Man City’s chastening defeat lays bare strength of coalition against them

Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola has agreed to sign a one-year contract extension, according to reports
The defeat at the Premier League will not have been welcome news at Etihad Stadium - PA Wire/Nick Potts

Again and again, Manchester City have appealed over the heads of the Premier League executive to speak directly to their fellow 19 clubs as if City themselves were running the competition. The club have rejected the analysis of the league’s in-house lawyers, contradicted the league’s public statements and even offered the services of its own alternative legal hotline.

On Friday morning City eventually got their answer – and for those in the City camp proposing the alternative arrangement it was chastening.

The vote on the amendment to the associated party transaction rules [APT] was critical for both what it did to the rulebook and what it signified. The three fellow travellers who backed City – Aston Villa, Newcastle United and Nottingham Forest – did so for reasons that are not yet explicit but might be guessed at. What might give City pause for thought is the breadth of the coalition against them.

It included their own former operations executive Omar Berrada, now at Manchester United and one of those who spoke at the meeting in favour of the APT amendments. It included Chelsea, represented by general counsel James Bonington, who was also explicitly supportive of a vote in favour. But it went beyond City’s big six adversaries like Liverpool and Arsenal, right through the many and varied ownerships of the 16 in favour.

That encompassed those veterans of the profit and sustainability [PSR] wars, Everton and Leicester City. It included Wolverhampton Wanderers, who have had to trim their budget radically to comply with PSR – and went rogue this year with a request to scrap VAR. It united the giant revenue generators at the top of the table, as well as the relative tiddlers at the bottom. Those playing in Europe and those not. Those with shareholder loans and those without.

That is a diverse set of interests and for all City’s dark warnings of long and expensive legal disputes that threat was not able to break a strong majority, in excess of the minimum 14 required. The league voted for robust financial controls, and it did not accept City’s contention that there needed to be any delay while certain points of clarification were sought from the three retired judges that heard the arbitration tribunal in June.

What now?

In the aftermath of that arbitration judgment last month the club claimed victory. Yet all those key parts of the APT rules deemed unlawful by the tribunal have now been amended. The structure of the APT rules is intact. Indeed APTs are now augmented following City’s insistence that it include shareholder loans. The show goes on. So what now?

Hard to believe that will be the end of it from City. They are fighting their forever battle with the Premier League over what has become known as the 115 charges. Their legal team is, to say the least, substantial. There may be new fronts upon which to fight, new vulnerabilities in the rules that can be exploited but even so – a defeat is a defeat.

Sixteen of their fellow clubs voted for the amended rules, and against City’s recommendations to delay. Are these 16 very different football clubs all in a cartel together? Are Manchester United and Brighton, Southampton and West Ham, Brentford and Crystal Palace all secretly plotting the downfall of Manchester City? Or could it be the case that they have read the tribunal verdict, considered City’s position on the matter and judged that for the health of the league, its competition and their own clubs, the amended rules make sense?

There may well be more legal pain ahead. The cost is already considerable when one notes that the Premier League’s fees are paid for at source from the disbursements the league makes to its 20 shareholders. There has already been one recourse to the High Court in the key legal case against City. That commission hearing continues and one wonders how many pages the final legal judgment might run to. The War and Peace of sporting disputes is the general view, but at least Tolstoy did not have to worry about the possibility of an appeal.

As for this separate case concerning the APT matter, the clear signal is that there needs to be no further expense. That is certainly what the 16 appear to have indicated. Whether Villa, Forest and Newcastle have the appetite for another round, is hard to say. But there certainly seems to be one club that is prepared to carry on the fight, whatever the cost.