Hopefully this is the final twist in the story of City and FFP which ends with a declaration of City's complete innocence. It seems, then, a baffling saga with the only consistent theme of a desire to damage the reputation and standing of the club and debase its achievements. We have never been short of ideas on who the leading actors are in this conspiracy and now would be a good time for the authorities to put them out to pasture, if nothing worse.
I think it fair to say that major institutions see litigation as the desperate last option to resolve a problem or dispute. This appears to have been UEFA's position in 2014 and certainly Infantino stated last December that this had been his position. City went so far as to take a "pinch" so that the club could not become embroiled in a case but could move on. It seems, however, that UEFA is actually split: a group of doves glad to see the back in 2014 to a potentially very damaging case but also a group of hawks who saw the DS "leaks" as a golden opportunity to end City's participation in the CL, with all the "collateral damage" that would bring with it, and keep the media full of negative stories about the club ( to add to the already extensive reporting ). Who could these "hawks" possibly be?! They appear to have been in a majority in the investigative chamber but too clever for themselves in the end. I presume that the reference of the case to CAS at least focused attention and involved what our American cousins call "plea bargaining" - discussions between the parties, City and UEFA and possibly even CAS. The club seems, not surprisingly, to have handled this very well and its intransigence coupled with the nature of the evidence the investigative chamber used so willingly have left UEFA with nothing more than face saving gestures.
What this shows, though, is that the hawks may have suffered a defeat but they are still there and that they still have the backing of medias all too willing to do any damage to City they can. We can only hope that it may be a case of computer hacking which ruins the anti City campaign rather than our CL ambitions.
