Scamchester City Fire Pit with Sam Kunti

Um, well, when City settled with UEFA in 2014, they had a deficit of about 188 million euros.

Hmm.

That alread- that already-

Hmm

... meant that they could never Match the financial requirements under Financial Fair Play from UEFA.

What perhaps gave the game away, so to say, is the commercial deals with companies from the United Arab Emirates, and obviously the two most prominent ones are Etisalat, a telecoms company, and Etihad, which also has the naming rights of Manchester City's stadium.

Um, so those deals were, as we later found out, grossly inflated.

And you see the same modus operandi, uh, at PSG in Paris, where, for example, you had a deal between the club and the Qatar Tourism Authority that was worth around $120 million, um, on, uh, per year.

And that's a massive amount of money.

And at the time, I believe it was in 2018, UEFA itself said, um, that this did not reflect a fair market value.

So a lot of these sponsorship deals-

Mm

... with companies in the UAE, which then had direct ties with the government, obviously offered a window into how, in this case, Manchester City operate.

Got it.

That's really interesting.

You need a lot of private auditors [laughs] or independent auditors to make those evaluations, so transparency is, I'm sure, really, really [laughs] slow to, uh, come by.

So why is this being tried? This seems to be a violation and constitute criminal fraud under English law, or, or certainly European law.

And I'm not a lawyer, but why is this being handled within the EPL? Shouldn't this be handled by the prosecutors of real criminal courts?

Well, clubs obviously vote for the rules within the EPL, and clubs agree on the rules, um, including the Financial Fair Play rules or the PSR rules as they are called today in the UK.

Um, so there is an ecosystem upon itself.

They also agree that, for example, Manchester City will not be able to appeal against an appeal decision in the future at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland because that's a European jurisdiction, but they could go to the High Court in the UK, for example.

So these rules are kind of agreed upon privately.

Now, obviously where there is a criminal element, um, prosecutors might obviously look at this, and I'm thinking, for example, about how Manchester City, um, dealt with, uh, taxes, paying taxes in, in, in the UK.

Um, but at this stage that would be speculation.

But you are right to point out that perhaps there are criminal elements to this.