The jokes were doing the rounds on Monday. So Manchester City can win in Europe, ha ha. It was so much bigger than that.
So much bigger than one competition or one trophy. An existential threat.
That is what those inside the club believed they were fighting. A struggle for their modern existence, for their right to sit at the top table, not just to be taken seriously, but to be permitted access, to be allowed to walk and breathe, and maybe thrive, among the Champions League elite.
Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City won their appeal against their two-year European ban
It is a cosy little club, European football’s upper echelons, and UEFA kowtow to it.
That is the problem. Financial fair play, an idea that could have been a force for good in the game — and still could be, given the economic inequality soon to be wreaked by Covid-19 — was hijacked by a powerful cabal and contorted to serve their protectionist interests.
City threatened the hierarchy. They wanted the right to come in, to play, to be allowed to challenge those who see football’s riches and its spoils as their birth right.
And they won’t be welcome, certainly not now having scored such a public victory. Not even having won at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, having been exonerated of the worst accusations, by an independent panel of lawyers.
Manchester City have no constituency. That is their problem. They are too big and successful to hang out with their old gang, the smaller clubs, the ones who are dictated to from on high. But they are too much of a threat to be received by the traditional elite, either domestically or in Europe.
Seeking potential allies during the nervous weeks before CAS’s verdict, a City employee idly clicked on the website of the European Clubs Association. There they were, the ECA’s men of influence: from Manchester United, Arsenal, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Juventus, AC Milan, Bayern Munich.
It read like a who’s who of every club that had ever spoken out or denounced City. They’ve got no friends there and should know that by now. Financial fair play is the elite’s power grab. It is their ploy to turn a moment in time into permanence. And Manchester City broke through.
Star players such as Kevin De Bruyne now have no reason to leave due to Monday’s overturn
Juventus are influencers in the European Clubs Association (pic, president Andrea Agnelli)
Financial fair play is the elite’s power grab. It is their ploy to turn a moment in time into permanence. And Manchester City broke through.
If you are a fan of Newcastle, Everton, Wolves, Tottenham, any club thinking big but currently on the outside looking in, you should cheer this victory from the rafters. If this leaves UEFA’s FFP regulations damaged, it means you still have a chance.
The elite don’t want you to have a chance. They think all the tomorrows should belong to them.
City would have gone on, whatever had happened at CAS. Yet not as they are now. They would have been crushed, financially and commercially, and their competitive rivals knew that. It was the aim. Ruination. There might have been enforced executive changes.
As for the football — Pep Guardiola: gone. Kevin De Bruyne and Raheem Sterling: gone. The reshaping of a flawed defence: near impossible on current budgets. The young talents, Phil Foden and Tommy Doyle, placed in jeopardy, too.
Could Foden, now coming of age, be part of a club regulated to the periphery? That is where City came from, that was what was being imagined for them by their rivals; a return to the days when Shaun Wright-Phillips could be plucked by Chelsea, and placed among the reserves to fulfil an English qualification quota.
Raheem Sterling would surely have left Manchester City if the suspension was upheld
Phil Foden’s development would’ve been curbed if City weren’t allowed to compete in Europe
The Abu Dhabi project would have been set at nought. All the good done for women’s football, for youth football, for English football in Europe would’ve been erased.
Hence the more intemperate language, the furious legal battle, the insistence vindication would follow with an independent view. City were still fined £9m for non-co-operation, a fact seized on by critics to justify their position, but even that sum was reduced by £21m from its original £30m.
The key was not City’s initial refusal to participate in an investigation provoked by hacked material, but CAS’s statement on the crucial charge, that City’s ‘disguise of equity funding as sponsorship contributions’ was not proven.
It means the allegations City had cheated, had lied, had falsely achieved their success were unfounded.
‘Most of the alleged breaches were either not established or time-barred.’ The two-year European ban was lifted, the fine was cut by two-thirds. Anyone arguing that this was not a comprehensive victory for the club is delusional.
It may be argued that time-barred charges mean City got off on a technicality. Here’s a technicality. Chelsea got where they are by doing everything that City did, in terms of owner investment, then worked with other elite clubs to change the rules so that growing a club using the transfer market became illegal.
Every club, at some stage in its development, has had to speculate. Only now has this been made a crime — and by the very clubs who will benefit greatly from the status quo.
And Monday was the perfect illustration of how used the privileged few are to getting their own way. First out of the blocks, Javier Tebas, president of La Liga and a man who, as a party trick, sometimes speaks while Real Madrid and Barcelona drink a glass of water.
LaLiga boss Javier Tebas believed City should have been thrown out of European competition
In July 2016, European Union competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager demanded the repayment of millions in soft loans, tax breaks and sweetheart property deals given to seven LaLiga clubs, chief among them Spain’s big two.
Yet Tebas continues to insist it is City who should be thrown out of Europe for distorting UEFA competitions. Now he wants CAS thrown out, too, for not reaching the verdict his masters desired.
‘We have to reassess whether CAS is the appropriate body to which to appeal institutional decisions in football,’ he said. ‘Switzerland is a country with a great history of arbitration, CAS is not up to standard.’
Funnily enough, it seemed perfectly acceptable to Tebas in 2016, when it halved Real Madrid’s FIFA transfer ban for wrongdoing over the signing of young players. And no complaints about CAS as recently as six days ago, when it rejected Brazilian club Santos’s case against Barcelona, relating to the signing of Neymar in 2013.
It must just be in the last week CAS’s standards have become unacceptable. When Tebas’s friends didn’t get their way.
The system works in favour of clubs like Man United (pic, exec vice-chairman Ed Woodward)
That is how the system is supposed to work. David Gill of Manchester United in the corridors of power, Rick Parry — a former Liverpool chief executive — on the UEFA financial control body that imposed City’s European ban, and pressure, pressure, pressure from outside.
Those inside City have sounded increasingly paranoid as the years have passed, have made some regrettable statements, too.
Yet City have no allies, no home, no place in football’s hierarchy. ‘We’re not really here,’ their fans sing — and if the elite had their way, they wouldn’t be, ever. That is what is meant by an existential fight.