This is the top flight of English football now, this faceless parade, this feast of redaction, this lawyers’ jamboree, this case without end, this land of double-speak and deflection and filibuster and prevarication and delay and uncertainty, this wrangle still cloaked in such absurd levels of secrecy, threat and paranoia that it makes the trial in The Trial look transparent.
The interminable, impenetrable battle between the Premier League and Manchester City, one of its member clubs, has been a ludicrous, ruinous shambles of a process that has brought only ridicule and shame on the English game. Amid its agonising and its navel-gazing, its threats and its suspicion, it has forced a league that was once supposed to be the envy of the world to its knees.
There is no prospect of it rising to its feet any time soon, either. Football still does not even know the identities of the three members of the commission that handed down the initial judgments. Those ruled that Manchester City were guilty of all the charges of financial misconduct that had been levelled at them by the Premier League back in the mists of time.
The top flight is a cast filled with bad actors and a medium laden with foul tribal abuse and so some degree of anonymity while the case was ongoing is understandable but to preserve the mystery now has allowed City and their acolytes to attempt to provoke disquiet about their possible allegiances.
City have referred to the independent commission as a ‘Premier League commission’ and its judgment as an ‘opinion’. Speculation has been allowed to form that perhaps one of the panel members was a supporter of a rival team. It is standard disinformation but the conspiracy theories could be easily dispelled if the process were more transparent.
There is precedent, after all. After City and the Premier League went to arbitration in October 2024 over the league’s Associated Party Transaction rules, the hearing took place behind closed doors at the International Dispute Resolution Centre in front of a three-member tribunal made up of former High Court judge Sir Nigel Teare, former Supreme Court Justice Lord Dyson and Monckton Chambers’ Christopher Vajda KC.
Pep Guardiola smiles at the Premier League trophy but his successes are now tainted
The interminable battle between the Premier League and his former club Manchester City has been a ludicrous, ruinous shambles of a process which some have taken to poking fun at
Yet the transparency of that example has not been followed here. It is hard not to feel that much of the bitterness of the case, the inflamed tensions it has created throughout the game and the grave damage it has done to football in this country would have been diminished if the proceedings had taken place in open court and been held up to the light.
The scale of the secrecy surrounding the case has felt unnecessary and self-defeating from the start. No one knew when the hearings were taking place or if they were taking place or if evidence was still being given or which witnesses were being called or when verdicts might be close. Other cases are held in camera, of course, but this is a row about football, for goodness’ sake.
The lack of transparency that has dogged it all the way through has spawned all manner of other conspiracy theories and continues to undermine it even now. Much of the judgment that has been released publicly is redacted. The judgment speaks of witnesses accused of lying to the commission but sheds no light on who they are.
Kyle Phillips, a partner at one of the United Kingdom’s leading law firms, Howard Kennedy, told ESPN earlier this week: ‘It’s very difficult to read because a lot of it is redacted and there’s no evidence or appendices that they keep referring to… Although the panel’s names are redacted, you’d expect them to be experienced lawyers.
‘There will be a fuller balanced judgment that we don’t have sight of: that’s the problem, so we can’t assess the language that’s used from that perspective. But you would think everything they said is supported somewhere by their evidential findings, and that they have got good grounds for making the points that they have.’
When it was put to Phillips that the commission referred to witnesses in support of City’s evidence about the source of their sponsorship funding and that they had been found to have given false and dishonest evidence, he pointed out: ‘Yes, but we don’t know which witnesses are accused of that, do we?’
The first trial of Manchester City is over and their owners have been found guilty of all of the most serious charges. Now it is about to begin all over again because they have appealed – and it may be that their punishment is announced within 30 days, and then rescinded if an appeal is successful, and no one knows when football might be able to breathe anew.
‘The Club’s firm position,’ City’s statement said on Friday as they revealed they had lodged their appeal at 7pm on Thursday, ‘is that on multiple grounds, the opinion contains clear material errors of law, principle and fact and is unsafe.’ It is time, they declared, for Round Two.
Richard Masters, chief executive of the Premier League, gives Pep Guardiola a league winner’s medal during his time at Manchester City
Lord David Pannick KC (right) has represented Manchester City before in their fight against the Premier League over accusations of financial wrongdoing
The Premier League’s interminable pursuit of City, which became our game’s closest approximation to Jarndyce v Jarndyce since its inception in February 2023, appeared to reach a conclusion a little over a week ago when it was announced that the club had been found guilty of the vast majority of charges levelled against it. Now, it has got a second wind.
The case is still couched in so many uncertainties and concealments that it has continued to sow confusion and distrust. This was supposed to be the case that restored faith in the Premier League as a competition but instead it feels as though the game is running out of control and lurching towards chaos. It feels as if football is lost in the murk somewhere and we are no closer to getting it back.
That level of concealment creates a vacuum which City try to fill. City and their chief executive, Ferran Soriano, continue to bleat about the ‘irrefutable evidence’ they possess that proves their innocence in all of this and yet it appears from what we know of the judgment of the Independent Commission, which ruled on the charges, that the irrefutable evidence has already been refuted.
Germane to that is evidence that City believe proves their principal sponsorship deals were funded by the Abu Dhabi government and not the club’s stated owner, the Abu Dhabi United Group. City are thought to be ready to argue in their appeal that the money received by Etihad, the state airline, came directly from the Abu Dhabi government and that state-owned entities are allowed to sponsor clubs under Premier League rules.
Others are deeply sceptical about that argument. City claim not to be state owned but the problem with state ownership is that lines become blurred very quickly and grow so opaque that, just like so much with this case, it is almost impossible to tell where one entity begins and another ends.
If City are really not owned by Abu Dhabi, then why is Abu Dhabi so enraged and threatened by the verdicts handed down by the independent commission? Bloomberg reported on Friday morning that United Arab Emirates officials had warned the UK government that the severity of any punishment of City could harm the relationship between the two.
The report said the City affair may undermine ‘their appetite for future grand-scale commitments in Britain, and that the UAE consider the Premier League’s actions to have an influence on the bilateral state relationship’. If feels like quite an over-reaction if City are not state-owned.
The layers are not being peeled away. They are multiplying. What now? That is still a question with no easy answer. A new anonymous three-person independent panel will be appointed to hear City’s appeal but that will run separately to the process of punishing City for the guilty verdicts in the initial judgment.
Manchester City’s Enzo Fernandez and Rayan Cherki may lead the team to victory over Liverpool at Anfield on October 11 but how much importance should we attach to that result?
It is impossible to run a sport with that kind of uncertainty hanging over it. City could be hit with a penalty that relegates them. But then they might win the appeal which would invalidate the initial verdicts
Once the sanction is decided, there are then 30 days to announce it. But there is no timetable for how long it will take to arrive at the chosen punishment. Some experts have said they think it is possible there could be an announcement of punishment before the end of the season. Others have said it could be up to five years.
It is impossible to run a sport with that kind of uncertainty hanging over it. City could be hit with a penalty that relegates them. But then they might win the appeal which would invalidate the initial verdicts. Which would then invalidate a sanction already visited upon them. It’s chaos, which is exactly what City’s chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak always promised it would be.
And somewhere in the middle of all this wreckage, fans will still turn up to watch men playing football. But they will not know what to believe. If City beat Liverpool at Anfield on October 11, for instance, and go further clear at the top of the Premier League, how much importance should we attach to that result?
Fans will not know whether the result of the game they are watching will mean anything by the end of the season. Nor will the players. Nor will the managers.
Nor will the television companies who pay billions of pounds to broadcast something that may be a sham. They will not know whether what they are watching is real. Or whether these matches are ghost games soon to be declared invalid.
And in that miasma of gloom and uncertainty, sport starts to die.
