Having noted all their problems this season, only Inter Milan stands in the way of Manchester City competing for the treble. Credit: Getty Images/Michael Reagan
If UEFA President Alexander Čeferin presents Europe's greatest club trophy to Manchester City before midnight on Saturday in Istanbul, he will do so on the third anniversary of yet another seismic day in the history of both club and governing body .
On June 10, 2020, a three-day hearing ended in Lausanne, at which the future of the city was determined. The club's team of 11 lawyers and one expert witness turned out to be the winner that day. The two-year ban from UEFA competitions will be lifted. The €30m (£25.6m) fine has been lifted and replaced with a €10m (£8.5m) fine for a fee. Confidence in UEFA's financial fair play rules will be undermined.
Just 15 months ago, UEFA lost a case in the same Court of Arbitration for Sport [Cas] against Saint-Germain in Paris. The defeat to City sent a signal that the nation-state clubs, with their unlimited wealth and the legal power they brought, were too strong an opponent for UEFA and its legislators.
The infamous threat in one of the leaked emails that formed the basis of the City case seemed prophetic. The owners of the club in Abu Dhabi were supposed to provide 50 lawyers for 10 years for 30 million euros, instead of being subject to UEFA rules. As it turned out, City won in a much shorter time frame. The UEFA process banned and fined the club on 14 February 2020. By June 10 of that year, City won their Cas appeal case, even if the result was not announced until the following month.
When it was, at first there was distrust, then mutual reproaches. Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, then chairman of Bayern Munich, said that UEFA had messed things up. “It looks like the UEFA commission in charge of the Champions League hasn't done a very good job,” he told AP. “I heard from various sources that it was not [well] organized beforehand.”
Since winning that appeal, City have reached the Champions League final twice, the first of which in 2021 was in the first season of their initial two-season ban. In the meantime, UEFA was facing a riot in the European Super League. It remains a governing body fighting for its very existence. However, on Saturday in the VIP hospitality areas of the Atatürk Stadium, many in UEFA suits will be asking the same question. How did UEFA lose this case to City?
According to UEFA's own lawyer, the seven offenses City were initially found guilty of were the “most serious” that its independent trial considered when it came to the “seriousness, repetitiveness and deliberate nature of conduct”. City have overstated sponsorship revenue by around £204m between 2012 and 2016, according to UEFA. The fine and ban were intended to reflect this and “protect the integrity of UEFA club competition”. However, these measures were rejected within four months by the City's lawyers, who won 2-1 in the Cas panel.
The UEFA process began with the collection of evidence by the Chamber of Investigation (CC) of the UEFA club financial control body, and then the Court of Justice (CA) rendered its decision. Both were independent of the governing body, and with good reason. As with all football disciplinary matters, large and small, establishing independence from the executive and its policies is critical. However, when the case went on appeal to Cas, it went back to UEFA's in-house legal department to defend the work of IC and AC. It failed.
Among other things, UEFA's lawyers did not object to the city's nomination of Portuguese lawyer Rui Botic Santos for the chairmanship and even requested that the position be chosen independently. Both sides were then allowed to choose one panellist each. For three-person Cas panels, only a majority verdict is required.
The City subsequently added witnesses as well as evidence that was not presented at the original AC hearing. “This theory is nonsense,” City claimed, “that he provided sponsorship rights to the Abu Dhabi companies Etisalat and Etihad for a fee, which was then supplemented by his property, Abu Dhabi United Group. “That would be,” the City said, “tantamount to a senseless, self-defeating conspiracy.” In the end, the question of whether City was guilty or not was in no small part a matter of whether certain infractions were subject to the five-year time limit set by UEFA rules.
The UEFA legal team lost this dispute in Cas. The proposed addition of City's payments through the telecommunications company Etisalat was declared past due. The related allegation regarding Etihad's payments was partly overdue and unproven, according to most experts. The Cus Commission decides that City failed to fulfill its duty of cooperation, for which the club received a fine of 10 million euros.
City lawyers fought at every turn. Did the club benefit from the sense of urgency of settling the case in the first six months of 2020? City's Champions League ban loomed next season as European football bodies struggled to end – or resolve – a Covid-ravaged 2019-20 campaign. In early March, nine Premier League clubs, including the rest of the Big Six, approached Cus to block any possible extension of City's ban. But the City never applied for a stay of execution. By this point, the club appeared to want the case to be resolved as soon as possible.
UEFA lawyers also appeared to be fixated on a speedy resolution, while calling the new evidence from City “unbelievable, misleading misleading and untrustworthy.” Was it time for UEFA's lawyers to figuratively step in and slow things down? The case moved steadily towards the June hearings and a three-man Cas panel, two of whom were chosen by the UEFA opposition.
The hearing was attended by 12 people on City's side. From UEFA there were only four in the hall and two British defenders who were present via videoconference. It would have been the most devastating defeat for UEFA, and its failure to enforce its own rules would have contributed in no small part to the unrest that sparked the Super League split. Now the Premier League legal team is up against City lawyers who already have one notable scalp. The city, of course, denies any wrongdoing.
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