High-spending kicks

This season Manchester City is making a bid to win a historic Continental Treble — the English Premier League (a title it has already won for the fifth time in six years and nine in all), the FA Cup (the final is on June 3) and the UEFA Champions League (final on June 11). Given the team’s outstanding form at the business end of the season, overtaking Arsenal with ease and flair, the team is expected to make it. If it does, it will be only the eighth European team to win the Treble and the second English Premier League team to do so — after 34 years.

The significance of this situation goes beyond the football field to the backrooms where financial negotiations take place. Underlining the big money era of European football, it is no surprise that Manchester City is the second most expensively assembled squad in Europe. For this 2022-23 season, the club spent £849.07 million to put together a squad that admittedly plays the most electrifying football in the world.

That’s one part of the equation. The club is bankrolled by the spectacularly wealthy Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who was recently appointed vice president of the United Arab Emirates. By modern footballing standards Sheikh Mansour is an odd sort of owner but every football manager’s dream. Ever since his investment company bought the club from the bankrupt former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in 2008, he’s obligingly shelled out stupendous sums to acquire the world’s best footballers and managers without interfering too much. He makes the odd appearance at matches, has an occasional chat with players, rarely speaks in public and mostly lets the club management get on with it.

The other part of the equation is that the club is currently under investigation for breaching a staggering number of Financial Fair Play (FFP). Introduced in the 2011-12 season, these rules sought to bring some sanity to the staggering spending by club ownerships, ensuring that they did not spend more than they earned. The rules were introduced by UEFA, European football’s governing body, partly to ensure a more level playing field for less-endowed teams and partly to ensure that clubs didn’t blow up so much money as to implode.

As anyone watching European football regularly will suspect, there were any number of escape clauses, which is how City, Chelsea, Real Madrid, Barcelona, PSG and other European frontrunners got away with so much success with impossibly highly paid squads. This year, the big spending seems to have caught up with Manchester City. It has fallen foul of the English Premier League’s own laws regarding club finances, accounting and good governance. A four-year investigation has found that the club is guilty of over 100 breaches of the Premier League’s rules between 2009 and 2018 — when it won the Premier League three times. Most of the charges are over suppressing spending information (including secret contracts).

This scandal offers a depressing reminder of the growing correlation between money power and footballing prowess. Assuming the Sky Blues win the Treble this season, it would be constructive to compare it with the Treble-winning season of their crosstown rivals Manchester United in that 1998-99 season.

Today, the Red Devils are a tragic shadow of their former selves, but during Sir Alex Fergusson’s 26 years in charge, they won the Premier League 13 times. More to the point, the team he assembled in that Treble-winning year comprised a clutch of stars from the club’s own academy — including Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, the Neville brothers and David Beckham, whose legendary spot kicks and pin-point accurate cross-field passes inspired the title of the film Bend it Like Beckham. There were, of course, strategic record signings — among them Eric Cantona, Brian Robson, Wayne Rooney, Peter Schmeichel, Cristiano Ronaldo. But the core of Sir Alex’s team famously remained its home-grown talent. His consistent successes, playing the old-fashioned 4-4-2 formation, turned the red half of Manchester into a financial juggernaut that its American owners have decimated.

It would be unfair to wholly attribute the Sky Blues’ successes to big money. By that yardstick, Chelsea, whose new owner bought the club from the sanctioned Roman Abramovich, outspent Manchester City by £40 million to become the most expensive squad in Europe this season, should have run away with multiple trophies. But the team now languishes at number 12 in the league table. So clearly, it takes more than money to turn a football team into champions, and the Sky Blues’ superb tactician Pep Guardiola is undoubtedly up there with the best. The attacking 3-2-4-1 formation he deployed against 14-time winner Real Madrid in the second leg of the Champions’ League final should convince anyone of that. So FFP breaches may not diminish Guardiola’s genius. But it will certainly fade against Sir Alex’s bargain brilliance.