6 days ago
Preposterous that Man City case is overshadowing start of another season
'I'm confident,' declared Richard Masters, 'that by the time we sit down again in 12 months, we can have the football front and centre.'
This was 2024, when the Premier League chief executive used his annual summer message to dismiss any suggestions that the inquest into Manchester City's 115 counts of alleged financial-rule breaches – even then a saga of Wagnerian sprawl, a form of Ring cycle for lawyers – was taking too long. One year on, there is still no resolution, with the affair so preposterously drawn out that supporters of all those clubs crushed underfoot by the sky-blue leviathan have now renewed their season tickets three times since City were first charged.
We are at the stage where impatience has given way to numbness, to a fatalistic shrug at the mere mention of the number 115. You can tell as much from the weariness of Masters, who said this week: 'My frustration is irrelevant. I just have to wait – legal processes rarely take less time than you anticipated.'
There is no longer any emollient message he can offer, with the City wranglings having morphed into a latter-day Jarndyce v Jarndyce, its maddening duration matched by a staging so opaque that nobody is any the wiser as to whether the interminable delays will work in City's favour or not.
The only certainty is that the case now hangs over a third consecutive top-flight campaign, scrambling all sense of strategic direction for the league. If the City case is, as we are routinely told, a moment of existential consequence for the game, with its repercussions dwarfing those of even Italy's Calciopoli scandal, how is anyone meant to change how it is run until the outcome is known?
It has become a dead weight, a block on genuine reform, benefiting only a few KCs and the spin doctors employed to convince you that two plus two equals five. One tendency in this infernal tale, witnessed throughout the battle over associated-party transactions, was for City – who have strenuously insisted on their innocence on all fronts – to claim an unalloyed victory, only for the Premier League to suggest the exact opposite hours later.
The wait has entered the realm of farce. 'It's a disgrace,' says Gary Neville. 'It's an absolute stain on the game that it's still going on. It has been dragging on for years. It's exactly what City wanted – defending themselves, number one, but also pushing it so far into the long grass that you wind up losing the will to live and forgetting about it.'
He elicited much the same exasperation this month on his podcast from Daniel Levy. The Tottenham chairman, normally circumspect when speaking in public about any other club, said: 'It has gone on for far too long. It needs to be brought, for the good of a game, to a conclusion, one way or another.'
Since last December, when the hearing into the City charges ended, deliberations have rested solely with the three presiding judges. On one hand, you can understand the glacial pace of progress, given that there are an estimated half a million pieces of evidence to consider: 10 times the number that led Nottingham Forest and Everton to be docked points for breaking profitability and sustainability rules (PSR). But on the other, you question whether the two sides furnishing the tribunal with enough paperwork to denude a small Finnish forest is truly the most productive use of the finest legal brains.
It is striking how, in the latest edition of the Premier League handbook, there is a requirement for those appointed to arbitration panels to confirm that they are 'ready, willing and able to devote sufficient time, diligence and industry to ensure the expeditious and efficient conduct of the arbitration'. In what world does a case forecast to last until October at the earliest, having started in February 2023, qualify as expeditious? And who in future will be prepared to sign up for a process of unlimited scope and indeterminate length?
Amid all the fierce discord this episode has aroused, there is at least one area of consensus: that no single case can be permitted to hold the entire league in suspense for two and a half years again.
A certain black humour has been mined from the open-endedness of it all, with one betting company known for its guerrilla marketing putting up a billboard in Manchester this week as a reminder that 247 days had elapsed since the City hearing ended. It is a stunt likely to require frequent updating, with Pep Guardiola's indication in February that a verdict was expected 'within one month' proving laughably optimistic.
Most predictions now point to an announcement in October, possibly to coincide with the international window, but the lack of any leaks makes drawing a precise timescale impossible. Before 2026? Before Guardiola leaves? Before the dawn of the next Ice Age?
The alternative reading, of course, is that this epic legal intrigue is simply a product of the case's complexity. Simon Leaf, head of sport at law firm Mischon de Reya, says that he is not surprised that an unprecedented case has brought a wait this extreme.
Masters, too, believes that the stakes are too high for the judges to be rushed. This cuts both ways, though: if the 115 charges truly reach to the heart of fair competition, then surely there is an element of urgency in unpacking them, rather than allowing the festering debate to overshadow three straight seasons?
Clubs need clarity, fans want answers, and still all we know is that the legal fees will end up in the high eight figures, perhaps more. That is before anyone even contemplates appealing. For lawyers, if no one else, it is the gift that keeps giving.
