In the end it was all too easy for Manchester City. They were just too good for the best of the rest in Europe.
If they were unlucky to have to settle for a 1-1 draw at the Santiago Bernabeu in the first leg of their Champions League semi-final against Real Madrid last week, this week's second leg saw them so dominant that they were unfortunate not to make even more of their superiority over Carlo Ancelotti’s men.
It’s hard to imagine a scenario where Pep Guardiola doesn’t lift his third Champions League title and Manchester City their first crown as kings of European football. In truth, some 15 years into the Abu Dhabi-fuelled success of the club under Sheikh Mansour and City Football Group, it is a surprise that it has taken this long.
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The barrier to complete football dominance has almost been toppled, with Inter Milan, a side whose run to the final has been a surprise in itself, all that stands in the way of history for Guardiola’s team, who were crowned Premier League for the third year running this weekend.
For Man City fans, especially those who stuck with the club through the thinnest of times when trips to Macclesfield Town and Wycombe Wanderers were part of their route back from what is now League One back in 1999, it would be hard to begrudge them the moment of joy that a first Champions League win would bring. Football is, ultimately, about the euphoria that the game brings and the 90 minutes of what the supporters see on the pitch than how the revenues that allowed for those joyous moments were accumulated.
In the Premier League this season, Liverpool fell short by some distance from the levels that saw them go toe to toe with City to the last 15 minutes of a scintillating campaign one year ago. Instead, this time around it was Arsenal who took the fight to the Citizens but found that they didn’t have the staying power. Their legs wobbled and they’ve have to watch the stellar cast of City’s latest show hold aloft the biggest prize that the English game has to offer for the fifth time in the last six years.
That even one team has managed to puncture their dominance over that period is some achievement.
When Liverpool lifted the 2020 Premier League, it brought an end to 30 years of waiting for supporters to be at the summit of the domestic game once more. That it had to be done in front of empty stands at Anfield due to the coronavirus pandemic denied Reds fans what would have surely been the most magical of moments.
Man City have been magnificent this season. Too good for the rest. The backdrop to all of this, of course, is that they have the small matter of 115 charges levelled against them by the Premier League, relating to inaccurate financial reporting over nine seasons; not co-operating with an investigation and handing over documents as required over five seasons; not providing full details of former manager Roberto Mancini’s pay over the four seasons he was at the club, and not providing full details of players’ remuneration over six seasons.
City refuted the allegations and Thursday saw the club launch legal challenges against the 115 charges, according to The Times, including the appointment of Murray Rosen KC, the head of the Premier League’s independent judicial panel, as the person who appoints the chair of the disciplinary commission. Rosen describes himself on his chambers website as a “member of the MCC and Arsenal FC”.
It is the first sign of resistance from City and the first flex of their undoubted legal muscle that hints at just how long this process may last. Anyone anticipating a decision to be handed down in months will be bitterly disappointed - it is a legal wrangle that will go on and on for some years to come.
It’s hard to feel massive amounts of sympathy for the other five clubs in the top six, especially given each and every one was a willing participant in the failed plot to radically change football forever and create a protected eco-system for the biggest via the creation of a European Super League back in April 2021.
They are all businesses turning over hundreds of millions each year, whose owners have seen the valuation of their assets increase considerably over time.
But with a level playing field allegedly absent for large parts of the last decade, it has demonstrated the task that has faced the rest in trying to keep pace with City, a club which is able to build the foundations for the success that exists now in an era before Financial Fair Play.
This week, Man City CEO Ferran Soriano hit back at claims that they had simply spent their way to success. “Look, you only have to look at the investment in players in England in the last year, three years, five years… we are never the club spending the most on players,” he told Movistar.
“There are many other clubs investing more money than us – Chelsea, Manchester United, Arsenal. Saying that we’ve spent a lot of money and we won because of that is just not true.”
Those comments are true in relation to the spending of Chelsea and Man United over the last decade, with City, according to fees taken from Transfermarkt, suggesting a transfer outlay of £1.5bn compared to United at £1.45bn and Chelsea at £1.8bn - the latter a figure significantly increased due to the spending spree of more than £500m over the last two transfer windows under the ownership of Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital, who acquired the London club last May. On that list, Liverpool sit eighth in Europe with £1.01bn.
But the statement doesn’t reflect the mechanisms put in place by City over time to maintain their ability to spend heavily and to sustain the kind of wage bill increases that have been seen.
Over the course of the last decade, Liverpool have seen their wage bill increase by 253.6 per cent, from £103.4m in 2012 to £366m in 2022. That has arrived at the same time as a revenue rise from £168.9m to £594.3m over the same period has delivered a 251.8 per cent increase. Roughly the same.
Manchester City’s wage bill over that same period increased from £201.8m in 2012 to £353.9m, a rise of 75 per cent, according to the club’s audited accounts. Against revenue growth from £231.1m to £613m between 2012 and 2022, the club have seen a 165 per cent increase. Revenue has risen 90 per cent against wage bill increase, where Liverpool’s has sat at minus 1.8 per cent when looking at their wage growth against revenue.
Those kind of figures would, on the face of it, seem to back up what Soriano is suggesting with regards to Man City’s spend. But the 115 charges that have been laid at their door would not have arrived on a whim from the Premier League, who continued with their own investigation after City had their 2020 ban from Champions League football by UEFA for alleged FFP breaches overturned on appeal by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, with CAS stating that some charges were time barred and others did not have enough evidence.
Accusations of inflating commercial deals, using methods to pay former manager Mancini via a third party and not providing full details of player salaries all call into question the true legitimacy of the club’s financial rise to a European powerhouse, which now boasts the highest revenues in European football.
Liverpool’s wage bill for 2021/22 was somewhat skewed by the addition of bonus payments related to success and a number of significant contract renewals. But in such a high wage bill it represented the continued financial challenge for Reds owners Fenway Sports Group in trying to compete through growing revenues to support spending.
Speaking to the ECHO in March, FSG chief and Liverpool principal owner John W Henry said: “You are right that there are ever-increasing financial challenges in the Premier League.
“The league itself is extraordinarily successful and is the greatest football competition in the world, but we’ve thought for some time there should be limits on spending so that the league doesn’t go the way of European leagues where one or two clubs annually have little competition.
“Excitement depends on competition and is the most important component of the Premier League.”
Soriano isn’t wrong in making comments related to transfer spend over the last five years, but he misses the point,and the view of both rival clubs and their fans when it comes to how the City juggernaut has been able to dominate to such an extent from a standing start, with the challenge for clubs with bigger reach and global appeal to try and keep pace with one that is simply too good to fail now. Even Real Madrid couldn’t come up with the answers.
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