Abu Dhabi Franchise May Do As It Wants

[Uilleam 5,440]

Hot off the press!!

 

We will have to wait a few days for the full judgement; well, Coronavirus has lengthened the time taken to clear deposits. 

 

Manchester City's Champions League ban lifted by court of arbitration for sport

Cas also reduces City’s fine to €10m

City have denied wrongdoing throughout

David Conn

Mon 13 Jul 2020 09.34 BSTLast modified on Mon 13 Jul 2020 09.56 BST

 

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/jul/13/manchester-city-champions-league-ban-lifted-cas-court-of-arbitration-for-sport

 

 

Manchester City’s two-year ban from the Champions League for a serious breach of Uefa’s financial fair play rules has been overturned by the court of arbitration for sport, which has also reduced the club’s fine to €10m (£9m) from €30m.

Cas’s panel of three lawyers found that City failed to cooperate with the investigations by Uefa’s club financial control body (CFCB), which oversees FFP compliance, begun in February last year, and imposed the €10m fine for that. The panel said City had shown a “disregard” for the principle that clubs must cooperate with a governing body’s investigations, and conducted an “obstruction of the investigations”.

 

However on the central finding by the CFCB’s “adjudicatory chamber” (AC) that City’s Abu Dhabi ownership had disguised their own funding as independent sponsorship by the state’s commercial companies, Cas found “most of the alleged breaches were either not established or time-barred”.

As those were the most serious findings, that had resulted in the AC banning City from European competition for two years, “clearly more significant violations than obstructing [Uefa’s] investigations, it was not appropriate to impose a ban on participating in Uefa’s club competitions for MCFC’s failure to cooperate with the CFCB’s investigations alone,” Cas said.

 

The quashing of the two-year ban represents a major victory for City’s hierarchy in the conclusion of this bitterly-contested episode, and a defeat for Uefa and its semi-independent CFCB structures. No full judgment was issued by Cas, only a brief one-page press release, so the full reasons and explanations will not be made public for “a few days,” Cas said.

City said in a statement: “The club welcomes the implications of today’s ruling as a validation of the cub’s position and the body of evidence that it was able to present. The club wishes to thank the panel members for their diligence and the due process that they administered.”

City, whose executives had furiously denied wrongdoing and throughout a 20-month saga consistently accused Uefa’s processes and decision-makers of being biased against the club, had appealed to Cas after the adjudicatory chamber of Uefa’s club financial control body (CFCB) imposed the sanctions in February.

The Champions League ban, a most severe sanction, and a €30m fine were imposed by the CFCB after it concluded that City had committed “serious breaches” of Uefa’s FFP regulations “by overstating its sponsorship revenue in its accounts and in the break-even information submitted to Uefa between 2012 and 2016”.

 

Uefa said in response to Monday’s verdict: “Uefa notes that the CAS panel found that there was insufficient conclusive evidence to uphold all of the CFCB’s conclusions in this specific case and that many of the alleged breaches were time-barred due to the five-year time period foreseen in the Uefa regulations.

“Over the last few years, financial fair play has played a significant role in protecting clubs and helping them become financially sustainable and Uefa and ECA [European Club Association] remain committed to its principles.”

The lifting of the ban will come as a huge relief to City in terms of status, finance, their prospects of retaining Pep Guardiola as manager beyond the end of his contract next season and their hopes of holding on to key players and attracting signings. Kevin De Bruyne had publicly said he would review his situation if the ban were upheld.

The guilty finding followed an investigation sparked by the publication of “leaked” emails and documents by the German magazine Der Spiegel in November 2018. A selection of the published City documents appeared to show that City’s owner, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan of the Abu Dhabi ruling family, was mostly funding the huge, £67.5m annual sponsorship of the City shirt, stadium and academy by his country’s airline, Etihad. One of the leaked emails suggested that only £8m of that sponsorship in 2015-16 was funded directly by Etihad and the rest was coming from Mansour’s own company vehicle for the ownership of City, the Abu Dhabi United Group.

FFP rules are aimed at encouraging clubs to break even and spend only money they make in revenues, not pay excessively for players in wages and transfer fees subsidised by outside funding from owners. The system means that sponsorships are an important element of clubs’ financial reporting and ability to sign players, and must truly be commercial revenues from outside companies, not disguised owner funding.

City refused to comment or engage with initial inquiries from Uefa and the CFCB’s investigatory chamber, on the basis that the emails had been leaked or stolen. Der Spiegel, in its extensive coverage, had anonymised its source as “John”, and quoted him saying he had not hacked computers to obtain the emails.

Shortly after Der Spiegel’s publication, the source was identified as a Portuguese national, Rui Pinto, who was arrested shortly afterwards and has been charged with 147 criminal offences, including hacking and other cybercrimes, which he denies. The charges relate to Portuguese football clubs and other organisations, not to the “leaks” of City’s or Uefa’s emails.

After the CFCB’s investigatory chamber began a formal inquiry to examine whether the documents did expose the overstatement of sponsorship income, City initially welcomed it, and said they would present evidence to show “the accusation of financial irregularities are entirely false”. However the investigatory chamber was not convinced, and charged the club last May.

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The adjudicatory chamber, chaired by José Narciso da Cunha Rodrigues, a former general prosecutor in Portugal, and including the prominent English sports law barrister Charles Flint QC, determined after hearings in January that City had indeed committed serious breaches of FFP, and also that the club had failed to co-operate in the investigation carried out by the investigatory chamber.

City then issued a public statement accusing the process of having been “prejudicial” and claiming it had ignored “a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence”. Declaring that they did not recognise that the CFCB and its senior lawyers operate independently of Uefa itself City alleged that it was “a case initiated by Uefa, prosecuted by Uefa and judged by Uefa”. The club’s statement expressed confidence that they would get “an impartial judgment” at Cas.

A few days later, however, City’s chief executive Ferran Soriano acknowledged the independence of the CFCB chambers, by saying of them: “This is not Uefa,” and describing Uefa as an “association of associations” with people who work “very hard for the benefit of … the clubs of Uefa like ours, but also for the benefit of football”.

 

Edited July 13, 2020 by Uilleam

[compo 6,150]

When you employ the best lawyers that money can buy you get results 

[BlackSocksRedTops 3,483]

10 million pounds fine? What is the point? That's close to 4 players monthly salary for them 

[Bill 13,717]

There are two choices. Either Man City's acquittal is corrupt or UEFA's charges were incompetent. Either way it says a lot about the continuing decline of football as a fair and competitive sport. Cheating is endemic in football. Players cheat routinely at game level, clubs cheat at every opportunity and those running the game make the mafia look like the Salvation Army.

 

It's hardly unique in the "sporting" world but football has become so seedy, the stench of corruption so pervasive, that were it not for my deep attachment to Rangers I wouldn't cross the street to watch another game. UEFA, FIFA, names that make your skin creep, run for and by the rich and the very rich. It's like Celtic in Scotland, only on a grand scale. 

 

[alexscottislegend 2,070]

I'm beginning to hate that club. You just knew it would be overturned by the way the BBC and others kept focusing on the countdown to the appeal in their headlines.

I think corruption may have started, or at least have been accelerated, by the abandonment of amateurism in the Olympics and Rugby Union. 

[Devil's advocaat 1,276]

Quote

It's hardly unique in the "sporting" world but football has become so seedy, the stench of corruption so pervasive, that were it not for my deep attachment to Rangers I wouldn't cross the street to watch another game

Absolutely spot on sir.

 

 

[compo 6,150]

As long as money is not stolen or the proceeds of crime then it's no one's business how much they spend or how they spend it City have been great for the English game this past decade more power to their wallets ?

[Uilleam 5,440]

The Guardian -rather odly, perhaps, prior to the CAS release of its full verdict- attempts to explain the judgement and its implications. 

 

Manchester City decision does not mean end of Financial Fair Play

Uefa quick to reaffirm its commitment to system it maintains has overwhelmingly improved European football’s finances

David Conn

Mon 13 Jul 2020 19.57 BSTLast modified on Mon 13 Jul 2020 22.14 BST

 

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/jul/13/manchester-city-cas-decision-not-mean-end-of-financial-fair-play-uefa

 

In the immediate reaction to the court of arbitration for sport quashing Manchester City’s two-year Champions League ban, there was a view that Uefa’s financial fair play system is finished, after such a thumping defeat for its compliance structures. But given the brief Cas statement that presented an odd conundrum to conclude an extraordinary saga, and Uefa’s response, reports of FFP’s death appear to be an exaggeration.

Cas does appear to have swung a wrecking ball towards the FFP rules and the Uefa structures that govern Europe’s top-flight clubs by agreement, but perhaps not in the way assumed. The three lawyers on the Cas panel did reverse the guilty verdict of Uefa’s club financial control body’s “adjudicatory chamber” (AC), which found City’s owner, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, of the Abu Dhabi ruling family, disguised some multimillions of his own funding as independent sponsorships from Abu Dhabi companies. However the circumstances, the Cas finding that City failed to cooperate with, and even obstructed, the investigations of European football’s governing body would normally appear quite damning of a club.

 

A €10m (£9m) fine for that is not nothing, and would hurt most European sports organisations, but for City, with revenues of £535m last year and Abu Dhabi’s mega-wealth behind them, it barely touches the sides. So the sanction to a club was relatively minimal for obstructing a governing body’s investigation and that, rather than the overturning of the CFCB’s conclusions, looks as if it could do Uefa some damage.

There was too little detail published to make full sense of the remarkable conclusion, victorious for City, of a 20-month ordeal that began with the German magazine Der Spiegel publishing leaks of selected internal City documents that appeared to show Mansour subsidising the sponsorship by Etihad, the Abu Dhabi airline. Cas delivered its monumental reversal of the AC’s findings with barely a page, promising the full judgment explaining it all will be published in a few days.

Logically, though, the outlines can be traced of how the panel picked their way to this conclusion. One of their main findings was that some of the breaches found by the AC to have been proven were “time‑barred”. The relevant rule, article 37 in the CFCB handbook, is that “prosecution is barred after five years for all breaches of the Uefa club licensing and FFP regulations”.

We must await the judgment to find how Cas decided the AC got that wrong, but it is inconceivable the AC and the “investigatory chamber” (IC) that brought the charges did not consider that carefully before starting out, presumably with their own legal advice. So there appears to have been a lawyers’ debate at Cas about the date prosecution technically started, which Uefa lost.

 

Does the court of arbitration for sport decision conclude City’s financial fair play trials? Very likely, yes. In principle Uefa haves a right to contest findings on legal points in a Swiss court, but European football’s governing body has given no indication that it intends to. So City, although found by Cas to have not cooperated and to have obstructed the investigations of Uefa’s club financial control body, have succeeded in having the Champions League ban overturned, apparently by presenting a fuller case to Cas. An ordeal that began with allegations based on “leaks” published by Der Spiegel in November 2018 appears to be over, with no worse sanction for the club than a €10m fine for the obstruction of the Uefa investigations.

What were the key findings of the Cas decision? The full ruling is not yet available, but Cas has issued a one-page press release of its findings. On the central serious finding by the adjudicatory chamber (AC) of Uefa’s CFCB, that City’s owner, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan of the Abu Dhabi ruling family, had subsidised sponsorships from Abu Dhabi companies, Cas found the charges were “either not established or time-barred.” According to the CFCB procedural rules, a prosecution must be brought within five years of alleged breaches. Clearly the AC believed the prosecution was brought within that time, but the Cas panel of three lawyers decided it was not. The Cas panel said the charges for the unproven “concealment of equity funding” allegations were “clearly more significant” than obstructing the CFCB investigations, so lifted the Champions League ban but imposed the €10m fine.

What have City said? After the AC found the charges proven in February, City attacked Uefa and both chambers of the CFCB as biased, saying in a statement the case was “initiated by Uefa, prosecuted by Uefa and judged by Uefa”. Days later the club’s chief executive, Ferran Soriano, was more conciliatory, saying “Uefa is much bigger than this FFP chamber” and praising Uefa as “an association of associations”, which has “many people that work … very hard for the benefit of Uefa, but also for the benefit of the clubs of Uefa like ours”. This time, the club issued a short statement, “welcoming the implications of today’s ruling as a validation of the Club’s position” and thanking the Cas panel members “for their diligence and the due process that they administered”.

 

The other alleged breaches, Cas said in its statement, were found to be “not established”. So City appear to have disproved the main allegation that Mansour funded the bulk of the £67.5m sponsorship by Etihad during 2015-16.

The AC, staffed by European lawyers of a similar seniority to those who serve on Cas, including the English barrister Charles Flint QC, did find when they banned City from the Champions League and fined the club €30m that City had failed to cooperate with the IC’s investigation. That is the one element of the CFCB conclusions Cas has upheld. Cas noted the importance of clubs cooperating with such investigations and imposed the €10m fine for the club’s “disregard of such principle and its obstruction of the investigations”.

City, having explicitly accused the IC, the AC and Uefa of bias in their official reaction to the guilty finding in February, responded to Cas by thanking the panel members and saying the club “welcomes the implications of today’s ruling as a validation of the club’s position and the body of evidence it was able to present”.

 

That leads to the question of how the CFCB could be expected to reach a full conclusion on the evidence if City were seemingly not cooperating to present it. The relatively puny slap from Cas, which appears to have overturned that conclusion based on fuller evidence provided by the club, is hardly a standard-setting deterrent for other clubs who might think of being obstructive.

As for FFP, there is no reason for this to sound its death knell. Uefa, which has otherwise said very little throughout the ups and downs of this rollercoaster, was quick after the ruling to reaffirm its commitment to a system it maintains has overwhelmingly improved European football’s finances. In January, Uefa released its latest annual “benchmarking” report, showing that in 2018 European top‑flight clubs made a profit overall for the second year running, compared with a total €5bn in losses made during the three years before FFP was introduced in 2011.

City’s Abu Dhabi hierarchy have always loathed these rules, the requirement to spend what a club makes in revenues, and for owners to invest in long-term structures such as the stadium and youth development rather than on signing players, seeing them as a block to their mega-project. But the Premier League, which was disdainful at first, saw the turnaround and introduced its own FFP system in 2013, which immediately reined in overspending on players’ wages and transformed a position overall of financial chaos to stability.

 

“Financial Fair Play has played a significant role in protecting clubs and helping them become financially sustainable,” Uefa said in its statement, “and Uefa and ECA remain committed to its principles.”

The reference to the ECA was significant: it is the association of top clubs, 246 across Europe, which has a formal memorandum of understanding with Uefa, including the commitment: “To continue to cooperate for the further development of Uefa … Financial Fair Play, which is an initiative undertaken in a collaborative manner to protect the viability, sustainability and benefit of European club football as a whole.”

City, as an ECA member, are signed up to that and while there are signals the rules will be modified, updated in as yet unspecified measures, football is extremely unlikely to return to a free-for-all of owner funding.

For City, after an ordeal when they failed to cooperate with Uefa, repeatedly accusing the organisation and its FFP trustees of bias, the club are assured of being where they have fought so hard to be next season: in the Uefa Champions League.

Edited July 14, 2020 by Uilleam

[Uilleam 5,440]

Oh, and there's more....

if the eyes have not glazed over..

 

Manchester City v Uefa final score: New Money 1 Old Money 0 (aet)

Barney Ronay

Overturning their two-year Champions League ban should not be seen as a reason for celebrating in the streets, but this is football so it probably will be

 @barneyronay

Mon 13 Jul 2020 18.23 BSTLast modified on Mon 13 Jul 2020 23.34 BST

 

 

If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. If there was ever any doubt that Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed was playing this game to win, such thoughts will have been erased for good by the success of Manchester City’s stunning, potentially transformative appeal against the judicial processes of European football.

This being football, the success of City’s supremely powerful legal team in junking a flawed two-year ban will no doubt be cast in the most binary terms.

 

For the most partisan areas of the club’s support, and indeed for some of the surrounding media, the judicial panel’s decision will be seen as “a sensational victory” in the classic football style: cause for dancing in the streets, beer thrown in the air, taunting memes, perhaps even a kind of heartwarming underdog story.

Who knows, perhaps it really is testimony to the beauty of sport that previously unknown boundlessly wealthy billionaires can stand up to rules framed to protect the interests of more established boundlessly wealthy billionaires. Either way the scoreline looks decisive. New Money 1 Old Money 0 (aet).

At the other extreme there will be a temptation to see City’s victory as another strand in a wider global truth. Plate sin with gold and the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks. Or in other words, if you don’t like the justice you receive, please ask your sales adviser as there are other, more expensive versions available.

Financial fair play was put in place to control the richest players at European football’s table. But the richest players can also afford the best lawyers. Certainly, they can afford better lawyers than those at Uefa’s disposal, judging by an oddly brittle case reliant on time-barred complaints. A two-year ban seemed punitive at the time. No ban at all, despite having obstructed Uefa’s process, seems lenient, but is perhaps a reaction to the former.

 

As ever, the truth is more nuanced than either of those polarities. There are probably two things worth saying right now. First, this is not in any sense a victory for the little man. The little man was never involved in this battle in the first place. No doubt they will be dancing in the streets of global billionaire overclass this evening, but this would also have been the case had the decision gone in Uefa’s favour.

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This argument has always been about the divvying up of wealth and privilege among the already wealthy and privileged. By way of example, one likely upshot of City losing this case would have been Manchester United taking their place in the Champions League next season. Which of these outcomes makes the most sporting sense? Which feels most like evidence of life-affirming social mobility? Which model of hyper-capitalism – state-backed, or leveraged buyout – do you prefer?

 

It is worth remembering this in any debate about fairness. There are no Ewoks here. Everyone is Darth Vader. And money – either the money you like, or the money you don’t like – is always winning this game.

This is not to say City’s victory will leave European football unchanged. The FFP rules were always a strange construct, born out of the sensible idea of restricting unsustainable debt, but also shot through with a grandiose pseudo-socialism cooked up during Michel Platini’s time at Uefa. Platini talked about wanting to “protect football from business”, and argued that cultural protectionism was justified, that the unfettered free market was not applicable to football.

 

In the years since the debt burden has been stabilised. But the rules have also protected this notion of ancestral privilege. In 11 seasons of FFP football the Champions League has still been dominated by the same top 10 wealthiest clubs from the year it first came in to play, clubs that have become ever more untouchable each year.

Barcelona, member-owned but with a historic dual-stranglehold on Spanish football, are deemed good. The arriviste overspending of a jobbing billionaire is bad. But how is anyone to break into this world? And what kind of appalling mismanagement would it take to actually fall out of it (ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce you to: Arsenal)?

 

All of which brings us on, finally, to football and to the immediate future of a City squad whose basic existence had been cast as a crime against sport, but which is now free to continue its pursuit of a more familiar kind of glory.

There was no public indication Pep Guardiola might have left had the ban been upheld. Those in the know seemed to suggest he was staying in any case. But Guardiola can now see out his contract with the added boost of two shots in 10 months at the competition he covets most.

The talk of late-20s star players agitating for a move is also dead in the water. This team have a free run from here, invigorated by a galvanising sense of righteousness, and with players fit and in form.

Signings will be required: a high‑class centre-half, perhaps a better heir to Fernandinho, perhaps even another centre‑forward. But who would bet against this sublime City team storming their way through Uefa’s mini club Euros in Portugal next month, or indeed against the narrative gold of a meeting in the final with a strong and settled Paris Saint-Germain?

As a season-ending Uefa showpiece it is hard to imagine a better reminder that this has always been about money versus money: new, old, or even newer. Or indeed that the greatest failure of FFP in the last few years isn’t City’s case, but the absurdity of PSG spending £1bn on transfers, successfully skewing their own domestic league in perpetuity, and still escaping any real restraint.

In the wake of such cases there is a view the greatest legacy of FFP will be to undermine Uefa’s own notions of centralised control, ushering ever closer some kind of private equity breakaway league. This is still some way off. But Uefa’s authority, not to mention its basic sense of competence, is seriously undermined. And let’s face it, fair play was never really a part of this argument in the first place.

[Uilleam 5,440]

13 hours ago, compo said:

As long as money is not stolen or the proceeds of crime then it's no one's business how much they spend or how they spend it City have been great for the English game this past decade more power to their wallets ?

Well, it skews competition completely when one, or more, competitors have no incentive, or obligation, to operate commercially, and generate by their own activities the wherewithal to invest and reinvest. 

Abu Dhabi's Manchester franchise, and "Paris" Saint-Germain perhaps are the most egregious examples of this. That the Manchester concession has not completely dominated the league is down to the fact that other teams seems to have generated sufficient income to challenge. 

I do have to note that the recent UEFA charges relate to several years ago, although I am loathe to assume that the franchise is now wholly self financing, and that its income contains no disguised subsidies. 

 

I have no time for UEFA -or FIFA, for that matter, (nor for the SFA, but I don't wish to lower debate to the level of music hall comedy)- although it seems to be on a hiding to nothing, here. Quite clearly it can't police the game, effectively, and equally clearly, the Clubs have, at present, little appetite for doing so themselves.

For the Clubs to take charge would require removing themselves from UEFA's ambit, almost entirely, and coming to rather complex agreements on financing the game, involving salary caps, strictures relating investment to income, rules on state aid, and so forth. They would, in other words, need to move towards an American model of sports/business, which is, after all, successful.....

It would be football, Compo, but not as we know it.