LONDON – Manchester City, a Premier League heavyweight and one of the world’s richest clubs, successfully lifted its two-season ban on European football’s biggest club competition, the Champions League, on Monday.
The ban, imposed last year by European football’s governing body, UEFA, after City was charged with “serious violations” of cost control regulations, was revoked by a three-member panel in the Court of Arbitration. for Sport in Switzerland.
The final decision on banning the Champions League, which had been on Manchester City for more than a year amid questions about its finances and credibility, will have significant consequences for both the club and UEFA.
Manchester City officials had vehemently and repeatedly denied any allegation of wrongdoing, and the possibility of being barred from the Champions League ran the risk of suspending one of the most ambitious projects in world sports.
For UEFA, the latest high-profile reversal of its effort to enforce financial regulations means that the governing body is likely to come under scrutiny, and its defeat will create further doubts about the future of its so-called fair play financial regulations and its ability. and willingness to enforce them.
The court said in a statement posted on its website that its panel found that the most serious offenses found by UEFA “were either not established” or no longer relevant (in the court’s words, “prescribed”).
The club, according to the panel, was guilty of failing to cooperate with UEFA’s investigations and fined it 10 million euros, about $ 11.3 million, a reduction of the 20 million euro fine that UEFA had imposed. originally.
Since it was acquired in 2008 by Sheik Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan, the billionaire brother of the UAE ruler, Manchester City has gone from relative obscurity to become one of the most valuable and successful brands in football. It has one of the best teams in the world and is led by Pep Guardiola, the Spanish coach who oversaw the collection of all the trophies available in English football last season.
Manchester City continues to compete to win the Champions League this year; He won the first leg of his round of 16 match against Real Madrid in March before the coronavirus pandemic forced him to temporarily halt the event. UEFA is scheduled to resume competition this summer.
“The club welcomes the implications of today’s decision as a validation of the club’s position and the body of evidence it was able to present,” Manchester City said in a brief statement.
The decision in favor of the City means that the team will continue to perform on one of the largest and one of the most lucrative sports venues. A two-year absence from the Champions League would have been worth more than $ 200 million, but it would also have been costly in terms of damage to the City’s carefully cultivated reputation and its ability to attract top players and coaches.
This is the second time that UEFA has been judged to have been in conflict with its own statute of limitations. In a previous case involving another wealthy Gulf-owned team, Paris St.-Germain, CAS rejected an appeal by the adjudicating arm of its financial watchdog, after determining that UEFA had acted too late.
UEFA said in a statement that the panel found that many of the alleged infractions “had a time limit due to the 5-year period provided by UEFA regulations.”
Investigators sought the advice of UEFA’s internal legal team before beginning work on the City case.
The rules were created in 2009 when several of Europe’s top clubs were on the verge of bankruptcy and have largely proven successful, although they have worked against clubs like City and others. Wealthy teams have been upset by any effort to limit their spending, and promising teams backed by wealthy owners have lamented how restrictions have kept them from challenging the most established powers in the game.
Still, the rules hadn’t stopped City from winning anything but the Champions League title, the crown its owners most coveted. He has another chance to win it in August, when the Champions League returns for a knockout mini tournament in Lisbon with eight quarterfinals.
But without the impending ban, City can approach the event with a sense of ease that it could have lost if faced with a ban, and the possible departures of players looking to compete for European trophies in the next two seasons.
Lawyers for City and UEFA presented their arguments to the panel during a video hearing in early June. The city had said it would spare no resources to defend itself. He argued that the UEFA process was unilateral and that an impartial body like CAS would overturn the ruling, which came after damaging leaks in 2018 that suggested the team had engaged in illegal accounting tactics to circumvent cost control rules. of UEFA.
Citing internal documents and emails, those reports suggested that City had disguised millions of dollars of direct investment from its owner, Sheikh Mansour, as sponsorship revenue. A document published by the German weekly Der Spiegel appeared to show that the team’s main sponsor, Etihad Airways, based in Abu Dhabi, had paid only a fraction of a $ 85 million sponsorship deal.
The city denounced the posts as “out-of-context materials allegedly hacked or stolen,” alleging that the leaks were part of an “organized and clear attempt to damage the club’s reputation.”
However, their rivals had demanded serious punishment, leaving UEFA and its president, Aleksander Ceferin, squeezed by powerful and wealthy forces on both sides. Ceferin said he had no role in the UEFA investigation, which was independently run by a group responsible for analyzing the clubs’ adherence to tax rules. That group, known as the Club’s Financial Control Corps, ruled against City, adding a € 30 million fine in addition to the ban.
The allegations sparked tensions between UEFA and City, which in November last year attempted to short-circuit the case before CAS could issue its ruling. That effort, in which City accused UEFA of leaking details of the case to the media, failed for technical reasons. Two of the three judges involved in that decision were on the current panel of three arbitrators.
Indications of animosity between City and the UEFA panel that investigated it were made clear in the November ruling, when UEFA’s statement confirming the ban stated that City “did not cooperate in the investigation.”
The bitterness spread to many of the team’s supporters. Manchester City fans routinely scoff at the Champions League anthem on match days, and others have turned to social media to criticize what they perceive as unfair treatment of their team by UEFA, which they accuse of align with the continent’s most established rivals.
On the day of the hearing, a group of City fans unveiled a large banner targeting UEFA, accusing it of having an agenda against its team. CAS, aware of the tensions, took the rare step of not publicly naming the three judges who heard the appeal until it was concluded in June.
