Manchester City legal letters where the main aim was to get me sacked

It’s more than 11 years since Manchester City first accepted a major UEFA punishment for financial cheating, or “cooking their books”, for artificially inflating their income and artificially reducing their costs. This is how The Guardian reported it at the time, and how the BBC reported it. City accepted an initial fine of €60m and various transfer limits and wage cuts.

It was more than five years ago that City were then banned for two years from the Champions League for other financial cheating (The Times report here; ESPN here; BBC here; New York Times here), before having that sanction overturned, and escaping with a fine of “only” €10m for not co-operating with any of the investigations into their behaviour.

It is more than eight years since the Premier League opened an investigation into 115 charges (and more) of alleged financial cheating by City, and amost three years since City were charged with 115 (and more) breaches of financial rules.

And it’s been more than a year since the completion of a 10-week hearing when City presented what they said was a “comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence” to support their claim of innocence, and we are still yet to have a verdict.

If you are interested in detail then it’s probably worth reading this piece from November last year which came with lots of downloadable documents that supported the claims that City did in fact make the extraordinary sums alleged in Football Leaks documents (as below) from sponsorship deals with Abu Dhabi entities. Those allegations and documents are available in full via that piece.

If you want more general background into City’s alleged financial cheating over more than a decade then I suggest you briefly look here and here.

But today’s piece is something different. It’s a story of how Manchester City have set out to intimidate and effectively bully reporters (specifically me in this case) who have consistently produced investigative journalism since 2014 that has asked questions about their dubious financial practices.

More specifically, today’s piece looks at a single newspaper article from 2023 (by me, for the Mail on Sunday) – which, on the face of it, was relatively innocuous – which asked questions about the financial advantages that a multi-club organisation (MCO) such as the the City Football Group (wiki page here, their own page here) might gain from being an MCO.

The rest of today’s piece, for Sporting Intelligence paid subscribers, without which this site could not exist, includes:

• My initial email to Man City in May 2023, asking basic questions about transfers of players between CFG entities. I had already extensively researched this but wanted City / CFG to give me guidance if I was wrong, or correct me when open source information was erroneous. This should give you an insight into how responsible and diligent reporters behave, fact-checking and asking questions about stories before we publish.

• The initial threatening response from City, which wasn’t from the club but from a law firm, sent to my bosses and effectively trying to get me sacked for asking questions (!!), without answering my questions.

• A second letter from a law firm on behalf of City, after we published the article in question, basically saying it was total rubbish, but actually providing information that showed my initial research was solid.

• My response to the Mail on Sunday’s lawyers, explaining how I had gone to great lengths to get accurate information for the article, and how City had declined to answer any questions about the subject, pre-publication. I also told the MoS lawyers that City would NOT want us to publish the “accurate” information they gave us, because they were obtuse and just trying to get me sacked. “That would be weird,” one of my paper’s senior lawyers told me. And guess what? When asked by the MoS lawyers if we could use the club’s own figures to update the article online, City refused! No further action happened and my original article about Manchester City “gaming the system” remains unchanged on the Mail website. City simply wanted to intimidate me and persuade my bosses I needed to be sacked.