If you want a metaphor for the state of contemporary politics, you could do worse than keep an eye on the football. Not Euro 24, the tournament that begins at the end of the week, though it should be gripping, but rather the off-field drama created by a legal case that Manchester City is bringing against the Premier League, a case that could have major ramifications both within and beyond the game.
The Premier League is the wealthiest national football league, and Manchester City the most prestigious club within it, having just been crowned champions for an unprecedented fourth year in a row. Last year it had the greatest revenue generated by any Premier League club, the highest commercial revenues, and the largest wage bill.
So, why is it gearing up for a legal battle? Because it wants to be able to spend even more money than it already does. And to do so, it wants to tear up some of the regulations that restrict spending in the name of more equitable competition, in particular the Associated Party Transaction (APT) rules, which insist that any commercial transactions made by a club with companies linked to their owners must not be artificially inflated but must reflect “market value”.
All this may sound like an arcane issue about football finance of interest only to sports geeks, but it gets to the heart of much of what is wrong with the game. And in Manchester City’s self-portrayal of its attempt to overthrow these rules, we catch a glimpse also of the perversity of contemporary politics. A club that stands at the pinnacle of the footballing elite presents its case not as a dispute among a group of mega-rich owners about how they apportion their riches, but as a downtrodden club that has, in the words of one fan account, “declared war on the entire football elite”. It is an echo of how many within political debate also attempt to depict themselves.
Over the past 40 years, football has shifted from a working-class game often treated with contempt by the elite into a middle-class glory project and, for some clubs, a money-making machine; from a game described by the Sunday Times in 1985 as “a slum sport played in slum stadiums and increasingly watched by slum people” to “an optimistic, upwardly mobile, aspirational business”, in the words of former Premier League CEO Richard Scudamore speaking to MPs in 2011. As football has become big business, so the kind of money flowing into the game has also transformed.
A watershed was the purchase of Chelsea football club by the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich in 2003. In his 19 years as owner, until forced to sell in 2022 because of sanctions imposed after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Abramovich spent more than £2bn on player signings, turning Chelsea, who had last been league champions in 1955, into a sporting powerhouse, winning 18 major trophies, including five Premier League titles and two Champions Leagues.
Other billionaires soon followed. Half of Premier League clubs now boast American owners. Then the Gulf states and their royal families arrived on the scene, compared with whom even Russian oligarchs and American moguls can seem like paupers.
In 2008, Sheikh Mansour, a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family, with a family fortune of about $1tn, bought Manchester City. Three years later, the French club Paris Saint-Germain was acquired by the state of Qatar through a sovereign investment fund. More recently, in 2021, Newcastle United was taken over by a consortium led by Saudi Arabia’s state Public Investment Fund. The British government reportedly put pressure on the Premier League to agree to the takeover so as not to “risk” British-Saudi relations.
The influx of money improved stadiums and made the game more cosmopolitan. It also ensured that the football itself – the skill, the beauty, the passion – became subservient to the product and the brand. The voice of the money men stifled that of the fans. On-field competition became distorted as the gap between the richest clubs and the rest widened. Smaller clubs were led to pile up debt in a futile attempt to keep up with the big boys, some going bust as a result.
In response, football’s governing bodies introduced new regulations such as Uefa’s financial fair play and the Premier League’s profitability and sustainability rules (PSR) which aim to limit a club’s spending and link it to revenues. Some of the richest clubs have in turn allegedly tried to game the system by artificially inflating revenues. Chelsea, for instance, recently sold two hotels to a company also owned by the club’s owners – effectively, selling their assets to themselves – to avoid breaching PSR rules. Manchester City signed a huge sponsorship deal with Etihad Airlines – which just happens to be owned by the Abu Dhabi government.
The APT rules are an attempt to minimise such gaming. And they are what Manchester City wants to rip up. Already facing 115 charges of breaking Premier League financial rules, the club has adopted what some describe as “the nuclear option” – attempting to incinerate the regulations themselves.
The irony in all this is that the Premier League has been at the forefront of putting the needs of money men before those of fans, of treating football as a commodity rather than a sport, of serving the interests of the richest clubs and ignoring the wider interests of the game. The changes it helped incubate spawned both today’s Manchester City, and its desire for a bonfire of the rules.
The echoes of wider political debates are not difficult to discern. In today’s politics, too, struggles within the elite are often portrayed as challenges to the elite. Oppositional politics has been so hollowed out, and the public so disengaged from mechanisms of change, that maverick figures within the elite, from Donald Trump to Nigel Farage, from Marine Le Pen to Giorgia Meloni, politicians with reactionary policies on everything from immigration to trade union rights, can present themselves as challengers to the establishment, rather than an intimate part of it, and as providing a voice for the working class, rather than seeking to keep them in check.
Manchester City’s legal challenge to the Premier League will be settled by an arbitration panel, and perhaps by the courts. Forging movements that can challenge the political elite will not come so easily.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
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