Cloak of secrecy for Man City’s court challenge to UEFA ban

GENEVA » A rare level of secrecy cloaks the court case opening Monday to decide if Manchester City will stay banned from European competition for two seasons.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport has scheduled three days at an undisclosed location for an appeal hearing by video conference link connecting lawyers in Switzerland and England.

The Lausanne-based court said on June 5 both City and UEFA requested confidentiality for the case. Neither party commented to The Associated Press.

The identities of the three CAS judges — selected by each side and the court — have also been protected in an intensely scrutinized legal fight.

The allegations include that City, owned by Abu

Dhabi’s royal family, misled UEFA over several years to comply with financial integrity rules for clubs.

The stakes are high in a case that provokes the tribal loyalties of club soccer and the distrust some fans have for sports ruling bodies.

If City’s appeal fails, it faces losing hundreds of millions of dollars in UEFA prize money and some star players during a two-year exile from world soccer’s most prized club competition.

Defeat for UEFA would undermine the Financial Fair Play (FFP) policy it says helps stabilize the soccer economy across 55 member nations.

Whatever the judges decide, City is still a contender to win this season’s Champions League.

The CAS panel’s verdict is expected before the round of 16 resumes in August, five months after UEFA paused games due to the coronavirus pandemic.

League prize money, almost one-third of its UEFA payout for reaching the quarterfinals last season.

The club denies wrongdoing.

“We did cooperate with this process,” City chief executive Ferran Soriano said in February. “We delivered a long list of documents and support that we believe is irrefutable evidence that the claims are not true.”

One internal email said City officials preferred to spend tens of millions on “the 50 best lawyers in the world” to sue UEFA rather than accept punishment in a previous round of monitoring.

UEFA can also cite several years of financial accounts submitted by City that are mandatory for FFP compliance. Expert witness testimony and forensic analysis of those documents are likely to be key in the CAS hearing. Olympic legal adviser François Carrard. After the ban ruling, the club hired another top London barrister, David Pannick.

The first wave of UEFA’s FFP sanctions in 2014 saw City and Qatar-owned Paris Saint-Germain agree to forfeit 20 million euros ($22.6 million) of their Champions League prize money.

Those fines fuelled City fans’ anger at UEFA and their suspicion FFP was designed to protect storied clubs by curbing spending by ambitious rivals with wealthy new owners.

UEFA voted to create the system in 2009, in fallout from the global financial crisis, to monitor finances of 200-plus clubs which qualify each year for its competitions. Clubs must approach break-even on commercial income and spending on transfers and wages. Deals linked to owners must be set at fair market rates.