guardiola’s team have won the league on the final day or by a point three times while, it is alleged and denied, enjoying the benefits of breaking rules their immediate opponents obeyed. European leagues have been depleted, talent and expertise lured away. Signing Kevin De Bruyne involved digging out an extra £25m, forcing Wolfsburg to sell, stretching the margins in your direction. This is exactly what Newcastle, for example, are not being allowed to do right now. If rules have been broken it not only depletes the spectacle, it undermines the basic notion of what sport is. On this basis it isn’t hard to see the argument for stripping City of titles if they are found guilty. Otherwise, why do the rules even exist?

The fact remains City have yet to suffer significant punishment on any front. In the more recent Uefa case, key elements of evidence were found to be time-barred. Deals have been made with no less a figure of unquestioned rectitude than Gianni Infantino, Uefa’s general secretary at the time. The problem facing City, and indeed the Premier League, is that their current accusers are not Uefa but a collective of other clubs with their own competing desires for success, glory and profit.

With that in mind it is still hard to see any outcome that genuinely benefits the Premier League. Three things can happen from this point. First, City are found guilty and punished to a significant degree. This would represent a potential disaster for the Premier League, which would find its entire recent history discredited, its broadcast rights undermined and integrity open to question. It would also leave a champion club, the richest in the world, in a state of open, vengeful warfare with their own co-members. Hello? Is that the Super League? Yeah. Are we still on?

The second outcome is City are found to be innocent. No matter how legitimate or how transparent, this would also be disastrous for the Premier League, hobbled with ruinous legal fees, sucked into internal unhappiness, menaced by conspiracy theories on all sides.

How does the league survive either of these verdicts intact? There are already splits and schisms. For the first time there are suggestions out there of other ways to organise elite club football. How strong does that union really feel, in a league where the generational champions are at war with their own governing body?

The third, and by far most likely, outcome is a qualified compromise, acceptance of some things, dismissal of others, and punishment that allows everyone involved to live with the outcome. The panel is, of course, entirely independent and concerned only with the truth. On the other hand, football, for all its self-importance, remains a very small player. Manchester City are an arm of an influential nation state with whom the UK did £25bn of trade in the previous financial year. What would be the most normal outcome here? Justice in a vacuum? Another defeat for commerce and money in the face of pure sporting principles? Which world, exactly, are we living in? In the current one the fudge looks a very decent bet.

So, back to the game then. With hindsight Arsenal probably did miss a chance to seize the initiative at the Etihad last season, were perhaps a little fearful when they might have seen it as their main chance. It still seems likely Mikel Arteta will look for something similar this weekend.

Keep it tight. Mummify Haaland in between those two highly impressive centre-halves. Look to counterpunch a set-piece goal along the way. This is likely to be the template on Tribunal Day Seven in Manchester, with the low-scoring draw, the exhaustingly complex 1-0 still the most likely outcomes. At the very least, they might just have a little backstory now. And a sense also of a world that may just be in danger of eating itself.