Manchester City’s war on Financial Fair Play: it sues the Premier League

He wants to blow up the system of financial rules he is accused of breaking. The Telegraph: "The survival of the English championship is at stake"

ROME – Manchester City doesn’t just want to dominate the Premier League, they want to have the power to make it fail. And this is how he went on the legal counterattack: he sued the league, to blow up the whole system of financial rules that he is accused of having broken. City wants to overthrow the system, conquer it definitively. The Times dropped the bomb : takes the league to court to eliminate controls on the value of commercial agreements signed by clubs with entities in the same state from which the owners come. They are technically called related party transactions (APTs). Without that wall of controls there can be no financial fair play, and everything comes crashing down.

“English football is in a battle for survival against a club owned by Abu Dhabi royalty, who seeks to push everyone else into oblivion,” writes the Telegraph. Since the 2008 acquisition by part of Abu Dhabi, City’s commercial revenues increased from 26 million euros (last season before the sale), to 399 million euros in the latest Deloitte audit. City essentially wants to eliminate oversight of club business with state bodies such as with Etihad for City, or Sela and others from Saudi Arabia for Newcastle, the Premier’s Fair Play rules, the so-called profit and sustainability rules (Psr) which have led to point deductions for Everton, would fall. and Nottingham Forest. It means that clubs like City would no longer have any limits, they could buy players simply to take them away from others.

This is a counter move by City to the 115 charges for breaches of financial rules for which the club must respond. Among these there is also the possibility that City has benefited from inflated sponsorship revenues thanks to the direct intervention of the club’s owners, using companies based in Qatar to hide direct financing and thus circumvent the rules.

“They want to dismantle the dynamic that has made the Premier League less unfair and more successful than other European leagues,” writes the Telegraph. But “dragging the Premier League and other clubs to court causes immeasurable damage”. Because “without uncertainty there is no interest, and without interest there are no broadcast agreements on which the Premier League has built its power”.

It’s not just City, writes the Times. There is at least one other club ready to support them. Because “the soft power of fossil fuel wealth in the Middle East extends to other club owners, and it will be interesting to see how they respond.”