The technicality on which Man City might escape punishment (despite being found guilty 114 times over)

Happy Friday, folks.

Three weeks. That is how long the Premier League has been shut, the longest break of the season and the first time they have ever run one this long. The good news is the taps come back on tomorrow morning.

On tap today:

• • ⚖️ What actually happens to Manchester City now, and how the Prime Minister ended up in the middle of it

• 🔴 Your full weekend preview, including the biggest game of the season so far

• 🇦🇷 Messi's last night in the blue and white & what Ronaldo had to say about it

Let's pour.

🥃 TOP SHELF

Man City have appealed - here’s what happens next

Two weeks ago I told you what Manchester City stood accused of 114 times over, and that the punishments on the table ran from a fine all the way to losing their place in the league.

Here is what I have learned since. Being found guilty and being punished are two entirely separate events, and in English soccer they can be months apart.

Think of a bar that has lost its licence hearing but has not been given a closing date. Still serving. Still the busiest place on the street. The paperwork simply has not caught up.

Which is what makes Sunday so strange. Manchester City go to Anfield to play Liverpool, top of the league, five wins from five, not a point dropped, and nobody in the building can tell you whether those points will still be there in May.

What they are actually appealing

Quick recap. The Premier League lets clubs spend roughly in line with what they earn, so that a rich owner cannot simply buy the league outright. The commission found that City made their earnings look bigger than they were, using what it called "sham" commercial contracts to disguise £830 million of owner money as sponsorship income.

City have now appealed, and this is the part worth understanding, because they are not really arguing about the scoreboard. They are arguing about the referee.

The club's statement says the ruling contains "clear material errors, of law, principle and fact" and is unsafe. That is lawyer for: the conclusion is wrong because the process that reached it was wrong.

“I swear, if they get off on a technicality…”

I’ll be just as livid, I’ll be honest. On the substance though, the whole thing comes down to one question: whose pocket did the money come from?

Premier League rules do not stop a state-owned company sponsoring a club. Etihad Airways, the airline whose name is on City's stadium and shirts, is owned by the Abu Dhabi government, and that is entirely allowed. What is not allowed is an owner quietly topping up his own club's sponsors so the club can report income it never really earned.

So City's case is that the extra money came from the Abu Dhabi government, which may legally sponsor them, and not from Sheikh Mansour, who owns them. If that sounds like a technicality, it absolutely is. But it is also a technicality with two large holes in it.

• First, City ran this exact argument at the original hearing in 2024 and lost with it. The commission decided it was a story the club had "concocted well after the event."

• Second, Etihad has said the opposite in writing. Sky Sports dug out a 2015 submission the airline made to the US government that flatly denied the Abu Dhabi government had paid for its Manchester City sponsorship, and said Etihad covered the deal out of its own money.

So what's the punishment?

Nobody knows. That is the honest answer.

The sanction gets decided separately, behind closed doors, and the list of options is wide: a reprimand, a fine, a points deduction, points deductions over multiple seasons to keep them in a sort of mid-table purgatory or even expulsion from the league. No club has ever been thrown out of the English top flight.

What usually happens

Two recent financial mishaps from this league, both far smaller cases:

• Everton were docked 10 points in 2023, cut to 6 on appeal.

• Nottingham Forest were docked 4 points in 2024.

And one from abroad that keeps coming up. In 2006, Juventus were stripped of two Italian league titles and relegated to the second division with points docked on top. That was a match-fixing scandal rather than a financial one, so it is not the same crime. But it is the last time a club that size was taken apart. They won the second division at the first attempt and came straight back up.

City's case runs to nine seasons. Everton's and Forest's were one-off accounting misses. Sky reported this week that rival clubs do not expect City to be in the Premier League next season if the appeal fails, and that some of them think points alone would not be enough.

Then the Prime Minister walked in

This is where it gets interesting.

Andy Burnham became Britain's Prime Minister in July. Before that he spent nine years as Mayor of Greater Manchester. He is, for what it's worth, an Everton fan.

Asked by the BBC about City's owners days after the verdict, he said he would be "really concerned to lose them" and credited them with helping build the modern city.

The reaction was not warm. The UK government issued a clarification saying the finding was serious and that nobody is above the rules. Opposition politicians told him to keep politics out of the sport. Today he is insisting he never downplayed anything.

How long this drags on

The appeal has to be heard within twelve weeks, and the decision follows within thirty days of that. Which works out at about 114 days. We’ll see you in January.

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🗣️ SOUND LIKE A REGULAR

“Sportswashing”

/ˈspɔːrts-ˌwɒʃ-ɪŋ/ 🔊

noun · soccer

1. Definition. Money poured into sport by a country, a company or an individual to make people feel better about them. The investment is real and so are the trophies. The point is what you end up thinking about instead.

2. Origin: A new-ish word built off "whitewashing." It started appearing around 2015, when human rights groups used it to describe Azerbaijan hosting the European Games, and it has followed big sporting money around ever since.

USED IN A SENTENCE

“The Prime Minister spent a week praising City's owners days after they were found guilty of 114 charges. Whatever you make of that, it is a working definition of sportswashing.”

🗞️ THE WEEKLY TAP-IN…

The Premier League is back

The state of play. 5 games played, 33 to go. Manchester City have won all five and lead the way. Arsenal, who won the league last season, are second, three points back.

At the other end, Tottenham are bottom of the twenty. And three clubs came up from the second division in May and are finding out how hard this is: Hull City sit eighth, Ipswich Town eleventh, Coventry City eighteenth.

The five worth your time

• Arsenal v Leeds United. Saturday, 7:30am ET, USA Network. Arsenal are the champions and the only side keeping pace with City. Leeds have not lost a game yet, which nobody predicted, and sit fifth.

• Aston Villa v Brentford. Saturday, 10am ET, Peacock. Villa won the Europa League in May, which is Europe's second-tier club competition, then sold most of the team that won it. They are sixteenth. Brentford, the small club from west London, are fourth and unbeaten.

• Chelsea v Bournemouth. Saturday, 10am ET, Peacock. Chelsea have scored ten and conceded twelve in five games, so nobody is falling asleep watching them. They should edge The Cherries here.

• Manchester United v Tottenham. Saturday, 12:30pm ET, NBC. Twelfth against twentieth. United have one win in five, Spurs have none. No pressure.

• Liverpool v Manchester City. Sunday, 11:30am ET, NBC. The game of the weekend. 6th vs 1st. City have won everything they have played while the Reds are yet to taste defeat.

The rest:

• Saturday, 10am: Ipswich Town v Fulham, Sunderland v Brighton

• Sunday, 9am: Crystal Palace v Nottingham Forest, Hull City v Everton

• Monday, 3pm, USA Network: Coventry City v Newcastle United

Ronaldo breaks his silence, at length

If you missed it: two weeks ago Cristiano Ronaldo, now 41 and playing in Saudi Arabia for Al-Nassr, walked out of the Portugal squad mid-camp after falling out with head coach Jorge Jesus.

On Tuesday he explained himself on Instagram, in a statement running past 1,700 words. He accused Jesus of going back on his word, apologized to the Portugal supporters who traveled to the Norway game and never got so much as a wave at the end, and said he is available for selection again in November.

On the subject of a farewell match, he said there will be time for that later. He is not done.

Messi's last night

On Tuesday night in Buenos Aires, Lionel Messi played for Argentina for the final time.

It was a friendly against Benin at the Monumental, the stadium where he has scored more international goals than anywhere else. Argentina won 3-0 and he scored one and made two.

Appearance number 208. Goal number 126, from the penalty spot. Twenty-one years, two Copa Américas and the 2022 World Cup. Enjoy the 2 hour 39 minute spectacle in its entirety here. Just remember to grab some tissues.

He was in tears long before the final whistle. The next day he posted that he already misses the shirt but knows the decision is the right one. The first reply worth reading came from Cristiano Ronaldo. A touch of class from Ronnie with the week he’s had.

🍻 HAVE A 0% BEER WITH…

Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan

Club and country: Manchester City, which he owns, and the United Arab Emirates.

What to watch for this weekend: His club go to Anfield on Sunday top of the league, unbeaten, two weeks on from a guilty verdict on 114 charges. He will not be there. He almost never is.

Fun fact: In eighteen years of owning Manchester City he has attended two matches. The first was a 3-0 win over Liverpool in August 2010, where the crowd gave him a standing ovation for showing up. The second was the 2023 Champions League final, which City won. City's own accounts put his direct investment past £1.3 billion in the first ten years alone. That is a lot of money to spend on something you have watched for about three hours.

Toast: He does not drink, so a gahwa. That is the cardamom-heavy Arabic coffee served in small cups with dates, and tradition says the host keeps refilling until the guest shakes the cup. Nobody at City has shaken the cup yet.

Where to follow him: Nowhere. No posts, no interviews, barely a public word in eighteen years.

🔥 HOUSE SPECIALS

⚽ Goal of the week: it may be a tap-in, but today I’m handing the gong to 19-year-old Justin Ellis whose goal earned a 1-0 win over Canada on Tuesday, completing a perfect four-win window for the USMNT.

🎉 Fanzone: Wrexham were cleared to add 2,250 more seats to the new Kop, taking the Racecourse Ground past 18,000 and keeping the world's oldest international ground fit for purpose.

📅 On this day: In 1866, Charles Wreford-Brown was born - the man credited with inventing the term “soccer” as an abbreviation for association football. Yes, the word Americans get told off for using was coined by an Englishman.

👕 Wardrobe watch: Argentina flew a giant Messi shirt over Rosario, his hometown, on the eve of his farewell. And when I say giant…you’ve got to see this one to believe it.

🐣 Underdog corner: Chile, who did not qualify for last summer's World Cup, went to Los Angeles and beat Mexico 2-0. Mexico, who co-hosted that World Cup, finished the whole window without a win.

🔗 Most clicked from Monday: Messi's red card on his Argentina debut, less than a minute after coming off the bench in 2005.

That’s all, folks. Sláinte.