by Chris Harris
New Order’s Power, Corruption & Lies is one of Manchester’s great albums. More than forty years later, its title provides an irresistible starting point for looking at Manchester City, extraordinary wealth, football regulation and what happens when the credibility of the competition itself comes into question.
There is a wonderful irony in the fact that one of the great albums to come out of Manchester is New Order’s Power, Corruption & Lies, because you would struggle to find three words that better describe the mess modern football has created for itself, through the conduit of Manchester City
Twenty years ago Manchester City were a large, historic and frequently unsuccessful football club, chaired by Manchester businessman John Wardle, whose supporters had endured relegations and false dawns while watching Manchester United conquer the world. Everybody liked Man City because they weren’t Man United and because of their ability to make a mess of things. Quirky even.
After the brief Thaksin Shinawatra interlude, City were bought in 2008 by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of Abu Dhabi’s ruling family and now vice-president and deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, and within a remarkably short period became one of the richest and most successful football clubs on the planet.
Critics, including Amnesty International, have described Abu Dhabi’s involvement with City as “sportswashing”, essentially using sport to create positive international associations that can overshadow less comfortable questions about a state’s human-rights record. City and those associated with its ownership dispute that characterisation, and none of this should be laid at the feet of City supporters, particularly those who were watching them play Macclesfield and York rather than Real Madrid and Bayern Munich.
The problem is much bigger than City. Over the past thirty years, top-flight English football has morphed from something rooted in ordinary communities into a fantastically wealthy international entertainment product, bankrolled to an enormous extent by television and sold around the world as the greatest league on earth. Even at my own beloved Crystal Palace you increasingly see people more interested in the Premier League and relative success than the history, peculiarities and meaning of the club itself.
Manchester City are the perfect expression of that change because they have delivered success on an astonishing scale, and some of the football played under Pep Guardiola has been magnificent. But sport depends upon one extremely simple principle: everybody competes under the same rules.
City were charged in 2023 with 115 alleged breaches of Premier League financial regulations following an investigation stretching back years. The Athletic reported that Manchester City had been found guilty on 114 of the 115 charges. The BBC says it has independently been told that the panel has ruled and that the majority of the charges were upheld.. The judgment has not yet been published, no punishment has been announced, and City are expected to appeal, so the process is not finished, but what is already indefensible is the extraordinary length of time it has taken.
During all these years City have continued winning titles, cups, a Champions League and the Treble while the Premier League has struggled to determine whether its own rules were being followed. The complexity of the case is understandable, but City’s ability to employ the finest lawyers money can buy cannot become a reason why football is incapable of regulating them, because at that point wealth itself becomes protection from regulation.
The Rangers comparison isn’t exact, because the old Rangers company entered administration and liquidation before the new company entered the Scottish league structure in the fourth tier, but the important point is that Scottish football faced an enormous crisis and dealt with its consequences, relegating them to the bottom flight of Scottish football to swim with the minnows. The Premier League appears terrified of doing anything comparable, perhaps because Manchester City have become such an important part of the very product it is selling.
That is precisely why, if the reported findings survive appeal, the punishment has to mean something. A fine to an ownership of almost unimaginable wealth is merely an operating expense, and if the proven offences are serious enough to warrant expulsion, then expel them. Rules that cease to be enforceable when somebody is rich enough to challenge them aren’t really rules.
It also inevitably affects Guardiola’s legacy if serious financial breaches are ultimately established. Guardiola remains an exceptional manager and his teams have played extraordinary football, but comparisons with Ferguson and the other great managers become more complicated if one side was operating with a financial advantage obtained by breaking the regulations intended to govern the competition. A level playing field isn’t an optional extra in sport; it is what gives sporting achievement its meaning.
This is part of a much wider decline in football’s moral authority. FIFA under Gianni Infantino talks incessantly about respect, unity and integrity while repeatedly finding itself embroiled in controversies about governance, commercial interests and its relationships with governments and host nations, and English football is hardly in a position to lecture anybody when money increasingly appears to dictate what it is prepared to tolerate.
If City’s reported findings are overturned on appeal, the club will quite rightly be entitled to shout that from the rooftops. If they stand, however, football cannot produce an enormous fine, deduct a few points and return to selling television subscriptions as though nothing happened.
But one thing is unquestionable: all the success was meaningless. History will regard this dominance by Manchester City as something garnered through cheating, ergo, meaningless. Because money corrupted the success. A regime and ownership who do not understand decency and fair play ultimately have found that you can’t just throw money at things to win them. Around the world, you face the court of public opinion; this you cannot buy. The opinion will be damning.
Seemingly, they are now paying someone to £5000 an hour to get them out of the mire they are in through technical interpretations. Again, they are throwing money at something to get what they want. But all that will be akin to a murderer that everybody knows committed the crime; they may get off on a technicality, but the stench around them will remain, as everybody knows he did it.
The saddest part is that Manchester City’s genuine supporters have gone through the wringer all of their lives; finally, success comes, and I guess it is in the City DNA, even that turns out to be a load of old crap, although a trait that explains why lots of older football fans used to have a soft spot for them. So maybe the real winner here is football’s propensity to kick you in the balls!
Make both our days by buying a copy of my book!
Something About England: Amazon.co.uk: Harris, Mr Christopher, Turner, Louise: 9798181129351: Books
Welcome to Denham, a fictitious Sussex village where behind respectable doors, well-tended gardens and familiar faces, things have a habit of going badly wrong.
Obsession, ambition, deception, jealousy and petty rivalry run through this collection of tragi-comical and satirical short stories. From poltergeists and lottery winners to cricket club feuds and environmental disasters, ordinary people embark on discovering just how quickly an ordinary life can unravel into an extraordinary mess.
Darkly funny, occasionally poignant and populated by characters who are rarely quite what they seem, these stories explore the peculiarities of Middle England, and the uncomfortable territory between respectability and ruin.
