Manchester City have been charged over FFP breaches, but what do we know about it all and what do we not? Because we may be in uncharted territory here.
When I hear ‘Manchester City’ and ‘FFP’ in the same sentence my eyes tend to start glazing over, so what’s happened now?
The Premier League confirmed on Monday morning with a lengthy statement that Manchester City have been charged with more than 100 breaches of its financial rules following a four-year investigation.
What are the charges relating to?
Formally speaking, the club have been charged with failing to provide ‘accurate financial information that gives a true and fair view of the club’s financial position’. More specifically, this relates to details of club revenue, including sponsorship income and operating costs, with further alleged breaches relating to rules requiring full details of manager remuneration from 2009/10 to 2012/13, when Roberto Mancini was in charge, as well as player remuneration during the period between 2010/11 and 2015/16.
The Premier League has said that City breached rules related to UEFA regulations, including Financial Fair Play (FFP) from 2013/14 to 2017/18, and Premier League profit and sustainability rules from 2015/16 to 2017/18.
We’ve been here before, haven’t we’
Well, yes. In 2020 UEFA ruled that City committed ‘serious breaches’ of FFP regulations between 2012 and 2016. They were handed a two-year ban from European competition, but this was later overturned by the Council of Arbitration for Sport. UEFA’s Club Financial Control Body (CFCB) had found that the Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG), the company through which Sheikh Mansour owns City, had funded payments in 2012 and 2013, understood to be £15m each year, that were reported to the Football Association and to UEFA as independent sponsorships from the telecoms company Etisalat.
However, the panel of three lawyers found that it could not consider the legitimacy of the Etisalat payments because they were made more than five years before the UEFA’s CFCB charges were brought in May 2019 so were ‘time-barred’, in accordance with UEFA rules for the CFCB.
Weren’t there some issues over the way in which this was dealt with by CAS?
Funny you should mention that, because there were, actually. Some European sports lawyers questioned the independence of the panel member nominated by City, Andrew McDougall QC, a partner in the international law firm White and Case….
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