Eyes down for a full house, then. Manchester City facing off against The Premier League. The sheikhs taking on the shakedown artists. The Oil v The Oleaginous.
One side is a greedy, grasping entity that has come to dominate English football by elbowing the other clubs out of fortunes and hoarding players, cash and questionable modes of sponsorship for itself. The other is Manchester City.
One side is an organisation that pretends history didn’t exist before its recent success, the very epitome of nouveau riche, a collection of lawyers and spivs in expensive suits who treat the world’s biggest sport as their own private plaything. The other is the Premier League.
Years ago, during one of the drawn-out Cork GAA strikes, from which one of my Kerry cousins was taking unending delight, he sent me text to boil it all down.
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“You know the problem there, of course,” he wrote. “There’s two sides fighting – and they’re both from Cork.”
There’s a bit of that here. Two sides in a clinch, both as stubborn as dogshit on a plimsoll, all parties utterly convinced of how right they are and entirely divorced from how they are perceived by the world outside. At least in Cork, you had somebody to root for. It might not all have been black and white but somewhere in the shades of grey, there was a fight worth having.
Between City and the Premier League, you wouldn’t dream of allying yourself with anyone involved. You’d need a strong stomach to think about popping champagne at the end, whatever the result turns out to be. One side wins, one side loses, a lot of wealthy people get to hoist themselves a few ribs higher on the hog. Meanwhile, the price of your TV package goes up and up like it’s attached to a helium balloon.
City are obviously a disgrace. That feels like it goes without saying? Imagine the neck it must take to pretend to be the little guy at a time when you’ve just completed the first four-in-a-row in the history of the men’s game in England. To present yourself as the plucky outsider taking a stand against the dark forces of the establishment when it’s you who dictates the financial reality in which every other club has to exist.
The fight they have picked will appear deeply silly to anyone with even a minimal interest in fairness. For a couple of years now, the existential threat of the infamous 115 charges brought by the Premier League has hung over City’s titles. This latest case is ostensibly separate, although it will fish in broadly comparable waters.
City are basically fighting against a 2021 Premier League regulation that prevents companies already related to the club paying over the odds for sponsorship of that club. Or, to pluck an example out of thin air, to prevent Etihad (owned by the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund) from spending multiples of what the market would demand to be a normal price for sponsorship of Man City (also owned by the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund).
This is basic regulation. Everyone can see that. In a realm where spending power has such a direct effect on outcomes, you can’t have a situation whereby one of the parties can inflate that spending power by the back door.
Over the past decade, City have never spent a single season outside the top three clubs in the league in terms of player wages. They are one of the greatest teams in the history of English football because they have spent oceans of money ensuring they are one of the greatest teams in the history of English football. Regulation of how that money is sourced is the very least a governing body ought to be doing.
Thing is, the Premier League are very obviously a disgrace too. Nobody could ever confuse them for a benign player in all of this. Ever since it was established, the Premier League has been a completely rapacious force in the game. It has never been enough for it to break away from the rest of the English clubs. It has always set itself up as the great unrelenting PacMan of the sport, gobbling up the best bits of every other place on the planet where football is played.
Of course Man City want to find loopholes and relax the rules on how you raise money to spend on your club – that guiding principle is what the Premier League has always, always been about. More money, higher ticket prices, bigger broadcasting deals, a wider spread of countries, vaster territories, no market left behind. More, more, more. And now they say no?
If City have the germ of an argument, that’s where it might lie. They undermine it with contemptible phrases like “the tyranny of the majority” but it’s obvious that the winners from stricter regulation are the already big clubs. Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea – these clubs are already baked into the top layer of the cake. They can’t not make money. But City are in a similar place, albeit with 115 reasons why their status could be in peril.
For the rest of us, the whole thing is just a tiresome, repellent vomitfest. We are treated as gormless fools who can’t not watch a game of football, mostly because we are. The power-brokers will go to court for years and spit peashooters across legal benches at each other long into the future. Meanwhile, we’ll snipe away at each other to fill the time until Monday Night Football comes on.
At least the Euros are around the corner. At least football still has that. Not that international football can claim purity or fairytales – the football industrial complex driven by the Premier League will presumably mean England winning one of these tournaments eventually.
But there’s still something attractive and weirdly noble about the best of one country against the best of another. About a random Tuesday afternoon watching Turkey play Georgia. About next Saturday, when the whole of Albania will gather around to watch its team try to nick a point against their Goliath neighbours Italy. About, yes, knocking a month of enjoyment out of hoping for England’s demise.
This is one corner of the game that hasn’t been entirely hijacked yet. We’ll enjoy it while it lasts.
