The chrysalis has finally hatched. What was meant to be the most important thing has now become the most important thing. Welcome to a Premier League-style coup.
When news broke that Manchester City were facing a potentially ruinous legal battle with the top team in English football, it was tempting to see some kind of analogy in it. Here we have a league founded out of greed to benefit future greed, and now threatened with implosion — yes, greed. If you invite a tiger for tea, he may have fun. But he’s still a tiger. And in the end he’ll eat you, too.
But that’s not all. Greed may have opened the door. Greed has made bringing an ambitious nation-state into one’s inner sanctum seem like a great idea with no possible downsides. But it’s not greed that pulls the trigger. It’s about control, hard power, and a quarter century of Wild West governance and oversight.
Let an extremely ambitious nation-state buy your sports institution, and you may end up with an unhappy extremely ambitious nation-state on your hands. Needless to say, at this point, no one has any control over what this outcome will be.
Reviewing the public details of the City’s legal claim, it’s hard to tell which aspect of the whole affair is the most unpleasant. Perhaps it’s the hodgepodge of populism and hot-button topics added on by City lawyers and mouthpieces.
Take, for example, the highly cynical Trump narrative that this is a fight against “the elites.” Here is a very wealthy monarchy, whose legacy comes at the hands of the most powerful soccer club in the world, and they are somehow trying to appear as outsiders. When will the endlessly wealthy kings and princes of the upper classes finally be allowed to take their seats at the top political tables? Except in all areas of life, now and forever?
Meanwhile, perhaps the most tiresome thing about this free-market nonsense is the talk of “commercial freedom” that is so often parroted on this subject by people who have no idea what a free market is. This has to do with the absurd assumption that if you allow the propaganda brigade to spend as much as they want on non-commercial causes, you are somehow making the market “work”.
In fact, the opposite is true: market distortions due to government subsidies and PR purposes that have nothing to do with value or competition have led to horrific non-market results like the sale of Neymar for €220 million. “This isn’t capitalism,” says the ghost of Milton Friedman. It’s more like a planned economy.
Then there’s the terribly tone-deaf expression “tyranny of the majority,” but it’s used here to describe that most tyrannical of things: democracy. In the proper context, the John Stuart Mill quote is meant to describe a state of mob rule, where no institution regulates the impulses of the herd. And it’s certainly not the richest person at the table who can’t get a board vote through.
But that’s the point of view of a tyrannical billionaire. Létat cest nous. And nothing must stand in the way of the exercise of power. Does that really sound like sport?
It’s important to remember that none of this is done with good intentions; it’s just propaganda, a way to stir up useful outrage. And it’s not actually Manchester City that is pursuing these goals but the organisation that owns and controls it: a government with very clear political objectives.
There are no good elite football owners. Hedge funds and leveraged takeovers are forms of evil in their own right. But the underlying problem here seems to me to be deeper: why, apart from blind and stupid greed, would anyone want the government to own a football club?
Governments are not charitable enterprises. The British government sells weapons and kills people to protect its interests. The US government is an imperialist machine. What exactly did we expect from Abu Dhabi? To be nice?
A direct analogy would be, say, the British government buying Royal Antwerp and spending billions of pounds of GDP to win the Belgian league while all the Antwerp fans are saying how great it is and Antwerp is thankful to Grant Shapps. We the British government will not allow us to rewrite the rules so we finally desperately sued the Belgian league.
Yet this kind of ownership was voted down at City and Newcastle United and remains explicitly left in the draft Football Control Bill, despite the fact that the potential consequences of all this could be devastating for English football.
A key part of City’s demands would be to remove the rules on related party transactions, thereby removing the cap on the amount of money that government owners can inject into clubs. This would destabilise every part of the game and destroy any leverage other than pure cash. What’s the point in building a team or preparing players other than to sell them to national overlords? When well-funded corporations have that wealth at their disposal, they essentially own the arena.
In theory, this could be prevented in two ways. First, the Premier League could kick City out. The league has a democratic right (sorry, I say it again) to expel members who threaten its stability – for example by taking legal action against the implementation of its own rules and seeking damages.
The fact there is zero chance of this happening is just as telling. Essentially, the league can’t afford it. The product would collapse. Freed from the yoke of membership City would bleed it white through the high courts. What you have here is a club that can in the end do as it wishes, because its budget will always be bigger, because it is not a commercial entity but a state. Did anyone ever actually think this through?
The other thing that could happen, but also won’t, is that government could take an interest. We must ask again why it is deemed unacceptable for a PR-hungry state to own the Daily Telegraph, but fine for a PR-hungry state to own a Premier League club.
There is a case to be made that Manchester City are a far more significant broadcaster than the Telegraph. They have 22 million followers on X, five times as many as the Telegraph. They have global reach and a cult of loyalty. They will use that to project a message, while also taking steps to destabilise a key British industry.
And yet, of course, given the potential trade issues, there will be zero interest in regulation. The top tier of English football can be rinsed through the courts by an overseas state, a clear tactic to diminish its power to resist, and analogous to the Slapp lawsuits the government is currently taking a stand against.
But then, there are so many structural elements to this that feel irreversible. This isn’t just City and Abu Dhabi. The Premier League could soon be assailed on all sides by everyone from unhappy shipping tycoons, to unhappy US hedge funds, to soft power hungry states. Invite an entire pack of tigers to tea, and, well, it might not end that happily.
More broadly the most depressing aspect is the wider issue with this entire public circus, illuminated by the willingness of football supporters to engage, the vulnerability of people to this level of engineered tribalism, the feeling that all you really have is a choice of which “elite” to back, a failure of basic concepts, meaning, agency.
Football’s vulnerability to this is no more than a bellwether of the wider swirls of digital rage, manipulation and post-truth politics. Go well, plucky sky blue underdog as you enter the establishment den, concerned only with fair competition and fighting for the little man. For the first time it is possible to see an end game here for the Premier League, and it isn’t very pretty.