The Referee Who Couldn’t See The Pitch

Introduction

The starkness of the Independent Commission’s findings on Manchester City, together with the scale of emotion football can generate, shines a spotlight on important aspects of how regulators hold companies and individuals accountable that normally attract too little attention. Below are some reflections on three of those issues and on why we should be talking more about them.

During the period when Manchester City committed the breaches, Premier League (PL) clubs were mostly self-regulated through the PL itself, with the FA and UEFA sitting above. Soon, we will have an Independent Football Regulator (IFR), but it is still consulting on key parts of its operating model. For this short article, I’ve steered clear of discussing either of these arrangements directly, and I’ve also avoided both the Independent Commission’s detailed conclusions and, pending appeal(s), the potential sanctions.

Instead, I’ve taken a step back to look at how the story chimes with broader regulatory issues and trends.

Inspections, public interest, and delayed justice

1.The power to look

It's critical for accountability that regulators should have credible powers to inspect and investigate, either directly or via an independent skilled person. Instead, the PL relied on the accounts Manchester City submitted. It couldn’t look at the relevant figures and documents itself, at least not without the club’s cooperation, which the rules required but which apparently wasn’t provided (see below). Had such powers existed, they would have improved the chances of uncovering the breaches sooner and might also have acted as a deterrent.

Inspection powers and their equivalents are often undervalued in the UK, popularly characterised as costly, intrusive and burdensome. A recent illustration of this, in a different industry from football but one where financial misstatements (both intentional and inadvertent) are also not unknown, was the House of Lords passing an amendment that would constrain the power of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) to require skilled person reviews of financial firms. Lyndon Nelson’s recent article on this is worth reading.

In fact, and by contrast, the Football Governance Act 2025 has given the IFR a similar skilled-person-style power, and it will be interesting to see the reactions if and when the new regulator begins to use it.

In the absence of such a power, the allegations about Manchester City only surfaced in 2018, and then only due to a hack and not through a protected reporting channel, a warning about where the practical inability to investigate and inspect can lead.

This absence also meant increased reliance on the cooperation of the club being investigated, which in this case doesn’t appear to have been provided.

Prior to the PL’s charges, the allegations had led to charges by UEFA’s Club Financial Control Body (CFCB). When the Court of Arbitration for Sport ultimately ruled on that case, in 2020, it cited the importance of clubs cooperating with investigations, noting the CFCB's limited investigative means and City's obstruction of its investigations. In the same vein, 35 of the PL’s 115 charges against Manchester City were for failure to cooperate with its investigation, despite the club’s duty to do so.

2. Whose side is the regulator on?

A big part of a regulator’s job is to act on the public’s behalf, to minimise and, where possible, prevent harm, and to hold those it regulates accountable for their breaches. But this is only usually emphasised after something has gone wrong. The rest of the time, regulators are almost exclusively framed, including by themselves, in terms of their corporate relationships with the firms and individuals they regulate. The bit about representing the public and protecting its interests is either whispered or is silent; the cost of regulation is the headline, while its purpose and benefits often go unmentioned.

In Manchester City’s case, the longevity of the breaches, which covered nine seasons (2009/10 to 2017/18) and was at least partly due to the PL’s lack of inspection powers, multiplied their impact, and that impact is visible. Football differs from most regulated markets in a way that makes the regulator’s public interest role unusually easy to see. As a result, we are all acutely aware of the multiple consequences and sliding-doors moments that resulted; we can see how they have affected numerous clubs, fans and individual players.

The reason behind this is that, while the PL as a business is “positive-sum”, in that broadcasting and sponsorship income has grown across the game, the competition itself is not. There is only one title, a fixed number of European qualifications, and three relegation places, meaning that an advantage gained by breaking the rules is taken directly from identifiable rivals. Both costs and benefits are concentrated, and everyone can put a figure on what is at stake. This contrasts with most other regulated industries, including financial services, where the costs of regulation fall on firms that can and do count them, while the benefits are spread thinly across a general population that rarely notices.

This encourages the tendency to downplay regulators’ role in being on the public’s side and representing its interests, which is only likely to accelerate during our current sharp turn towards deregulation. But, whether it’s football, water or financial services, we should see the job of regulators as representing the public’s interest. They should be consistently held to that standard, including by themselves. Pretending otherwise can’t be the right answer.

3. Justice delayed

Finally, to the growing problem of delayed justice. In Manchester City’s case, as an example, many of the alleged breaches of UEFA’s regulations were not just delayed but removed altogether, as they were time-barred under UEFA’s own five-year limit. We’re now eight years on from the original Football Leaks revelations in Der Spiegel, and more than three since the PL laid its charges against Manchester City. Pending appeal, sanctions will be set at a separate hearing, and it’s not yet known if any will apply to individuals.

It matters that justice should be timely, and the duration of cases such as this is a growing issue for regulators generally. This is partly due to their growing complexity, but it also stems from the willingness of multi-billionaire defendants to use every avenue of legal challenge open to them. This is seemingly a conscious tactic to exhaust regulators who they know have far fewer resources. Questions around accountability and timely justice have therefore become fraught issues across regulation, with no straightforward answers.

To make matters worse, there are signs that some of the biggest companies simply factor in regulatory sanctions as a cost of business; most of the financial penalties regulators can impose are relatively trivial for them and they may believe, with some evidence, that any reputational damage will be limited and short-lived. As parliaments begin to extend regulation into social media and, in the future, AI, where the companies involved are of a different order of magnitude, this trend is unlikely to diminish in the foreseeable future.

Final thought

Whatever else happens in the Manchester City story, the IFR will probably need to win arguments in all three of the areas above to have a realistic chance of success in making clubs and individuals accountable for their actions. The same is true for other regulators, not least the FCA and PRA, whose ability to look freely is now in jeopardy.