Man city escape ban! Or did they? [Update 6/2/23]

Caporegime
Joined
28 Jan 2003
Posts
39,857
Location
England
Add an asterisk to every title they’ve won lol.

they’ll be the Juve of the premier league, no one is gonna give a **** what they won because they’ll be branded as cheats.
 
Caporegime
Joined
17 Oct 2002
Posts
27,635
Location
Lancs/London
I'd wait until the appeal before thinking they're out for 2 years, some money will grease UEFAs filthly palms and i'd be surprised if they didn't get off somehow.
 

And

And

Associate
Joined
7 Dec 2002
Posts
1,079
Bravo, you missed the point of my question :D

Because the whole thing is a corrupt racket in much the same way as Spanish clubs being bankrolled by the state.

The BBC seems to think that City losing the CL money won’t effect them financially because of their rich owners which makes 0 sense. If they couldn’t abide by FFP with the CL money, they certainly won’t be able to without. They would just keep getting banned.
 
Don
Joined
9 Jun 2004
Posts
46,152
Wait for the City ground to suddenly be full to capacity every single game despite the ticket price having shot up to £300 a ticket, and City suddenly making £200mil a year from Stadium income. At the same time Qatar make a donation to a new Manchester Charity that funds tickets for fans who, can't afford them, can't work, or don't like Mondays.

Magically City can afford to run at a profit again.
You mean Abu Dhabi and they're going to do exactly what they're in the dock for now? That would be brave.

The challenges facing City, if this ban is upheld, won't just be limited to the £100m odd of legit revenue they stand to lose but how much (more) of the dodgy revenue will be wiped off the books? Everybody knows City massively inflated their commercial revenue with deals from Abu Dhabi owned companies but back in 2014 when City were initially charged, UEFA didn't just discount all revenue they received from these deals, they just reduced them to a 'fair market value'. I'm not sure exactly how much UEFA reduced these deals by but if we take the Etihad deal alone, according to the leaked emails, that deal was worth £65m per season. Did UEFA reduce this to £50m? £40m? I doubt they'd have reduced it by much more than this. The leaked emails that have resulted in this ban show that Etihad were only paying £8m per season, with the other £57m coming direct from Abu Dhabi. That's potentially another £40m hole in City's accounts. There's then the £25m odd they received from selling players image rights to a 3rd party, which leaked emails show were being funded by Abu Dhabi.

If UEFA/the PL now find against City on the basis of these leaked emails, they're surely going to remove another £60m-100m of revenue from City's accounts when they do their FFP calculations, on top of the £100m odd they're going to lose from being out of the CL.
 
Don
Joined
9 Jun 2004
Posts
46,152
I'd wait until the appeal before thinking they're out for 2 years, some money will grease UEFAs filthly palms and i'd be surprised if they didn't get off somehow.
That's one way of looking at it. Another way is to say that UEFA are very close with the Qatari's at PSG, with the top dog at PSG now on the UEFA board, and it fair to say that Qatar and Abu Dhabi are not best friends right now following Abu Dhabi's decision (along with the rest of the UAE, Saudi Arabia and others) to cut all political ties with Qatar.
 
Don
Joined
9 Jun 2004
Posts
46,152
There is a key difference between City's CAS hearing and previous hearings, such as Milan's. City haven't simply been banned for failing to meet FFP's breakeven limits as Milan were. They were already charged with that back in 2014 when UEFA determined that City had numerous commercial deals with related parties above a fair value and as such reduced these. What City have now been charged with is deceiving UEFA after the leaked emails showed that these commercial deals weren't even commercial deals - the money wasn't coming from Etihad etc, the money was coming directly from Abu Dhabi. City conspired to cheat FFP with lies and fake invoices.
 
Associate
Joined
8 Mar 2013
Posts
1,824
Location
Chiang Mai
Also they've only been proven to be cheating from 2014-18 but in reality have probably been cheating the whole time. The true level of how bad it has been might never be known, they should reopen investigations going right back to the start of their new ownership in 2008 and start totting up punishments.

Honestly cant stand city and want to see them punished into non existence. They cheated and lied to Uefa / the FA for everything they ever accomplished. wipe the footballing world clean of them.

Will be interesting to see if the FA has any backbone now that Uefa has finally done something. There's 3 or 4 other investigations on going and you have to think they will all find them guilty as well.
 
Don
Joined
9 Jun 2004
Posts
46,152
It has nothing to do with the FA. The Premier League are already investigating whether City have breached their own FFP rules and should UEFA's charge stand up to the CAS appeal then it will be very difficult for the PL to do anything but issue their own charges. There's no issues with finances pre 2011/12 as FFP didn't begin until that season and City's charge in 2014 related to their finances from the 11/12 to 13/14 seasons. The latest charge is related to new evidence that shows City didn't just fail to meet FFP limits but they deceived UEFA into believing they were closer to the limits than they actually were.

City met the FFP limits in the seasons from 14/15 to today however the leaked emails do raise the possibility that City may not have done without the creative accounting that's been uncovered. Whether UEFA will look again at these subsequent years to see whether City failed to meet FFP then too or whether this current charge covers every thing from 2011/12 right through until today, I'm not sure. I suspect the latter though.

I honestly have no idea what will happen at CAS. Part of me wonders whether UEFA have issued this punishment simply to show that they've done something and that City will spend £1bn on the best lawyers in the world to get it overturned, which has been the case with previous Europea bans handed out by UEFA. The flip side to that is this is a much more serious charge than what resulted in AC Milan being banned (which was overturned by CAS), UEFA would have been fully aware of how hard City would fight this and would they put themselves in a position where they could be bankrupted by City? You then look at the 3 people that handed out this punishment and you've got some very serious people with a former Belgium Prime Minister, a Judge at the European Court of Justice and some hotshot British QC.

Whatever happens, it has the potential for something both brutal and hillarious. Imagine Utd or Everton finishing 5th. City's CAS appeal would literally be a no lose situation.
 
Don
Joined
9 Jun 2004
Posts
46,152
Disqualify them before their appeal has been heard? That's clearly not going to happen.

Reading some articles last night, the charges relate to the period of 2012/13 and 2015/16 with some speculation that if found guilty and if the PL also find them guilty in their investigation, City could potentially be docked points retrospectively and have their 13/14 title stripped from them. Who came 2nd that season? :p
 

fez

fez

Caporegime
Joined
22 Aug 2008
Posts
25,023
Location
Tunbridge Wells
Mourinho pretending to be nice to City when in reality he is basically saying "they have a 2 year ban but lets see how they wriggle out of this one before we get too excited".
 
Don
Joined
9 Jun 2004
Posts
46,152
What do we reckon the final "ban" will be. Slap on the wrist. Comical fine? Banned from the rest of this seasons CL?

Genuinely I have no clue. Part of me thinks UEFA issued the ban expecting CAS to overturn it just so they can say 'we tried'. Then again, the charges against City are far more serious than previous times UEFA suspended clubs.

I'm not sure banning them for the remainder of this season will be an option. If I were to guess then I'd say it'll either be a fine or a 1 year ban but that's nothing more than a guess.
 
Back
Top Bottom