Been busy this week and have no time to plough through 120-odd pages on this. I may therefore be duplicating stuff that's been said before, in whioch case I'm sorry. Anyway, here goes.
1. The bottom line is that this is going to be a highly technical case that depends on very complex intricacies of UK competition law. Such cases are usually very difficult for a claimant to prove.
2. However, I'm surprised and not a little disappointed to see various prominent City accounts on X wading in a criticising the club based on the reporting of this issue so far.
3. For a start, nearly all of what we know about the matter is based on a story that a newspaper has sourced based on an extensive leak from our opponent or from a rival member club within it. That constitutes a bad-faith source which is deliberately giving a skewed, incomplete and likely misleading view of events, so I'd wager that City's position would look more ostensibly reasonable if we had an impartial account produced in good faith of the respective positions of the parties.
4. Further, I think that the senior executives of the club deserve our trust at this point. That could change as events progress, though I hope and believe it won't. However, I don't see grounds at this stage for any committed Blue to mistrust them.
5. For City to have brought this action, those running the club must believe the following two things among others: (a) that City have suffered a genuine loss as a result of the PL applying the provisions we're challenging; and (b) that such application has been discriminatory.
6. IF the two circumstances listed in point 5 were true (and please note that this is a conditional sentence, while also referring back to point 4), it'd be perfectly reasonable for the club to seek to safeguard its position in this way. Indeed, there's a strong argument that the directors would be remiss if they failed to do so.
I don't see that it's currently possible to say any more than the above with any authority. But, as with the thread on the so-called '115 charges', where literally almost nothing of note has happened in public since February 2023, BM is nonetheless likely to amass thousands of pages of comment.
