Punish City if you want, but I’m glad they found a way to beat a bent system

Financial Fair Play is a football cartel designed to keep weak clubs weak...

IT has been said many times in the last seven days by those who believe Manchester City have committed crimes against modern f oot bal l t hat you cannot select which laws you choose to obey and which you choose to flout.

I have no desire to open myself up to a debate with that renowned Hegelian scholar, Jose Mourinho, or anyone else for that matter, about philosophy but if a rule is unjust and if its imposition is harming the status quo more than i ts absence would and if it is unenforceable anyway, then there is at least mitigation in rebelling against it.

If it is never right to break the rules, maybe someone ought to have mentioned that to whoever it was who hacked their way into City’s emails and to the people who are now praising Football Leaks for whistleblowing. The information they uncovered has enthralled football but whether it was obtained legally is another matter.

If the allegations about their financial practices, published in Der Spiegel last week, are both true and admissible, then City should be punished. That i s clear. How severely they should be punished depends on your view of whether a bent system that exists to create a closed shop for the biggest clubs is viable, fair and worth defending.

I dislike the underhand nature of what City executives are alleged to have done i n their attempt to circumvent Financial Fair Play rules. I love the beauty of the football that the team play but I am under no illusions about the sinister cynicism of some of those who run the club. I dislike the arrogant ‘we do what we want’ attitude that the club are said to have espoused when it came to disguising their income streams.

The problem is, I dislike FFP even more. If the allegations published in Der Spiegel last week are correct, City have cheated by ignoring FFP. But then the clubs that waved FFP through in the first place cheated by i ntroducing i t . They gave themselves an unfair advantage. The summit of modern football is a world where no one is innocent.

Let’s be honest about FFP: it is a system imposed by an oligarchy, designed to restore the rule of that oligarchy and to make sure that oligarchy is never, ever breached by outsiders again. It promotes football as a cartel, not as a meritocracy. In an irony that UEFA may finally be beginning to grasp, FFP is laying the foundations for the formation of the long-dreaded European Super League.

It is about self-preservation, not the common good. And anyway, it is doubtful that FFP is legally defensible itself, which may be one of the reasons why UEFA have so far been rather quiet about Der Spiegel’s sensational claims. FFP, as many have suggested previously, looks like an obvious affront to EU competition law.

By effectively freezing the existing financial position of European football clubs, lawyers

have argued, FFP’s rules are likely to promote the opposite of its supposed principle of fairness, by distorting competition rather than encouraging it. It means the dominant will remain dominant and the weak remain weak.

Football should still be about dreams and FFP kills dreams. Part of what makes English football so enthralling is that its top echelons have been refreshed by the rise of the modern Chelsea under Roman Abramovich and the modern City, bankrolled by the petrol billions of Abu Dhabi.

The money of their owners, allied to the wisdom of some of their hires, has allowed them to compete with the traditional elite of Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal, clubs that had dominated the previous four decades. Our elite is fluid, at least compared with La Liga, the Bundesliga and Serie A. No one has retained the Premier League title for 10 years.

Fans of those clubs have watched them achieve a pre-eminence that they dreamed of but never really thought could come true. FFP means no one else can join the club. It is the sound of the oligarchy slamming the door shut. It is the sight of a sign that says ‘Might is Right’ and that ‘Big is Best’.

I have never quite understood the idea put forward by the bestsupported clubs that attracting bigger crowds and earning more income from those crowds than others do entitles them to spend more money than a team like City, who have the backing of a wealthy benefactor.

In that world, the smaller clubs know their place, they do not get ideas above their station. In that world, the smaller clubs have defined limits to their ambitions. I hate that philosophy. It stands for everything I abhor in the modern game. It stands for complacency and it stands for greed and it stands for entitlement.

City knew they had to act before the cartel closed ranks and so it appears t hat t heir executives misled the UEFA accountants. They were punished for it in 2014 with a £50million fine. It is unclear from Der Spiegel’s revelations whether any of the offences they allege actually took place after that date.

The result is that City crashed the party. The result is that they made signings they would not have been able to make if they had bowed down before the oligarchy and tugged their forelock. The result is that they built one of the best teams the Premier League has ever seen.

So punish them if you want. But I’m glad they crashed the party because if they hadn’t, we might never have got to see the majesty of Kevin de Bruyne, David Silva, Raheem Sterling, Sergio Aguero and Leroy Sane sweeping all before them last season.

It’s a bent system and City found a way to beat it for just long enough. If the result harmed football, it’s a strange kind of damage.