The Law Catches Up With Manchester City

I was genuinely blown away when the news came in on Friday that Manchester City had been found guilty by the Premier League of breaching over 100 financial fair play rules. The case had been going on for so long, since the accusations were made in 2023, that it was starting to become one of those long-running jokes about a thing that you never expect to happen.

And yet it has, and now we have to see what'll happen next. Will City get docked points? Relegated or expelled from the Premier League? Will their titles be stripped, and if so, will the titles go to the runners-up, or will they stand as "unawarded" forevermore?

On the question of the trophies, City won seven Premier League titles, one Champions League, the FA Cups and six League Cups during the period under investigation, 2009-10 to 2022-23. The next biggest scandal I could think of was the 2006 Calciopoli scandal, in which Juventus and several other Serie A clubs were found guilty of manipulating referee selections and pressuring referee decisions to be more favorable. The greatest burden of punishment fell on Juve, which was stripped of two titles (one remained unawarded and the other awarded to Inter), as well as being relegated to Serie B and docked 9 points at the start of the following season (initially sentenced to a 30-point deduction but reduced to 9 on appeal).

Juve lost a bunch of players in that relegation, but still managed to handily win Serie B and return to the top flight for the 2007-08 season. You can debate how chastened they were by the experience, since Juve suffered another points deduction in 2023 for financial irregularities, and it appears another scandal emerged in 2026, though not specifically around Juve.

The question is whether a similar punishment would be warranted for City (depending on what happens when they appeal), and whether it would stop financial chicanery in elite football. After all, there's been a lot of talk about how Chelsea posted profits of £200 million in 2024 by selling its women's team to its owners, BlueCo, as a way of circumventing financial fair play rules - rules that were originally put in place because Chelsea had pretty obviously bought its way to success following Roman Abramovich's purchase of the club in 2003.

I've read various sources over the years that have suggested that although FFP aimed to create a level playing field by not allowing clubs to just spend their way to success, it also entrenched existing football dynasties and prevented new clubs from joining the elite. Effectively, it became a way for the big European clubs to keep nouveau riche clubs from competing with them - and exhibit A of the clubs they were trying to stop was Manchester City.

Now, I don't want to give the impression that I think City shouldn't be punished. But I'm pointing out that financial doping, as former Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger put it, essentially existed already, in the form of rich clubs like Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal (to say nothing of the likes of Real Madrid, Barcelona, Juventus and others) steamrolling their rivals through sponsorship deals and overpaying for hot prospects that might otherwise go to their rivals. 

Arsenal fans spent years crying poor mouth about not having won any Premier League titles for two decades, thanks to the expense incurred by moving their stadium from Highbury to Ashburton Grove, but for many of those seasons they still reaped the financial windfall of qualifying for the Champions League. Same with Manchester United, which periodically reported ever-more ludicrous sponsorship deals (like official mattress partner and official noodle partner). In the face of this kind of over-performance, how else is a club expected to get ahead?

Here's another little defense of City: while it was boring to see them win all the time, and that winning streak naturally engendered a certain arrogance, they were also the model of a well-run club. They may not have pulled down the success they wanted immediately, but they bided their time until they could get the manager and backroom staff they wanted, and when they had all that lined up, they blasted off like a rocket to the moon. Compare that with Chelsea under Abramovich, which had a brutally efficient backroom structure but which fired manager after manager when they didn't satisfy Abramovich's demands - City fired its fair share of managers, but when they brought in Pep Guardiola, they let him run things on the pitch, and he ended up creating this dynasty for them.

This tainted dynasty, as it turns out. A lot of the coverage I've read since Friday has talked about "sliding doors moments" and who might have won what trophies without City's financial shenanigans. Some of it is going to be too hard to tease out, unless auditors can determine a numerical value for how much each goal or point or win was worth.

But going deeper, how many goals would City not have scored without these unfair advantages? It makes me think of an analysis someone did once of Bayern Munich under Guardiola, as they powered to yet another dominant Bundesliga season: even if all the shots on goal against Bayern that season had gone in, Bayern would still have been in first place, because they were just that dominant. A deep, forensic analysis might find the same about some of City's seasons, which would be deeply disappointing to the likes of Manchester United and Liverpool, among other clubs.

All of this is idle speculation: I'm curious to see how the various football podcasts cover it in the coming week, and I'll be eagerly reading about City's appeals, and what the punishment will end up being. This does feel like genuinely new territory, at least in scale, and it'll be interesting to see if the league (and the Football Association) hold their nerve to punish City appropriately, or if it'll just be another slap on the wrist.

And even if City does get punished appropriately - whatever form that takes - how will the rest of European football respond? Will rules tighten across the world, or will other leagues become effectively the Wild West for football finance? These are all fascinating questions, and I really want to see how things get decided.

How 9/11 Never Went Away

Apart from the prospect of AI ending humanity in the next ten years, the big news this week was the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. I saw a lot of reports and remembrances of people who died in the attacks, or of those who survived them, or even just experienced them, and I also saw a few comments about how we're still living with the effects of that day.

I think that last point is fairly obvious, but I feel like few sources commented on how you can draw a straight line from the attacks to the situation we're in now. I also feel like I didn't see enough posts (though there were a few) excoriating George W Bush for his response to the attacks, because that's what's influenced our current situation so obviously.

The first point is that, by invading Iraq more than a year after the attacks, after having sent his proxies to lie to the UN and to the American people about Saddam Hussein's ability to build weapons of mass destruction, Bush gave rise to the conditions that led to the formation of the Islamic State (ISIS or Da'esh) and their acts of terror throughout the Middle East and Africa. ISIS became a bogeyman for Westerners, especially those on the right who espoused Islamophobia. This gave ammunition to right-wingers who wanted to end immigration from the Middle East, just as Bush's wars in the region created a wave of refugees and migration as people tried to escape the violence tearing their homelands apart.

I think it's pretty clear that we wouldn't have had Donald Trump as US president if he hadn't gotten so much traction for claiming he'd seen Muslim families in Jersey City celebrating the attacks - he may have come to prominence by questioning Barack Obama's US birth, but his increasingly outlandish 9/11 stories were his first foray into running his mouth off and being rewarded for it.

Bush's war on terror also gave cover to a bunch of other countries as they demonized their own Muslim communities. Israel's response was fairly quick, and we're living directly with the consequences of that, as the US wages a war of choice on Iran - and one that makes the case for the invasion of Iraq look legitimate - essentially because Israel had started trading missiles with Iran.

There's also India and China. China used it as cover to oppress their Turkic Uighur minority in the west of the country, while India's BJP ramped up its anti-Muslim rhetoric and has ridden high on that ever since. China's actions briefly galvanized Western opposition, while India's enabled the populist prime minister Narendra Modi to emerge as a global figure as he leads the world's most populous country.

Those are all the global effects, for which the death toll has reached the hundreds of thousands, if not millions by now. On the personal level, the national security apparatus that the US put in place after the attacks has had its own long-ranging effects. The biggest one, which has also largely faded into the background but was a big deal when it happened, was Edward Snowden's 2013 revelation of NSA spying on the population through pretty much every large tech company around at that time.

There was also all the immigration enforcement, which expanded into curbing illegal immigration and all of CBP's and ICE's excesses since then. And it has to be said, as bad as Trump's policies have been, Democratic presidents have also signed off on them: the NSA spying scandal was during Obama's administration, and people defending Trump's family separation policy noted that immigration authorities had done the same under Obama, too.

Jason Burke, who wrote The 9/11 Wars, has talked about the failure of Osama bin Laden's wider vision for the Middle East and for "bleeding" America dry. I think the Onion's joke headline "FBI Uncovers al Qaeda Plot to Just Sit Back and Enjoy Collapse of United States" captures what's happened since much better - even things that weren't explicitly caused by the terror attacks have led to our loss of standing in the world, and to our loss of cohesion as a society. I'm talking about the political polarization and the widening economic inequality.

My question is, when is all of this going to end? At some point the principals who've dominated US politics and foreign policy for the last 25 years will shuffle off the stage - most of them have, but they've also given rise to others, and the nightmare continues.

My other question is whether there'll ever be accountability for the lies that led to squandered American and Iraqi lives, among others. George W Bush has been spared going down in history as the worst president by Trump, but no amount of sharing candy with Michelle Obama can obscure the fact that his actions led to so much suffering, over so long.

Unfortunately, I think I know the answer to that second question: too many people on both sides of the aisle were complicit, even just at the point of voting to authorize the Iraq invasion. So I won't hold my breath - but I live in hope.