On February 6th, the English Premier League announced that Manchester City will go on trial for cheating. What happens next is anybody’s guess.
Part of City’s defensiveness comes from having very expensive lawyers, who dispute any assertion that the club has enjoyed an unfair advantage. The rest comes from its supporters, who identify strongly with the team’s wilderness years, when City was the constantly troubled weaker sibling of Manchester United, traditionally the richest and most successful sporting franchise in English soccer. Before 2012, the year that City won the E.P.L.
That version of City has been shed, like an earlier life stage. The club has metamorphosed, inside and out. It has a new stadium, new players, and new meaning. City Football Group, its parent company, fields soccer clubs on five continents, from New York to Melbourne, which play in matching sky-blue uniforms. Since 2008, the team has won seventeen major trophies—most of them in the hands of Pep Guardiola, arguably the most successful club coach in world soccer.
On February 6th, the E.P.L. announced that the titan will go on trial for cheating. The charge sheet, published in full on the league’s Web site, is an incomprehensible salad of alleged rule-breaking: “Season 2013/14, Premier League Rules B.15, E.3, E.4, E.11, E.12 and E.49.” But the over-all effects—and potential consequences—are breathtaking. Manchester City is accused of breaking the league’s rules some hundred and fifteen times since 2009, mainly in ways related to financial honesty. The E.
The charges against City were compiled during a four-year investigation by Bird & Bird, a law firm retained by the E.P.L. The inquiry began in the spring of 2019, a few weeks before I visited Lisbon, and four months after, the German news magazine, published a detailed description of City’s alleged financial chicanery; the report was based on Football Leaks’ disclosures, which the club dismissed as an “organized and clear” attempt to damage its reputation.
What happens next is anybody’s guess. “Alarmist or not, the sheer extent of the PL charges are at a level that IF found proven, must lead to relegation,” Stefan Borson, a former financial adviser to Manchester City, tweeted on Monday. In recent years, plenty of English soccer clubs, mostly in the lower leagues, have been fined or docked points for breaching spending rules. But there has never been a case of this magnitude in the E.P.L.
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