According to a recent article from The Times, Manchester City, in the midst of the Trial of the Century, has accused the Premier League of bending the rules and regulations of the division to benefit four other top flight clubs, including Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal.
As the lengthy wait for a verdict continues into the latter stages of the 2024–2025 season, a decision on the club’s 130 charges—which is anticipated soon—has not yet been rendered. Now, the case has been pending for more than two years.
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Pep Guardiola, manager of Man City, holding his head in his hand.
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In the most recent development, the four-time Premier League winners attacked league executives last month in a statement they sent to an impartial tribunal, alleging that efforts were being made to change sponsorship regulations.
Pep Guardiola’s team has maintained that not only Arsenal, but the Gunners as well as Brighton & Hove Albion, Everton, and Leicester City, have been unfairly handed an advantage, according to The Times’ well-reported story on the subject.
They proposed that shareholder loans from the owners of the four clubs named above, which can amount to hundreds of millions of pounds, have not been handled similarly to other Associated Party Transactions (APTs).
As a point of reference, APTs involve sponsorship agreements with businesses connected to club owners. The Citizens won their legal battle against the Premier League’s APT regulations last year after arguing they had experienced “discrimination.”
This is due to the regulations’ insistence that shareholder loans be exempt from the “fair market value” (FMV) criteria that applies to business transactions. Nonetheless, the revised regulations resulting from Manchester City’s court triumph aim to mitigate the aforementioned problem.
According to the rules, all 20 teams in the top division of England that have benefited from shareholder loans are now permitted to convert those loans into equity within a “grace period,” which concluded in January this year.
The panel, which included Lord Dyson, Sir Nigel Teare, and Cristopher Vajda KC, came to the conclusion that the regulations were “void and unenforceable.” Consequently, the club argues that clubs ought to return to the pre-2021 arrangement, when the regulations governing transactions with “related parties” were less stringent.
According to reports, Manchester City believes that the modified rules still “discriminate” against them while improving the financial standing of its rivals. To support their claims, the team has examined their financial records.
According to a portion of the claim, Arsenal received £259 million (in 2022–2023) from shareholder loans, while Brighton received £406.5 million in 2021–2022, Everton received £450 million in 2022–2023, and relegation-bound Leicester received £265 million in 2021–2022.
The 2022–2023 Champions League winners’ ruling body therefore feels that slight modifications to the current regulations would not be adequate because they currently “fail to meet the requirements of transparency, objectivity, precision, and proportionality” and are also “liable to distort competition.”
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