We’re told that a third Manchester City ‘victory’ over the Premier League is ‘not linked’ to the eternally impending verdict on their 115 plus breaches of financial fair play, but in rooting for a perennial loser, we can’t help but feel that those who want to see the book thrown at City are set to be disappointed.
The first Associate Party Transactions (APT) battle was won by City in October 2024, with the sponsorship rules which had ‘unfairly blocked’ two of their deals earlier in that year deemed ‘unlawful’, before a tribunal in February declared those rules ‘null and void’ in what City claimed was a second victory.
Speedily amended rules were voted in by clubs in November, which City continued to rail against before it was announced on Monday that the ‘war has ended’, with City and the Premier League reaching a ‘settlement’ in which the club ‘accepts that the current APT rules are valid and binding’.
It doesn’t sound all that much like victory without the revelation that it ‘paves the way for City to complete a wide-ranging deal with Etihad Airways’ – worth £1bn – which was the very reason for waging this legal war in the first place when their bid to have the airline sponsor their shirts as well as having the naming rights for the stadium was blocked in 2023 as the Premier League claimed it was not considered to be ‘fair market value’.
And you’ve got to wonder about the Premier League’s insistence that this and all future sponsorship deals will continue to go through their stringent FMV process if City are calling this as their third victory, ahead of what feels like an increasingly inevitable and far more significant fourth.
The business as usual (at least off the pitch) culture at the Etihad and what looks to have been – at least from the outside looking in – several examples of the Premier League’s pants being pulled down in arbitration courts by the extraordinarily well-paid lawyers who have argued these APT cases, who we have to assume are akin to the City reserves or even a bomb squad compared to the first XI under Lord Pannick arguing the FFP case, makes the most nuclear punishment possibilities feel like little more than a pipe dream for the City sadists.
If the Kalvin Phillips of lawyers has won them the APT case, the Erling Haaland’s surely crushed the financial fair play arguments.
We all get plenty of mileage and enjoyment out of the relegation prospect, the trophy reallocations and the thought of Pep Guardiola managing in League Two, but although there haven’t been any leaks or hints as to what the punishment might actually be, everything that’s happened since the case was first brought against City suggests it will be a hefty but unfulfilling slap on the wrists at best: a points deduction to rule them out of Europe for a season; a ‘significant’ fine Sheikh Mansour wouldn’t bother to pick up from the ground if it fell from his pocket.
As has been abundantly clear on the pitch for years, City wins beget further wins, and with every reason to believe they’ve built a legal squad as dominant as those peak Guardiola sides, after three victories, the quadruple is surely coming.
