General Premier League Thread 2023-24 Mod Note in op 27/6/23 And 21/05/24

They have the opportunity to increase their income. It's all about money.

The smaller clubs are against it because it'll widen the gap between the big and smaller clubs.

My guess would be the supporters are Newcastle, Chelsea, United, Arsenal, Aston Villa, Spurs and possibly Liverpool.

If there's a specific number then start at the end and eliminate from there.

How exactly did the PL break the law? This is a private club, they can draft whatever rules they choose. Applying democratic voting rights or financial rulesets isn't and never will be construed as breaking the law.

True. There's a difference between raising the standards and raising the points total to win it out. The two shouldn't be conflated. A robotic display grinding out a foregone conclusion isn't exactly raising the standard. Just because one team has highly technical footballers doesn't mean that the standard across the league has improved or even that the standard of a particular match is higher. Their football is tedious to watch.

Good piece in todays Times on City.

It is but 2½ weeks since we were digesting the reality that Manchester City had won their fourth consecutive Premier League title and thus established themselves as statistically the most dominant club in English football history. That is not enough, though. This latest news tells us that from this position of unprecedented dominance, they actually intend to run away from the rest of the pack.

In the midst of the legalese, the endgame here is frightening. It is not about being frontrunners in the Premier League competition, it is more about rendering the competition redundant because if you lift financial constraints, which is what they are fighting for in court, then you create a two-horse race for nation state-owned clubs, with Chelsea, whose owners are partly Saudi-funded, trundling along in third.

Managing the financial disparity among its 20 clubs is a complicated game which the Premier League has been attempting to play. On the one hand, it wants to reward the well-off and ambitious yet, simultaneously, it wants to limit the possibility of this disparity killing the competition. It could be argued — and it has been in these pages — that the balance isn’t quite right at present. No, it probably isn’t. However, this is the nuclear option.

This legal challenge by City is a battle about cutting loose from the rules and in so doing, it would cut them loose from the other 19 clubs. Sorry, the other 18 clubs. Newcastle United will have a fingers-crossed front-row seat in the gallery.

There are some elements to this legal challenge that are staggering in their audacity. City are challenging the Associated Party Transaction (APT) rules that the Premier League signed up to in December 2021. Yet, like all the clubs, City had themselves signed off on the new rules. They may not have voted for them but as signatories to the Premier League agreement, they nevertheless put their name to them and agreed to abide by them. That is how the Premier League works; it is a private club governed by the majority vote.

City’s legal challenge is about both the past and the future. For the past, this attempt to determine that the rules regarding financial constraints have been unlawful, could have a significant impact on the 115 charges against them. It asks the question: were some of those charges based on rotten law?

For the future, it says: can we now use the freedom of our financial muscle to do whatever we like?

Those 115 charges — still just charges — are a portrayal of a club allegedly breaking the rules (that they had signed up to) in order to accelerate their commercial power and thus to achieve spending parity with the market leaders, the Manchester Uniteds and the Chelseas.

That parity was achieved with impressive speed. This lawsuit, however, is an attempt to accelerate beyond parity and to leave the rest of the game in their wake.

Somewhere in all this there is surely a deal to be made. You drop the charges, we’ll drop the lawsuit. And then it may all go away. But City will have gamed the system. Whichever way you look at it, City are trying to beat the system.

Within its 165-page legal document, City argue that the rules approved by their rivals were implemented to stifle their success; they call this a “tyranny of the majority”. What they mean is that they cannot live with a democracy.

Yet the success of the Premier League is founded on the principles of democratic decision-making. A system of majority-agreement governance ensures that the Premier League remains a competition that the majority want to compete in.

It is this that Manchester City are seeking to detonate in court next Monday. My colleague Matt Lawton reports that this has sparked “civil war in English football’s top flight”. Indeed, the clubs must fight tooth and nail; they have everything to fight for.

Its very clear City feel that they are going to get walloped by the 115 charges so are trying to circumvent them and essentially obliterate the notion of any sort of a level playing field. Everything about them is hollow, from the hyper inflated sponsorship to the complete apathy their winning the treble last season or the league this season was met with from everyone, including their own fans.

If they win this case they the PL may as well pull down the shutters because the league is completely bricked.

This is also the first time I can recall a journo in a major publication criticising them in any way. Id expect to see more as the potential ramifications and their intentions become clearer.