The richest clubs are fast-forwarding us to football's dystopian future
Threatening to sue the governing body of the game into oblivion should be sufficient reason to chuck them out altogether. But that's the one thing that won't happen.
There is one group of people for whom I would reserve a degree of sympathy over Manchester City’s latest attempts to cast themselves as the supervillains that the rest of us had for so long merely assumed they’d eventually become, at some point or other; the ordinary supporters, those with a deep bond for their club but also with some degree of moral compass, who may have had deep reservations about its state ownership and who have found themselves increasingly alienated by the behaviour of the current owners.
It’s easy to persuade yourself that virgins like the guy who produces this sort of thing are the voice of Manchester City’s supporters. Fewer trophies to bolster what we can only presume to be very fragile levels of self-esteem? Unthinkable. With foot soldiers such as this, the Abu Dhabi Group will never be short of unthinking, uncritical support.
But not everybody is unthinking and uncritical, and it seems likely that ‘their’ club’s all guns blazing attack on the Premier League will have a substantially more negative impact on others. I mean, how are you supposed to take the threat of pulling funding for the women’s team, youth and community development in a fit of pique when those three areas are already specifically excluded from PSR calculations as things stand? Or the absolute, utter, rank hypocrisy of suing over rules that you’ve been previously (and presumably disingenuously; this clearly passes The Man on the Clapham Omnibus Test) claiming to have rigidly stuck to over the last few years. Whoever ordered this may be despicable, but they’re not stupid. They already knew that.
It is understandable that a large number of Manchester City supporters should have become defensive over their club’s wealth. They’ve seen success the likes of which they wouldn’t have dreamt imaginable just twenty years ago. And with their club, whether rightly or wrongly, the attacks on social media can seem relentless. You don’t have to be an oil money shill to be able to see that.
But surely even those who may have jumped to their keyboards once or twice to defend them before can now see the damage that the owners of their football club are set to wreak upon the entire game in this country, can’t they? And all for what? Because six league titles and the Champions League in the last seven years somehow isn’t enough? Because they want to turn their club into the Harlem Globetrotters, the embodiment of a raised middle finger to the entire game in this country and an affront to the very nature of sporting competition, and make the entire rest of us the Washington Generals?
Perhaps they were emboldened by a general election being called and an independent regulator being put on ice for at least a few weeks, thanks to the abrupt halting of parliamentary work. Perhaps they were triggered by seeing Real Madrid lifting the Champions League trophy yet again. Perhaps we were just always on a road towards this destination, from the point that the game turned professional in 1885, through the era of professional players as serfs, the ending of the maximum wage and retain & transfer, the arrival of silver-suited, flash-talking ‘new money’ into the game in the 1980s, to the formation of the Premier League.
Whatever the reason, it seems that the warnings of those who called this out from the start are now coming to reckon. The football club that is owned by a state now believes itself to be bigger than the league in which it plays. They’re threatening legal action in the full knowledge that they have such vast financial resources that beating them in court is almost impossible. And when laws that you have to abide by yourself are essentially an alien concept to you, why would you think that regulations might apply to you? Why wouldn’t you think that a robust voting system is, “the tyranny of the majority” when you always get what you want?
Can anything be done? This feels like a moment so significant that it might need the sort of combined effort ftrom supporters that did for the European Super League three years ago. Are English football fans prepared to make Manchester City a true pariah club? To refuse to attend matches against them and treat the Premier League as if they don’t exist? To turn every match against them into anti-oil money protests until it becomes too embarrassing to ignore any more?
Perhaps the most stomach-turning aspect of Manchester City’s caterwauling is their sub-Trumpian claim that they’re just fighting against the “elites”. In the 21st century, everybody has to try and push themselves as ‘the little guy’, even those who are richer than Croesus to the extent that they own a whole country. The Premier League’s 14/6 voting system actually works very well in preventing cliques from forming and ensuring that rules aren’t needlessly changed too often. That they want to upend this says a lot—none of it that much of a surprise—about what they really think of the actual ‘little guys’.
Should Manchester City expelled from the Premier League, pour encourager les autres? Shouldn’t other competition they wish to enter be asking, ‘Why should we want them in the first place, if there’s a likelihood that they’ll end up threatening to sue us for upholding our rules if they’re not benefiting from them?’ Who, in other words, would want to do business with explicit bullies?
It seems a fair enough question for anybody making a decision over whether to allow Manchester City to take part, because this football club is a menace to every other club and every other league in the country. They’re prepared to break just about everything to get what they feel entitled to, and that’s something that should appal anybody who values this game as a sport in this country. Even Manchester City supporters.
But ejection is also the one thing that won’t happen. Some sort of compromise will have to be reached, and the only question that matters is what the upshot of any attempt at negotiation might be. This doesn’t have to be a disaster for the game. It could be, if there is sufficient pressure from outside, a point at which a firm line in the sand is drawn, a point at which these people were told that no, for once you’re not getting what you demand. There is little reason to be optimistic that this will happen. Why should anybody else be interested in the Premier League, if it simply becomes an arms race between nation states? Why should we tolerate the further opening up of a gap that is already too great?
But don’t be shedding any tears for the Premier League over this. A league explicitly established to siphen off football’s explosion in broadcasting rights money to just twenty clubs may be considered very much hoist by its own petard. They chose wild west capitalism from the outset, with as little regulation as they felt they could get away with. By the time the need for an independent regulator became obvious to all, the Premier League was pushing back against it with all they had. Perhaps if they hadn’t spent so much time pushing back against the very idea of one, they’d have had a stronger legal framework to fall back upon had something like this happened. Funny old world, isn’t it?
But the fact that the Premier League will likely vote for the Face Eating Leopards party at the upcoming general election doesn’t mean that this great carve-up should be allowed. It will be down to the supporters of other clubs to make their voices heard, if anything is to happen to prevent the game in this country just being subsumed by extremely wealthy despots. There’s no such thing as a good billionaire. They need to be driven out of our game. We need to remember that this is fundamentally a sport, again. At the moment, it feels as though we’re being fast-forwarded into dystopia.