OLIVER HOLT: Man City’s tainting is just a sign of an out-of-control Loadsamoney League

There are those who still cling to the idea that English football has never had it so good.  

They will say, even in the light of the 115 charges facing reigning champions Manchester City, that at a time when we have turned inwards in so many ways, the Premier League is Britain’s greatest export, that it is our shining light, our world leader. 

They will say that amid all our woes and the sense of decline that besieges us, it is something to be proud of. 

There are elements of truth in that. The beauty and the drama of the football that our top flight produces every week make the head spin. 

It is a privilege to watch Kevin De Bruyne, Virgil van Dijk, Bukayo Saka, Harry Kane, Marcus Rashford, Bruno Guimaraes, Alexis Mac Allister, N’Golo Kante and many, many others at our stadiums. The thrill of seeing players of that calibre at grounds up and down the country never wears off.

The news of Man City’s breach of financial rules has sent shockwaves across the top-flight

The reigning champions are facing a potential points deduction and expulsion from the league

But despite the thrill of gazing at the canvasses created by the coaching genius of Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp, despite the increasing veneration for the way clubs like Brighton and Brentford are run, pride in the Premier League and its Goliaths is dwindling fast. 

This week’s tainting of City is the headline act but it is also a symptom of a league that is out of control, a league that needs to be saved from itself.

For some time now, with every day that passes, with every club subsumed as a sportswashing vehicle for repressive nation states, every transfer record obliterated, every new monument to conspicuous consumption established, every new attempt to make the super-rich clubs even richer, every deception exposed, every supporter betrayed, the Premier League has been careening down the road to Hell.

As City gird themselves for a grim and protracted struggle to try to prove their innocence and the government prepares to publish its white paper setting out plans for an Independent Regulator for football, it is clear the game has conjured an identity crisis from the midst of its vast wealth. 

Sometimes, the only thing it seems to stand for is the accumulation of money and the profligacy with which it spends it.

No one wants to harm the Premier League but it is time to arrest its slide into something we need to apologise for. Is a league that allows countries with fabulous wealth, but appalling human rights records, to own our clubs something to be proud of? 

Does it make you feel warm inside that one of the teams contesting the first showpiece occasion of this season, the Carabao Cup Final, will be Newcastle United?

How low have we sunk if we think the renaissance of a team owned and funded by Saudi Arabia, a totalitarian state that cuts up journalists with bone-saws, laughs at the idea of free speech and runs on institutionalised misogyny and homophobia, represents a feel-good story for the English game?

City’s breach in financial play comes shortly after Chelsea’s £320m spending spree in January

Saudi-owned Newcastle represented a fairy-tale story as they reached the Carabao Cup final

This is a league whose leading clubs were prepared to destroy that league and the entire fabric of English football by founding a European Super League two years ago. A league that needed the fans to rescue it from itself. 

A league whose philosophy has appeared for some time to be summed up by the club executive who wrote, in a leaked email: ‘We can do what we want.’ And by fans drunk on oil money singing ‘We’re so rich, it’s unbelievable.’ 

The Greed is Good League. The Loadsamoney League. Is that a league to be proud of?

A league where one club, Chelsea, was able to spend more than the combined outlay of the Spanish league, the French league, the German league and the Italian league in this year’s January transfer window. 

Chelsea owner Todd Boehly has played a role in the league’s extortionate spending rate

A league that thinks that kind of competitive imbalance is healthy. A league that is short-sighted enough to crave that kind of imbalance. A league that thinks that imbalance signifies success. That it signifies victory. Is that a league to be proud of?

A league that rules by cheque-book diplomacy. A league that grew out of the English football pyramid and which now resists the idea of a more equitable distribution of broadcast revenues with the lower leagues. 

A league that is so tone-deaf it likens itself to Tesco or Sainsbury’s and asks why it should help the corner shops of the Football League. A league that has forgotten where it came from. A league that does not want to accept it is part of a bigger eco-system.

A league that perpetuates a chasm of wealth inequality between it and the Football League and encourages those desperate to get promoted to it to court ruin in the process. 

Leading English teams threatened to destroy the league by founding a European Super League

This season, 25 clubs – 20 in the Premier League and five who get parachute payments in the Football League – will receive 92 per cent of the distributable revenues of the English game (£2.96bn), while the other 67 professional clubs will receive just 8 per cent (£258m). Is that a Premier League to be proud of?

A league we celebrate because it has promotion and relegation but which is effectively a closed shop. 

The Premier League is all but a closed league by stealth. The parachute payments paid to relegated clubs see to that. They lock in an elite of 25 or 30 clubs and make it harder and harder for others to gain admittance.

Forget the idea, loyally parroted by the obsequious and the biddable, that the Premier League has proved its fitness to govern by confronting City. If anything, the opposite is true. 

That it has taken more than a decade to call City to account for the infractions alleged and the fact that City have won more titles since the four-year investigation began, is proof of just how pathetic the league’s attempts at self-regulation have been.

Teams in the EFL will receive just 8 per cent of the distributable revenues of the English game

Later this month, the government will publish its white paper setting out the proposals for an Independent Regulator for football in this country that arose from Tracey Crouch’s much-admired Fan-Led Review of Football Governance. 

Some clubs, including Manchester City, welcome the idea of the regulator. Others are terrified by it. They think it might be the end of the gravy train. The only fear for many of us is that the proposals will not go far enough.

An Independent Regulator would not be able to stop Saudi Arabia or Abu Dhabi or Qatar owning a Premier League club and nor, it is thought, would it be able to force the more equitable distribution of broadcast revenues in the game. 

If the Premier League maintains its intransigence on that issue, though, there is at least some hope that the scope of the Independent Regulator may be extended.

Tracey Crouch released a much-admired Fan-Led Review of Football Governance in 2021

Some still warn us solemnly that we must not meddle with the Premier League lest we destroy it, conveniently forgetting that if it were up to the owners of the Big Six clubs, the Premier League would be dead already. 

The idea that the manifest flaws of the Premier League should be enshrined forever is preposterous.

The Premier League’s fear of change, its fear of being made to take greater responsibility for the health of the English game, may be enough to put the brakes on its excesses. 

It is so afraid of the spectre of the new that it chose this week, the week the white paper was originally scheduled to be published, to throw Manchester City under the bus. 

 Pep Guardiola is facing a monumental moment in his career as City receive their sanctions

It was a crude ploy that all but the most credulous saw through immediately. It must not be allowed to work.

The tainting of City and all that they have achieved in the Premier League era, the stain on the standard-bearers for our top flight, could not be a more powerful signpost towards the conclusion many had already reached: the Premier League, which spent too long basking in the glow of the bonfire of its vanities, needs to face up to its responsibilities to the greater game. 

A reckoning has been coming for the Premier League for some time and now that reckoning is upon it.