Samuel: Yes, Man City broke the rules, but the rules protect the old elite

He later got a call to say his employment had been terminated.

A few weeks before this, Tottenham had failed to qualify for the Champions League. The club had finished fourth in the Premier League but this was the season in which only the top three progressed, because Chelsea qualified as holders despite coming sixth. It isn’t certain that Redknapp would have been retained, but it would have been hard to dismiss a manager with two Champions League qualifications in three years for Tottenham at the time.

Redknapp had already given the club their tournament debut the previous season, and reached the quarter-finals.

However, the 2011-12 Premier League title was won by Manchester City and, on April 8, Arsenal beat them 1-0 thanks to an 87th-minute goal by Mikel Arteta. So, if City are now to be retrospectively stripped of their titles - as many wish - it is not quite as simple as handing the prize to the second-placed team. If City disappear, their results must be expunged from the records and, with them, Arsenal’s three points. As this happens, Tottenham would leap above them into third place, qualifying for the Champions League in La-La Land and arguably preserving Redknapp’s job.

“You could not remove a single grain of sand from its place without thereby changing something throughout all parts of the immeasurable whole,” the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte wrote, but if the Premier League is foolhardy enough, it might have a swing at it.

Others too. Take the 2013-14 League Cup final, in which City beat Sunderland. Giving the trophy to Sunderland takes for granted they would have defeated the alternate finalists. West Ham United were defeated by City in the semi-final and Sunderland played West Ham twice that season and didn’t win either game. Unpicking City from English football across the past decade is therefore impossible. It’s the butterfly effect. A butterfly, flapping its wings, can trigger a tornado. City’s first Premier League title win came against eight clubs that are now in the Sky Bet Championship, plus Bolton Wanderers of League One. It is not as easy as just tossing a pot to the next in line.

So any punishment City are due must exist in the here and now. A points deduction, perhaps summary relegation - either could be justified given the widespread nature of the accusations. City were members of an organisation and, as such, were bound to play by its rules. If found guilty they have broken multiple undertakings of good faith and can expect to be punished accordingly. The fate of Saracens is most certainly one precedent.

The reputational damage is immense too. If City are found to have systematically corrupted the competition, that is a tough stain to wash clean.

However.

The degree to which City’s alleged corruption is greater than the protectionist corruption of Financial Fair Play (FFP) is quite another matter. Those loyal to the European Super League cabal won’t agree, but City broke rules that shouldn’t exist in their present form. What began as an assault on unscrupulous owners and debt was twisted into a means of thwarting new money coming into the game, while protecting an elite. If we are giving City’s titles to their rivals, there is not a lengthy list of benefactors: it’s Manchester United, then Liverpool, then United, then Liverpool, then United, then Liverpool. The red clubs, who love the English game so much they conspired to destroy it not so long ago, would again be close to untouchable: just as they like it, just as they have engineered it.

City and Chelsea get the blame for inflating the transfer market, but there has been a steady rise over many years, largely driven by the clubs that now seek protection from new wealth. United broke the British transfer record in 1962, 1981, 1995, 2001, 2002 and 2016; Arsenal in 1928, 1938, 1971 and 1995; Tottenham in 1968 and 1970; Liverpool in 1995. Since the Second World War, Derby County have broken the British transfer record more times than City. So inflation was always with us and the global elite, having created this market - because AC Milan, Barcelona, Marseille, Juventus, Lazio and Real Madrid also feature heavily in the escalation here - then linked the ability to play the market with the financial capacity of a club. The rules City broke are the ones designed to keep them in their place, and Newcastle United or any other club challenging the orthodoxy.

Grow organically - that is the sermon. But what club can, now that Champions League football and a berth among the elite is the Holy Grail for every player? How can Everton grow organically if United take Wayne Rooney before his 19th birthday? How can Brighton & Hove Albion grow into consistent top-four contenders while being plundered by those already occupying the space? It is certain West Ham will lose Declan Rice this summer too, heading off more organic growth.

Meanwhile, in Germany, an ambitious player knows what he has to do to win the Bundesliga: leave and sign for Bayern Munich, who are on their way to an 11th straight title. And, yes, promising players have always moved to bigger clubs - but, back then, the rulebook hadn’t enshrined organic growth as the only legitimate means of improvement. The elite have carved up the game and its revenue streams until only sovereign wealth funds can compete at their level - and then moulded FFP to limit what can be invested, even by those who can afford it.

What about Leicester City, then? And it’s true - in one freakish season a club from outside the elite won the Premier League. It remains the greatest achievement in domestic football. Yet it certainly came at a price. Last week it was announced that the Leicester chairman, Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha, wiped off the club’s debt of £194 million to King Power International by converting it to shares. So maybe the guardians of fair play will come for that manoeuvre next, considering Roman Abramovich used the same strategy at the original financial dopers, Chelsea. Who knows, maybe if FFP can be manipulated even further we can remove all sense of surprise from the competition until the three richest clubs in the country play title pass-the-parcel?

For looking back across City’s six Premier League wins, United would have won three of them. And not even a good United. Ordinary United - the United who got knocked out of the Champions League by Sevilla and lost in 2017-18 to Newcastle, West Bromwich Albion, Brighton and Huddersfield Town; the 2020-21 United that won two games in succession only four times across an entire campaign and, at one point, won four games in thirteen, losing seven. Without the new money coming into English football - and Leicester are a part of that, as are Newcastle - the advantages of size and wealth would be so great, the competition would be immeasurably poorer. United wouldn’t need to be good, they would just need to be United. The rest of it is as good as laid out for them.

Newcastle are bending over backwards to comply with FFP and have done incredibly well, but they’re not a threat yet. Give it time. The Premier League has already rushed through regulation on owner-sponsorship, so that United can mine Saudi wealth more effectively than Newcastle, who are actually owned by Saudis.

Part of the rulebook now governs inflated commercial agreements, but how to measure inflation? Newcastle’s previous deals had an obvious ceiling, but the club are bursting through that. So a contract could be signed not on where the club are now, but where they hope to be in five or ten years. And what seems inflated in 2023 may be a bargain in 2030.

Chelsea have constructed their latest player contracts the same way, growing year on year. By 2030 a player such as Mykhailo Mudryk could be earning pounds 350,000 a week, yet by 2030, if he progresses as expected, that won’t seem unreasonable. Still, for now, the elite have Newcastle where they want them. Shopping mid-range and with four wins in nine across all competitions as demands on the squad increase.

It was at this point that the City project went into overdrive. Sergio Aguero, Yaya Toure, David Silva, Roberto Mancini. The FFP drawbridge was shutting and they escalated recruitment rapidly to get inside the castle. The accusation remains that, in doing so, they were not honest. Maybe.

But, paradoxically, they kept the league honest, because standards improved and have never been higher. City have helped make the Premier League the place to be, because the best players are here, the best managers and the best football. Still, watching mediocre United teams win title after title - that would definitely have been fun too.

- The Times

Originally published as Samuel: Yes, Man City broke the rules, but the rules protect the old elite