Tommy Martin: City’s past now as much at stake as their future

One thing that came as news to me out of this whole Manchester City affair was that the Premier League had its own Financial Fair Play regulations.

I knew about the Uefa version, obviously (typical meddling from the banana-straightening Eurocrats). But the idea that the world’s most rampantly free-market sports league had any measure of financial regulation seemed unlikely.

Picture the Premier League’s FFP department: A dingy broom cupboard located in a basement corridor, staffed by a man in a cardigan snoozing peacefully. Suddenly the phone rings. The man awakes with a start, wipes drool from his mouth, and stares at the phone.

That’s weird, he thinks. The phone never rings.

“Hel..cough..hello?” A voice starts shouting at him about the Man City file. Suddenly he’s on his feet and, behind a mop bucket and some JIF bottles, he finds it. Time to get to work. Time to shine. He cranks up the Commodore 64 on his desk...

The ultimate outcome of Uefa’sdecision to ban City from the Champions League for two seasons will be decided by the legal beaks of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), with their focus on precedence, process, and arcane minutiae.

But ultimately, whenever the legal arguments are played out and a final decision has been arrived at, and if City’s punishments are upheld, then this will be another discussion about cheating.

It will be about crime and punishment.

It will be like Saracens and Rangers and Juventus and all the dopers who denied clean athletes their deserved medals.

The club maintain they have done nothing wrong, but if they have, then our friend in the Premier League broom cupboard will be busy.

In the aftermath of Uefa’s decision, it was reported that the Premier League were also investigating the same issues and that, under their rules, retrospective points deductions could be applied.

Uefa’s ban punishes City’s future: Two seasons without Champions League football could destabilise the club as we know it, prompting players to leave and denying them the revenues needed to square their books legitimately.

A Premier League punishment that involved retrospective points deductions would be something else entirely: An attack on their history and their legacy.

A punishment that led to them being stripped of their 2014 Premier League title has been suggested as a possibility and it is one that you will hear more about if the current process goes against City.

WHILE large fines and competition bans hurt, being stripped of titles is the ultimate indignity in sport’s criminal justice system.

It is the idea that if you have stolen something, then you should be made to give it back. It’s a penal morality that even a child can understand, but its clarity is usually shrouded in legal fog.

Premiership Rugby found that when Saracens were found guilty of breaching the league’s salary cap. According to their rules they could not act retrospectively to strip Saracens of their 2018 and 2019 league titles, even though they were won within the time period in which the club were found to be in breach.

Similarly, with the campaign to strip Rangers of the five Scottish titles they won between 2001 and 2011, during which the club were found to be operating secret Employee Benefit Trusts (EBTs) in a tax avoidance scheme.

In 2013 an independent SPL commission found that the payments, while meaning that players were not properly registered, did not give Rangers an ‘unfair sporting advantage’.

To say this judgement raised eyebrows, particularly on the other side of Glasgow, is an understatement.

Even when a Scottish Supreme Court decision in 2017 declared the payments unlawful, the league found that they had no legal power to modify the previous decision.

Naturally, the right and wrongs of the rightful ownership of those titles continues to be debated across Scottish football’s tribal divide.

Titles are not easily given up, no matter how they were won. Juventus were relegated to Serie B and stripped of their 2005 and 2006 Serie A championships due to the Calciopoli corruption scandal.

When their general manager Luciano Moggi was partially acquitted of criminal charges relating to the affair, they sued the Italian football federation looking for damages and the reinstatement of their titles.

Their case was thrown out by the Italian Supreme Court in 2015, but the Juventus official website lays claim to 37 scudetti, a number that includes the two lost titles that, in their minds, are still rightfully theirs.

In an ironic twist, current Rangers manager Steven Gerrard has an interest in how the Manchester City case plays out.

In fact, he is “really, really interested in it…for obvious reasons.”

It was Gerrard’s infamous slip in Liverpool’s crucial Premier League match against Chelsea in 2014 that is popularly accepted as the moment that cost his team the title and handed it to City.

“All I say is I’m very interested because of the severity of what Uefa have put out there,” Gerrard said this week. “That tells me that something has gone badly wrong. We will see how that progresses.”

It must be a tantalising prospect for Gerrard, the subject of so many taunts about that terrible moment, to have its impact neutered by a retrospective awarding of the Premier League title.

It’s this backdated easing of historical pain that makes stripping of ill-gotten prizes such a contested topic in the search for justice in sport.

It strikes at something more important than financial penalties. It metes out shame upon those that have cheated, an irrevocable stain on their records.

But sometimes posterity strips titles that legal means have failed to. Manchester City’s past is at stake now, as much as their future.

While CAS will decide on Manchester City’s immediate fate, the legacy of their achievements will be in the dock for some time to come, especially if those dusty files in the Premier League’s basement turn up something unpleasant.