Yes, figures were inflated. Revenue streams were bloated with sponsorship revenues grossly exaggerated. UEFA and its Club Financial Control Body were misled.
The punishment? Stiff, obviously, to reflect the gravity of the offence – the suspension from European Cup competitions for two years and a whopping fine of £25million.
Deservedly? Is justice justifiably served? It all depends on how you view it.
If in the course of true justice Manchester City’s case is adjudicated to be proven true after their appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), then they would justly deserve to have the rules book thrown at them and deal accordingly with the punishment meted out.
UEFA’s Financial Fair Play were apparently set up as an insitution of rules to serve the cause of justice and engender compliance with ‘fair play’ to aid, and protect the majority of clubs that do not have the blessings and convenience of financial abundance. To level the playing ground, if you will. Supposedly.
Yet it’s long been insinuated even since its inception that UEFA’s Financial Fair Play had been corrupted all this while by the powers at the top, or more accurately by those with sinister agendas at the back, from when it was created.
Harsh accusations indeed but should they hold water, then Manchester City’s transgression is but doing wrong in the face of rules that had been put in place all this while to protect a privileged elitist few simply as preventive measures to deter and prevent those non-eletist clubs from ascending to the summit of football’s Everest.
This is where it all gets a whole lot more interesting. The finger-pointing becomes a lot more complicated then.
Understandably, for those to whom right or wrong are basically black or white, there would be little sympathy, if any, for Manchester City, more appropriately the owners and the Board, following their Champions league 2-year ban, not to mention the heavy fine. But what if the rules themselves, the black and white, set in place from the very beginning are actually compromised shades of grey?
What if Financial Fair Play was corrupted from its very inception by the powers that be at the top of the football food chain with their own hidden agendas as a form of protectionism device to safeguard their own selfish interests? Or, alternatively, Financial Fair Play could also have been something set in place with the best and most honourable intentions originally but somehow in the course of time – as is often the case where fame, power and financial gains began creeping into the picture– began warping into protectionism in its most naked form. Something akin to a modern-day replay of the Garden of Eden/Tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil kind of scenario – hey, it’s just an apple so how could that ever be bad? Come on!
Financial Fair Play regulations do not seem to have been judiciously applied so far in adhering strictly and truly without compromise to their original role of alleviating the sustainable management of club debts. Instead they appear to be muscling in to flex huge biceps in order to enforce limitations on club ownerhip in terms of investment. Hence a club loaded with debt would understandably be only too happy to be in full compliance, unlike a club without debt, like Manchester City for example, would not. A very simple hypothesis.
Not unlike the main plot and premise in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The Scarlet Letter’, Manchester City’s ‘wrongdoing’ from the point of view of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play regulations is an unfortunate stigma they are now branded with, and one they are beholden to carry with them. One that many would see as a symbol of City’s perhaps grudging acknowledgment of their complicity in this ‘wrongdoing’.
For the conspiracy theorists, be they loyal fans or well-intentioned fence-sitters with a penchant for righteousness and justice, it is easily understandable why they’re inclined to show nothing but utter contempt for the ‘rigged’ system created for the purpose of extirpating those that do not have the exclusive privilege of dwelling in the elevated rarefied atmosphere where the elites quietly assemble to convene their secret briefings and exert pressure on their specially appointed watchdogs to do their bidding.