Football finance expert Kieran Maguire has been talking about Manchester City’s Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) verdict and the Premier League teams that wrote to CAS to argue for City to be banned from Europe while their appeal was being heard.
This comes after Maguire recently made an appearance on The Price of Football Podcast where he talked through a range of issues related to the financial side of football at the moment.
After CAS lifted the Manchester club’s two-year ban from UEFA competitions, which was handed out after City were deemed to have broken Financial Fair Play rules back in February, the full verdict revealed that numerous Premier League clubs wanted City to be banned before the verdict was given.
These clubs were Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Leicester City, Burnley and Newcastle United.
On this point, Maguire shared his thoughts on the clubs that called for City to be banned from Europe during the podcast.
He said: “It will come as no great surprise that Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Spurs were all involved there because potentially you knock City out of the Champions League places for two years, you can see the benefits.
“It was a bit more surprising to see Newcastle mentioned in those. I don’t know what Mike Ashley was expecting in terms of a resurgence under Steve Bruce in terms of Newcastle challenging for the European places. This could be sort of a subtle masterstroke by Mike, perhaps he, as part of the potential deal to sell Newcastle to PIF, thought well they might be willing to put in a few zillions into the club, and therefore this is an opportunity for him to get a higher price for Newcastle, so as always, with these events, there’s more to it than meets the eye.”
Were you surprised so many PL clubs voted for City to be banned from Europe?
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TIF Thoughts…
Now that City have been cleared of any financial wrongdoing, these clubs’ calls for City to be banned from Europe are now irrelevant and ultimately useless.
It seems quite underhanded of these clubs to write to CAS to argue against City when they would presumably have been unaware of whether or not the Manchester club had broken these rules, which they were found not to have.