Shockwaves are now reverberating around the globe about Manchester City’s Champions League ban for the next two seasons for purported serious breaches of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play regulations. The stifling ban has given rise to questions over City’s outlook for the near future and the long term. The reigning English League champions are charged with having circumvented FFP rules between 2012 and 2016 and have subsequently been fined £25million apart from the imposition of the 2-year ban.
However, there’s scepticism abounding that Europe’s invisible football rulers have already played judge, jury and executioner as far as the case is concerned. The immediate recourse available to City now is to take their case for the first time to a body not linked to UEFA, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).
CAS will be making provisions for a list of independent arbiters – with one chosen by Manchester City, another by UEFA and a third by CAS themselves – to comprise the three-strong committee with the appeal most likely to be heard soon to prevent any unforeseen delays inflicting mayhem into next season’s Champions League. City will be lodging an injunction against the punishment handed them if CAS are unable to hold their hearing before the start of next season.
City’s official statement released Friday night clearly affirms the club’s stand that this will continue to be a bitter dispute to the end until justice is served.
City’s statement read:
“In December 2018, the UEFA chief investigator publicly previewed the outcome and sanction he intended to be delivered to Manchester City, before any investigation had even begun.”
“The subsequent flawed and consistently leaked UEFA process he oversaw has meant that there was little doubt in the result he would deliver.”
Any cynic with reasonable capacity for syllogistic thinking would be able to speculate that the reason for UEFA’s harsh two-season ban punishment is to allow some room for a bit of calisthenics and wriggling around at the appeal stage. Were CAS to show some measure of sympathy for City and have the sentence halved, the period of exile for the club would still be a year. Had the ban been for 12 months instead of 2 years, arbitration would have been an awkward mathematical case of binary numbers with the digit ‘1’ taken out of judicial consideration.
Legal head-banging and wrangles aside, the repercussions and implications, short term or otherwise, for Manchester City are nevertheless explosive and debilitating. If the conspiracy theory hypothesis were to run true that the established elite are intent on ruining City, one of Sheik Mansour’s pet projects, then surely there could have been no better clandestine plot and ploy than via UEFA’s Financial Fair Play regulations. Here’s why:
Manchester City would face massive financial losses, making it a bet not worth hedging on for its owner
City’s 2018-19 financial accounts posted a revenue of £535m with a marginal profit of £10.1m. These revenues include about £100m from the Champions League, comprising £86m in prize cash from UEFA, together with match day and hospitality income from five home CL matches in excess of £10m. Commercial income from other avenues related to Europe was also included in the tabulations.
To lose out on that £100m would mean a loss of £90m, similar to the impact a ban would have if a ban is enforced for 2020-21, and doubly intensified if a ban ran for two consecutive seasons.
Then there’s also the £25m fine.
Extrapolating further on this, if Manchester City were to post losses from next season, they could just as easily fall foul of UEFA’s dastardly Financial Fair Play regulations again for spending more than they earn, if they were to dig into their own deep pockets to bale themselves out of the pit they have fallen into.
The simplest and probably best remedy then would be to sell their stable of glittering players, which would defnitely raise income and effectively slash a wage bill standing at £315m last season. Except that they’d be left without decent players of course. A familiar Catch-22 situation?
Loss of commercial sponsorship revenues
Manchester City earn a disproportionately high commercial income for a club their size, with £229m recorded for last season. With the quandary that the club is now in, it’s doubtful if their major ‘global partners’ would seek to renegotiate terms for the new seasons.
£130m of their commercial income derives from sponsors based in the UAE – where club owner Sheikh Mansour holds court – with Etihad alone accounting for £80m a year to sponsor City’s shirts and campus, while Visit Abu Dhabi pay about £19.75m and £16.5m are from telecoms firm, Etislat.
Puma, Nissan, Korean tyre firm Nexen and others are City’s other sponsors.
The prospect of Pep Guardiola and his players taking a hike
The uncompromising financial squeeze Manchester City would face without the Champions League revenue stream for two successive years would inadvertently restrict their ability to buy players or even pay for wages, let alone bonuses, which would inevitably lead to a sharp decline in the quality of their players. And at a crucial time when the manager needs to significantly rebuild his squad to catch up with the likes of Liverpool who’re cantering off comfortably to an ever-increasing lead at the top of the Table?
A two-year ban most definitely increases the prospect of Pep Guardiola and some of the club’s best players leaving. Why not, after all what’s there left to stay back for? For one, in the case of Pep, it’d be well nigh impossible for him to talk to agents and clubs about recruitment while groping in the dark regarding the club’s financial resources across the next two years. As for the players in the squad, the impending gloom and doom forebode a situation quite devoid of future prospects to dream of or a vibrant environment to shine in.
What’s more, one of football world’s much loved and most highly venerated, incredibly talented and idiosyncratic managers might not even be around anymore!
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