Pochettino waits in the wings for banned City
Rodgers also in frame if Guardiola walks away Players attend meeting to address ban from Europe
Mauricio Pochettino and Brendan Rodgers would be in the running to succeed Pep Guardiola if the Manchester City manager quit over the club’s two-season ban from the Champions League as executives held a crisis meeting with the squad yesterday.
City have a 10-day deadline in which to lodge an appeal with the Court of Arbitration for Sport over Uefa’s decision to ban them from European competition for the 2020/21 and 2021/22 campaigns for “serious breaches” of their financial fair play rules.
A two-season ban from the Champions League could cost City between £200million and £300million in lost broadcasting and commercial income, fines and other costs – and potentially more in the longer term.
It is understood Guardiola will evaluate his position once City’s predicament becomes clearer, with CAS under pressure to expedite the impending appeal given the wide-ranging impact a ban would have. News of the club’s ban – which City, who have denied any wrongdoing, said they were “disappointed but not surprised” by – could encourage Juventus to intensify their efforts to lure him.
Pochettino, who was sacked by Tottenham Hotspur last November six months after leading them to the Champions League final, has his admirers among City’s executives and would come into contention if Guardiola left. Rodgers, who in December signed a new contract with Leicester City until 2025, would also be in the frame.
City also face the possibility of a Premier League points deduction, while the competition’s laws also allow for points deductions to be imposed for previous seasons. That is thought unlikely but any European ban will increase the pressure on City in this season’s Champions League. It will also serve to complicate City’s summer transfer plans as well as raise questions over the futures of their star players, such as Raheem Sterling, who has attracted interest from Real Madrid their last-16 opponents.
City’s players were summoned to a meeting yesterday lunchtime with Ferran Soriano, the club’s chief executive, and other officials. Text and WhatsApp messages were sent out within an hour of the news filtering out on Friday of City’s ban, requesting players attend the meeting so the club could talk through their plans. Guardiola was targeting up to six players this summer, with Leroy Sane eyeing a move to Bayern Munich.
Although many of City’s best players are tied to lucrative, long-term contracts, dressing room sources have said the players will be watching developments with great interest. Suspension from the Champions League could also have implications regarding players’ contracts, many of which includes bonuses for Champions League success.
John Mehrzad QC, a top sports lawyer with Littleton, suggested it was arguable that City’s conduct in breaching Uefa regulations, subject to an appeal to CAS, could constitute a breach of the implied terms of trust and confidence in the contracts of their players.
Mehrzad said City’s players may argue that the club have acted in a way that has ended their ability to play in the Champions League for two seasons and effectively undermined their contracts by denying them the opportunity to achieve bonus related payments, giving them the power to resign in response and become free agents.
Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp, meanwhile, expressed his sympathy for Guardiola and the club’s players.
“You trust your people [in the club’s heirarchy] and they tell you it’s all fine and obviously Uefa sees it slightly different,” said Klopp after his side’s 1-0 win at Norwich. “I feel for Pep and the players because, wow, they did for sure nothing wrong – they just played football and sensational football.”
It was the ineptitude of it that struck you first: the leaked emails from Manchester City executives apparently discussing their Uefa financial fair play sorcery that read like a plot-explainer on a daytime detective show for the benefit of those who had not followed the clues.
There was Ferran Soriano (below), the chief executive of the City Football Group, counselling that the club’s approach should not identify them as “the global enemies of football”. There was Simon Pearce, one of Abu Dhabi’s closest advisers, declaring “we can do what we want”. Unforgettably there was CFG lawyer Simon Cliff insisting that the whole operation – relating to image rights and commercial deals – be called “Project Longbow” in tribute “to the weapon the English used to beat the French at Crecy and Agincourt”.
These sounded like the fantasies of a man who packs a replica chain-mail suit and sandwiches in his car to spend Sundays with other like-minded people re-creating the 14th century in a rented farmer’s field in Derbyshire. They were certainly not the careful strategy of executives given a unique opportunity to redress the balance in English and European football and propel a recently mediocre club into the elite by challenging the rules designed to stop them.
City have always insisted the leaks were selective and out of context, “an organised and clear” attempt to damage their reputation as they have preached relentlessly since the first revelations in late 2018. But now they are isolated by the elite they sought to join, outmanoeuvred and, for the first time in a long time, vulnerable. It is a rotten system, and yet they have delivered their own strategy with all the competence of a company of Sealed Knot archers firing into a Storm Ciara headwind.
At the heart of City’s two-year Champions League ban and €30million (£25million) fine is the dismal reality that there is no side to cheer on in all of this. Not the City execs, delighted with themselves at the not-at-all-blatant inflation of commercial contracts and pumped-up image right funds. Not the opaque Abu Dhabi fortune driving them onwards, from an absentee owner in a non-democratic nation presented as the benevolent saviour of east Manchester. And certainly not the old European elite determined to stitch-up entry to the
Champions League and preserve their status forever, a collection of dinosaur fossils guaranteed the prime spot in the museum foyer.
The ruling against City was warmly welcomed in Spain, where Real Madrid and Barcelona have seen their modern hegemony challenged like never before by the emergence of the new money. In Italy, Juventus chairman Andrea Agnelli will press ahead with his plans for an expansion of the Champions League post-2024 to try to close the wealth gap between the Premier League and the rest of Europe. At least four more rounds of fixtures are expected as concessions from Uefa to Agnelli, chairman of the European Club Association, which wants its members’ marquee event one day to swallow football whole.
Uefa, and the old money of European football allowed Paris St-Germain to avoid censure in 2018 after a dizzying array of summer acquisitions and it seems this time they were determined FFP regulations would not let City off the hook.
The elite that City sought to enter was one in which the power of the
Champions League has granted a domestic monopoly to the clubs that had the good fortune to be in ascendance during the past three decades of the competition’s soaring revenues. What was once the shifting face of the European game, when Stade Reims, Partizan Belgrade or Nottingham Forest reached finals, and sometimes won titles, has been levelled out and the existing hierarchy of the past 30 years preserved in perpetuity.
Crowbarring their way in to the super-clubs was City’s monumental challenge and it feels now that they walked straight into the trap.
They served themselves up to Uefa and the eager defenders of the status quo. The restrictions imposed on City by FFP were designed to stop them growing at the speed which their Abu Dhabi funders insisted that they did and, faced with those obstacles, the panel found that they sought to break the rules rather than fight the structure itself. There must have been a better way than this to approach the dismantling of European football’s cartel. Yet in those emails leaked to
Der Spiegel it seemed the intoxicating wealth of their owner empowered a kind of recklessness in City, who naturally saw football as a place where the rich shape their own rules.
The short-term diagnosis for the club is bleak, even if the ban can be reduced to one year by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, with Pep Guardiola’s future first on the list.
Then comes the problem of an ageing squad that will require an extensive rebuild over the next two years without Uefa income, £77.5million last year alone. It is unclear what shortfall the £389million investment in 10 per cent of CFG from the US private equity group Silver Lake in November may cover. Beyond, the growing network of eight CFG clubs offers a legitimate way of generating FFP-clean revenue.
It remains an astonishing truth about football that one of the richest clubs outside the elite now see the only way to join it, and perhaps win a Champions League, is by building the kind of towering global infrastructure that CFG now have. That executives headhunted and well rewarded can see no way round the problem other than secretive commercial arrangements backfunded by their own paymasters. Brian Clough once won a European Cup with a team he had built to get promoted from the old Division Two. Soriano has tried to win it by building a multinational corporation.
City’s FFP legacy could be that everyone can see the con now, the giant super-club stitch-up endorsed by Uefa to keep out the new money and the desperate measures one newcomer went to circumvent them. Project Longbow is over, the flask of tea is empty, the quivers and chain-mail are back in the car boot and it is time for everyone to go home. Yet the battle served some purpose. It showed no one has found a way to thrive against these odds.
Agnelli wants the Champions League to swallow football whole one day
City saw football as a place where the rich could shape their own rules