The Pac-Man defence, as all high-flying financiers know, is a tactic borrowed from the enjoyably addictive computer game which means that if you feel you are under attack then you fight back even harder to scare the crap out of your enemies. It seems that in Abu Dhabi and at the Etihad the poor beleaguered executives of Manchester City have been at their Nintendo machines.
What place a Wolves or an Ipswich or a Burnley in this oil-rich, dollar-strewn new world?
How else to explain City’s private court case against the Premier League? City already face 115 charges brought against them by the top tier of English football but it’s not as if they have done badly out of top-flight football. They have won six out of the last seven titles and are said to have the highest commercial revenue of any club. But now they are saying: ‘You come for us and we’re going for you.’
The key part of the City claim relates to a loveable little feature called associated party transactions (APTs) – or sponsorships. Manchester City is now an offshoot of one of the wealthiest sovereign states on the planet, Abu Dhabi. Etihad Airways is all over the front of the players’ shirts. City want to abolish all the APT rules, which would remove any ceiling on how much an owner can pump into a club. And don’t forget, a sovereign state’s funds are literally limitless.
Poor City say they are bound by the ‘tyranny of the majority’ and cannot pump as much money as they would like into the club. If they win this case – and I suspect a deal will be done to make the 115 charges go away – the entire fabric of the Premier League could be pulled apart.
What place a Wolves or an Ipswich or a Burnley in this oil-rich, dollar-strewn new world? The answer is that Sheikh Mansour and the family don’t really want to be playing Sheffield United or Luton Town: they want to be playing Barcelona or Real Madrid or Paris Saint-Germain or Bayern Munich. Though I am not sure the fans are so keen: regular weekends away in expensive European cities don’t do much for the credit card.
But unless some element of financial fair play is enforced, English football will remain in the pocket of a handful of very wealthy clubs. That’s why anyone who cares about the structure of English football must want City to take a hit in the form of a points deduction. If they got off all 115 charges scot-free it would look extremely weird. A penalty of, say, 20 points would keep City in the top flight; relegation would be a heavy defeat and could set off a whole series of tremors in football boardrooms.
It’s summer tour time for rugby’s home nations and very tasty they look too. But the implications of last weekend’s red card in the Gallagher Premiership final shouldn’t be forgotten. The Bath prop Beno Obano was sent off for a high tackle on the giant Northampton back row forward Juarno Augustus, who could reasonably be described as a battering ram himself. Such a dismissal could easily have ruined the showpiece final: in the event it was a stirring match, a fitting end to the season as Bath fought back superbly, only going down 25-21 to the Saints in the end. Could they have won with Obano? Who knows.
What is clear is that there was no malice in Obano’s tackle: it was just an earth-shaking collision between two powerful players. Rugby is one of the few sports which is unashamedly violent but that creates the problem of when an act of unashamed violence is unacceptably unashamedly violent. Obano’s tackle should have received a ten-minute yellow card, though there is also a case for, say, a 20-minute card for unacceptable violence, reserving a red card for rare acts of existential violence. Too many games are ruined because one team is outnumbered for long periods. Saints’ victory wasn’t ruined but rugby needs to get to grips with its definition of violent play.
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