The APT rulings don't look like *that* much of a victory for Manchester City

Read the judgement and it's difficult to make much of a case that either side in this row had a flawless victory, but the Premier League's case seems stronger.

Everybody’s claiming victory because of course they are, but it’s entirely possible to argue that no-one really quite won the first round of the legal wrangles between Manchester City and the Premier League. But while Manchester City may have won the headlines, there’s more to this than a lot of what has been reported.

This particular case related to “Associated Party Transactions” (APTs), clubs making inflated sponsorship deals with companies that have ownership links to them (hello Abu Dhabi, hello Saudi Arabia, the list goes on) and player transfers between clubs under the same multi-club ownership models. Restrictions to these were voted through at a Premier League shareholders’ meeting on 9th February in Central London.

But this vote was not unanimous and City’s objections ended up in front of an arbitration panel who have now delivered their verdict. And the result of it is muddy, with both sides having issued public statements claiming that they ‘won’. In some respects, it’s the masterclass in dignity that we’ve all been primed to expect from the outset.

The headline, of course, is whatever you choose it to be, but broadly speaking from a skim-read of the hefty 175-page judgement (PDF), what strikes this onlooker as the single important aspect of it is that APT rules were found to be broadly compatible with competition law. It was agreed that they were adopted with the intention of upholding Profit and Sustainability Rules, which seek to promote financial sustainability and competitive balance within club football.

But there was one not-insignificant exclusion to this, an exclusion for shareholder loans. This, it was found, was “at odds with the whole rationale of PSR” and that the “effect on competition... is the same whether the money is received in a transparent manner from the owner or in a non-transparent way from a third party”. This was a win for Manchester City.

But it was also really about as good as news got for them. It’s true to say that some APT transactions were unfairly assessed by the Premier League, but the APT system in an overall sense has survived. And as things stand, the rules will now need, if anything, to be expanded and tightened in order to comply with British law.

City scored two other clear wins, The first was relating to a complaint that the League had not shared relevant benchmarking information at an appropriate point, denying the club the opportunity to feed back before a decision was made. This was upheld by the tribunal and will necessitate another rule change. Well, okay. That doesn’t sound like a difficult fix.

The final win related to an ‘unreasonable delay’ over making decisions against their own rules, which again is sloppiness on the part of the Premier League. They claimed a lack of manpower to tackle these in time. Well okay, get the manpower. City claim damages over this, but a rule change relating to it seems out of the question.

But in all other respects, Manchester City were unsuccessful. “All other challenges fail”, as the judgement itself said, in fairly stark terms. But this didn’t stop the club from putting out a statement which focused on what they did win: “The Club has succeeded with its claim: the Associated Party Transaction (APT) rules have been found to be unlawful and the Premier League’s decisions on two specific MCFC sponsorship transactions have been set aside.”

The definite article in “the Associated Party Transaction (APT) rules” is doing a lot of heavy lifting, there. Yes, those ones were. But don’t ignore the definite article there, because APTs have categorically not been found to be unlawful. Some of the ways in which they were calculated have been, but the overall principle has, if anything, been backed by the tribunal. Their argument over the “tyranny of the majority” did not succeed.

The Premier League’s statement was just as wordy, but this overview is correct:

The Premier League welcomes the Tribunal’s findings, which endorsed the overall objectives, framework and decision-making of the APT system. The Tribunal upheld the need for the APT system as a whole and rejected the majority of Manchester City’s challenges. Moreover, the Tribunal found that the Rules are necessary in order for the League’s financial controls to be effective. 

Was this a flawless victory for the Premier League? Far from it. Their application of the rules has clearly been shoddy, and this shouldn’t be downplayed, while this all ultimately stems from their own failure of regulation in allowing clubs to be bought by those that it has. Money trumped sport in this league years ago. It is also fundamentally a failure of regulation to end up in this position in the first place. But the principle of APT monitoring as A Good Thing for football at this level certainly seems to be intact, though doubtless there will be others who will disagree with this assessment.

This is, of course, a hors d'oeuvres for the main event. It’s all unrelated to the Premier League versus Manchester City, THE MAIN EVENT, which starts soon with those now famous 115 charges at stake. Considering everything that they may have been intending to win from this appetiser of a court case, we may have seen that the ultimate victory of the Manchester City legal steamroller isn’t quite as inevitable as we’d might have expected it to be. Not quite. Not yet. But none of this says anything about the 115 charges to come, no matter what anybody says.