The elephant in the room - Man City ffp

[FishofContemplation]

The majority of charges will be dismissed because they are "failure to disclose" and "failure to cooperate" rather than actual breaches (103 of the 115). The others will be argued that guidelines weren't clear at the time and practices have changed since the rules became more concrete (around sponsor funding etc).

That sort of thing has always been an issue with EFL equivalent cases. If you have to “tighten the rules” to prohibit some act that you haven’t thought of before, that provides quite a good argument by implication that it wasn’t against the rules before then.

Our experiences with Derby County provided at least three examples of this. EFL rules no longer allow you to sell your ground to a connected entity. They didn’t prohibit it then. Which is why (on the back of evidence of the valuation) Derby won their hearing on that point. EFL rules no longer allow you to amortise player values on anything other than a straight line basis. They didn’t prohibit it then. Which is why Derby were never ordered to although they did in the end do so in the agreed decision. And there was also some obscure a bit of accounting (debt swap between connected companies or something like that) that had since been prohibited, but basically everyone had done before, including us, which Derby fans used to accuse us of hypocrisy.

Fact is, there is a distinct possibility that the EPL will be unable to prove a rule breach because most of these things won’t have been expressly against any rule. Fortunately, most of them now are, which does appear to be causing problems for them up the road.