The jury is in, and we have a verdict.
Manchester City are bang to rights!
Only the sanctions are to be determined.
This prolonged case against the English club began in 2009.
They’ve been found guilty of all but one of the 115 allegations of breaches of the English Premier League’s financial rules.
The import of this is clear to anyone with the facility of reason.
Barney Ronay in the Guardian didn’t hang about:
“Welcome, then, to the age of asterisk. Whatever punishment Manchester City and their owners receive at the end of this process, the fact remains, everything is tainted now.”
It is unthinkable that any heroic member of the Stenography Corps on Planet Fitba would have stated this about their favourite nativist franchise in 2012 or, indeed, in July 2017, when the UK Supreme Court found for HMRC against the Murray group, which owned the original Rangers.
The EBT decade was cheating on an industrial scale.
Fortunately for those in the Blue Room, they had the local media onside.
It was the interventions of outsiders that spoiled the cosy arrangement.
The City of London Police, HMRC, and investigations by journalists from outside Fair Caledonia.
It is now undeniable that the Boumsong raid on Ibrox in 2007 was the hinge factor.
When UEFA’s Financial Sustainability Regulations (FSR) came into force on June 1, 2022, after being approved by the UEFA Executive Committee in April 2022, it was relayed to me by a well-placed source in Nyon that the behaviour of the dead Scottish club had been part of the reasons for the new ordinances.
I discussed these regulations with the President of La Liga, Señor Javier Tebas Medrano, that same year at the Web Summit in Lisboa.
You can read it HERE.
The following day, I had lunch with his Tom Hagen, a seriously bright young Madrileño.
He told me that his boss had only omitted ONE thing from his answers to my questions in the presser:
“Manchester City!”
The main differences between that English club and Rangers (1872-2012) are media scrutiny and the attitude of the respective governing bodies.
You could say that the Ibrox outfit benefited from having friends in low places.
It is hard to imagine a discussion like this in Scotland when the UK Supreme Court found for Hector in 2017.
Alan Morrison’s observation on X yesterday regarding the comparison between City and Rangers is unassailable.
Absolutely spot on!
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