Football: Man City banned from Europe
In the 11 years since the Emirati royal Sheikh Mansour bought Manchester City, the club has won the Premier League four times, said Martyn Ziegler in The Times. Its players have lifted two FA Cups and four League Cups. The only major trophy that has eluded City is the one its owner values most: the Champions League. But for the next two seasons, the club won’t appear in that competition at all. In a “seismic” decision last week, Uefa (European football’s governing body) handed down the ban and a s30m (£25m) fine as punishment for City breaching “financial fair play” (FFP) rules between 2012 and 2016. The decision is not final – City has appealed – but once the Premier League concludes its own investigation, further punishment may be in store: there is even speculation that rivals will call for the club’s recent league titles to be stripped.
Under FFP, clubs can make losses of no more than s30m over a three-year period, said David Conn in The Guardian. The rules also state that a club’s owner cannot get around this by injecting money through a sponsorship deal – which is what Mansour has been accused of doing. Over the four years in question, Etihad Airways was ostensibly paying the huge annual sum of £67.5m to sponsor City. But according to leaked emails, in the 2013/14 season all but £8m of that money actually came from Mansour’s own company vehicle, the Abu Dhabi United Group. City was also punished for “failing to cooperate in the investigation”, and it certainly didn’t help itself: the leaked emails show that the club’s behaviour towards Uefa has been “hostile”. You can see why City are angry, said Martin Samuel in the Daily Mail.
There’s nothing fair about FFP. It’s intended to “cement a handful of elite clubs and shut the rest outside”: by limiting how much owners can invest, it makes it harder for clubs to compete with the already wealthy giants like Barcelona and Bayern Munich. City was just trying to “get inside football’s fancy castle before the establishment upped the drawbridge”. That’s all very well, said Paul Hayward in The Daily Telegraph. But City signed up to those rules. Uefa has done the right thing: this ban sends a “message that the age of unfettered power for billionaire owners has passed”.
The big challenge for City now is holding this team together, said Barney Ronay in The Observer. Will Raheem Sterling, Kevin De Bruyne and Bernardo Silva – some of the finest players in the world – really be willing to sit out the Champions League? It’s hard to see how a club with a wage bill of £300m can even afford to hold onto all those stars, when the cost of missing out on European football is at least £100m a year. And then there’s Pep Guardiola, said Ian Herbert in the Daily Mail. Since the brilliant manager arrived in Manchester in 2016, there has been a sense that he is “merely passing through”, and this crisis could precipitate his exit – although he insists he wants to stick around for the next two seasons. Whatever happens, though, City will still have plenty of advantages: the “best training complex, best academy facilities, best player acquisition system”. And if they’re forced to give homegrown players more chances, that can only be a good thing. It might just be that a more “humble, joyful Manchester City emerges from the wreckage”.