Why the Manchester City controversy strengthens the case for regulatory reform

The news on Monday that Manchester City have been charged with over a hundred breaches of competition regulations by the Premier League unsurprisingly generated much reaction from fans and observers alike. It was a significant step in the slow and rumbling case against the club, which had already resulted in it being – albeit briefly – banned from Uefa’s Champions League back in February 2020.

The case itself is one of the highest profile series of allegations of regulatory breaches in European football history, with the potential consequences clear, dramatic and somewhat open-ended, ranging from docked points to expulsion. In a long-winded world of arbitration and appeal, no immediate conclusion to the saga is likely and it could take years yet before any punishment is dealt. That is not necessarily a cause for pessimism for City’s detractors. The independent commission considering the charges may well yet wield a judgement on the club which serves to shatter the realities of the club’s top-division domination of the last decade and rock the stability of the Premier League for good.

But barring some extraordinary fate for the club which sees it stripped of titles or knocked off its comfortable perch in the Premier League, the latest developments are much more a symptom than a cause. It is part of a much wider story of football’s growing inequities, a story which does not start and end in M11 but reaches across the North West to Bury and Macclesfield, just two of the clubs to go under in recent years due to financial mismanagement. It also implicates the offices of Spain and Italy where the European Super League was cooked up in 2021 to the bemusement and fierce opposition of fans.

And on the very same day that the Man City story broke, the British government announced that the publication of a long-awaited white paper on regulatory reform in the sport would be delayed yet again, this time to the end of this month. Since then, there has been yet another Culture Secretary appointed to oversee this, jeopardising the situation further. The centrepiece of the proposals is the introduction of an independent football regulator with the ability to sanction and reprimand clubs for financial breaches, a body which would be a major move away from the self-regulating structures currently in place.

If found guilty, the Manchester City case could be a watershed for financial regulation in football

The added complexity of this is that the Premier League, which has charged Man City with the alleged financial breaches, are opposed to an independent regulator themselves, keen to see such powers remaining within the FA. In contrast, City are one of the few top clubs in English football to have endorsed one. The timing of the Premier League’s announcement therefore could perhaps be seen as a tactical manoeuvre in a much larger proxy war over regulatory control, a point mooted by football finance analyst Kieran Maguire.

But this only further yet strengthens the argument for an independent regulator. A body like the Premier League is by its very nature compromised when it comes to wider matters of regulation; after all, it first and foremost represents its 20 stakeholders and has never before this case made such a bold step into the realms of Financial Fair Play reprimands. You only have to see the reaction to the news of the developments in the City case to get a glimpse of the likely response to any reprimand. When former Manchester City captain and now-Burnley manager Vincent Kompany was asked for his reaction to the developments, he suggested that the football industry could not “afford to point the finger too many times”. The calls of prejudice, however justified, would only be louder.

Only a truly independent regulator with the teeth and powers to investigate and punish clubs and owners and establish a consistent and coherent set of standards in English football can be trusted with such a task longer-term. The game has for too long been unmanageable and ungovernable and the last few years have given a multitude of examples of the need for greater and tighter scrutiny. If found guilty, the Manchester City case could be a watershed for financial regulation in football. But it cannot be left to this one case alone to set the benchmark for future action.