Sporting Intelligence Newsletter

Since Friday, football has been consumed by reports that Manchester City have been found guilty of 114 breaches of the Premier League’s financial rules. The allegations are still to be tested on appeal, but at their heart, they concern sponsorship money and where it really came from. Everyone is asking how money came to rule football so completely. I can tell you, and I’ve written a book about it (below). Because I was there when it started - and I built the machine.

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.

I wrote a piece last month where I said that the income from any new paying subscribers as a result of that piece would all be given to three charities. That income was $982 (£740), and as a result, Maggie’s, Brain Tumour Research, and a hospice have each received £250 today. So thanks to all those who, in effect, contributed to help people with cancer and those affected by cancer. In return you’ve had some articles about … stuff, generally but not always related to sport.

This piece was commissioned for the Nutmeg Substack and I’ve been writing for them regularly since 2024. Those pieces will appear here, and over there. More about Nutmeg, the Scottish Football Quarterly, later. No Scotsman, no party? That is the big current fear for fans of IK Sirius - the surprise package of this season in Sweden’s top football division.

In 2014, one of the most senior figures at football’s European governing body, UEFA - a grey bureaucrat called Gianni Infantino (below, with Donald Trump years later) - personally intervened to negotiate with senior officials at Manchester City and PSG to ensure that both clubs escaped without bans from the Champions League following huge, egregious breaches of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play rules.

Last week, FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s private jet, provided by Qatar, took him to the Dominican Republic where he wanted to wow another regional voting block - the Caribbean Football Union (The CFU) - even after he had been asked to stay away by CONCACAF.

It was about 10pm UK time on Friday 19 August 2016, and Great Britain’s women’s hockey team were playing in the Olympic final in Rio de Janeiro. I was in my car on the forecourt of a petrol station in the west of Scotland, crying. Eight hours earlier we had been for a ‘precautionary’ MRI scan of my wife Helen’s brain. That was to find out the cause of the mild numbness in the fingers and toes of Helen’s right hand and foot since June.

No fewer than 51 of the 92 football clubs across the Premier League and English Football League (or 55%) have changed their managers at least once during the past year. Three clubs in the Premier League alone have made more than one change each in that time. Nottingham Forest started last season with Nuno but sacked him in September, replacing him with Ange Postecoglou (sacked in October), then replacing Ange with Sean Dyche, sacked in February and replaced by Vítor Pereira.

The ongoing FIFA psychodrama took its latest extraordinary twist of the summer earlier today when UEFA, the AFC and CONCACAF wrote an open letter accusing FIFA president Gianni Infantino (without naming him) of breaking trust "through deception". “Leadership in football is not a possession,” they wrote. “It is not about holding – or demanding – power to be held. It is a duty of service to the football family that entrusts it.

As someone who has covered Manchester City’s financial misdemeanours for more than 12 years since their first fine and sanctions by UEFA in 2014, and their Champions League ban and CAS case in 2020, and their defeat in the High Court in 2021 to keep their battle with the Premier League secret, I’ve been asked loads of times in recent weeks when we will finally have a verdict in this case.