Chris Labrey

The apoplexy over City is rooted in deep-seated envy of everything we have achieved-and in the fact that we are the nearest rivals to the key Premier League cartel club, Manchester United. I don’t particularly want to have a go at Chelsea. Like City, they are a club outside the red cartel that has looked to challenge the traditional elite. But the difference in treatment cannot be overlooked. Let’s not forget that Chelsea, albeit under Abramovich, admitted submitting incomplete financial information and concealing agent payments totalling around £47m. This helped them sign superstars such as Hazard, Willian, Eto’o and David Luiz, among others. That was “cheating” under red-cartel orthodoxy, yet there simply isn’t the same energy behind calls for relegation, financial reparations to clubs that lost titles, or titles being stripped. Equally, in the present day, Chelsea have effectively been gaming the rules in plain sight: selling a hotel to themselves for £76.5m so they did not fail PSR and face the punishments that would otherwise have been due. The Premier League effectively waved it through after assessing the “sale” against fair-market-value rules. Which brings me to City. What we have allegedly done is disguise owner investment through inflated sponsorships. But we didn’t: the Abu Dhabi government invested in one of its businesses, Etihad, and Etihad used the liquidity this created to fund its sponsorship of City. Creative on behalf of AD and Sheikh Mansour’s connections? Possibly. But by no means worse than Chelsea creating revenue by selling a hotel to themselves. This is what businesses do. If you create rules, CFOs and CEOs will find creative-but legal-ways to work around them. It is what businesses do year in, year out to minimise tax liabilities and exploit legal loopholes. That is the point: City had no reason to commit large-scale financial fraud when there were perfectly legal ways to generate sponsorship revenue. Equally, the hypocrisy and apoplexy over City stand in stark contrast to Chelsea, who have done exactly the same thing by different means. Let’s also talk about the huge owner equity investment at Brighton and Arsenal that didn't have to be at Fair Market Value but under Premier league rules owner related sponsorhsip did. That was challenged by City and ultimately deemed unlawful by the courts. By that definition both Brighton and Arsenal could have been accused of cheating to help propel their clubs forward. I would hazard a guess that there are other creative measures all clubs have used to compete in the age of PSR. It is the biased and unfair rules that have created this problem in football, and the Premier League’s clear lack of impartiality-driven by a continual desire to protect the interests of the red cartel. The real cheats in all this are the rule-makers themselves who have designed rules to entrench the inbuilt advantage of the red cartel clubs.