One is obliged, when contemplating the reported discussions between Manchester City and the Premier League over the matter of sanctions, to confront a rather stark choice. Either the club’s owners are so deranged, or so monumentally obtuse, as to spurn any offer of settlement that might mitigate their predicament or they are in possession of evidence that would, if ventilated, prove distinctly inconvenient to their accusers.
Of the former proposition there is conspicuously little supporting testimony. Of the latter, the club’s conduct has been, from the first, both consistent and unyielding.
It is not without significance that these conversations took place before the liability findings were permitted to leak into the public domain.
Some years ago I ventured the prediction that the entire affair would most probably conclude in a negotiated arrangement that City could accept. The meeting in question may well have been no more than a polite inquiry as to the precise terms on offer, an elementary precaution that any serious party would take.
We are invited to believe, on the strength of secondary and carefully non-attributable briefings, that the League’s proposal consisted merely of financial penalties. What if, however, City’s counter-stipulation was that certain of the more grave charges be withdrawn?
Such a demand would be wholly congruent with a sustained insistence upon innocence; it would not, by any reasonable standard, constitute evidence of lunacy or incompetence.
The proprietors of Manchester City are not, whatever the more febrile organs of the British press may imply, frivolous or unworldly men. A negotiation worthy of the name is one from which each side emerges with something it can claim as a gain.
That the League declined the terms City was prepared to entertain suggests either a failure of realism or the operation of other, less elevated, pressures. One cannot entirely dismiss the possibility that clubs enjoying an unusually intimate relationship with the League’s machinery exercised a veto upon any compromise that might have left City less than comprehensively chastised.
City are therefore left with no alternative but to pursue, with all available vigour, the avenues of appeal and, if necessary, the ordinary courts of law. Only by such means can a measure of daylight be forced upon a process that has so far preferred the comforts of confidentiality. Sunlight, as the proverb has it, remains the most reliable disinfectant.
It is by no means impossible that the club has reserved certain of its more potent materials, allowing the League to advance fully into the open before deploying evidence that would prove acutely embarrassing to the institution, to its chief executive, and to those who installed him.
There exists, a genuine institutional jeopardy for the Premier League in any examination conducted at arm’s length from its own preferences. That jeopardy has always constituted a not inconsiderable part of City’s bargaining position.
I'm not saying any of the above is true or accurate.
As always I present an argument to try to help people think about this properly in the face of hysterical and negative media who far from doing their job are engaged in an unprecedented blood lust where all journalistic standards have been used to wipe their arses with after shitting clicks for their owners and the ravenous, anonymous and psychopathic beast the algorithm.
#algobitches
@scousericey Should have spent more, gutted we missed out on a few titles. Never in danger of going bust so what's the issue. Fuck the rules, we know why they were brought in, if you can't see or admit it then what about the 120 years before the rules. What a load of shite.
@johnbrab@cityreport_ He never had to because he's the plums. Why don't you take a shite job and a wage reduction, you know, just to see. What absolute cobblers. He turned a stuttering dysfunctional team into a juggernaut after proving himself in their reserve league. They were -18 to RMD at the time.
@TelegraphSport@SamWallaceTel To ensure integrity I think every email every EPL club account has sent and received since 2012 should be made public for scrutiny. Only fair, no?