PL charge City for alleged breaches of financial rules

[Chappie]

Sky bought shares in United and tried to buy the club. The PL and government stepped in to stop it.

Sky also bought a chunk of City a few years later.

They were trying to buy a stake in most clubs at the time,until they were stopped.

 

[Centurions]

Also, Interesting that arsenals first title was in 1931 and their 5th was in 1938. That can’t have been through ‘organic growth’ and today, they’d be up on charges…

It's always been bent, from Wiki:-

The club controversially rejoined the First Division in 1919,[18][19] despite having only finished sixth in 1914–15, the last season of competitive football before the First World War — although an error in the calculation of goal average meant Arsenal had actually finished fifth, an error which was corrected by the Football League in 1975.[20][21] The First Division was being expanded from 20 teams to 22, and the two new entrants were to be elected at an AGM of the Football League. On past precedent the two places would be given to the two clubs that would otherwise have been relegated, namely Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur. Instead one of the extra places was awarded to Chelsea and a ballot was called for the remaining place. The candidates included 20th-placed Tottenham and, from the Second Division, Barnsley (who had finished third); Wolverhampton Wanderers, (fourth); Birmingham (fifth, later amended to sixth); Arsenal; Hull City (seventh); and Nottingham Forest (eighteenth).[20] The League voted to promote sixth-placed Arsenal, for reasons of history over merit; Norris argued that Arsenal be promoted for their "long service to league football", having been the first League club from the South.[19] The League board agreed; Arsenal received 18 votes, Tottenham 8, Barnsley 5 and Wolves 4, with a further 6 votes shared between the other clubs.[18]

The announcement of the vote reportedly caught all the clubs, except Arsenal, unawares and the affair is a major contributing factor to the rivalry which has fuelled the long-standing enmity between Arsenal and Tottenham.[18][19] There is also an inconsistency in the argument – if "long service to league football" was the criterion for promoting Arsenal instead of Tottenham then Wolverhampton Wanderers, who finished two points ahead of Arsenal and were founder members of the Football League, would appear to have had a stronger claim. It has been alleged that this was due to backroom deals or even outright bribery by Sir Henry Norris,[18] colluding with his friend John McKenna, the chairman of Liverpool and the Football League, who recommended Arsenal's promotion at the AGM.[18] No conclusive proof of wrongdoing has come to light, though other aspects of Norris's financial dealings unrelated to the promotion controversy have fuelled speculation on the matter; Norris resigned as chairman and left the club in 1929, having been found guilty by the Football Association of financial irregularities; he was found to have misused his expenses account, and to have pocketed the proceeds of the sale of the Arsenal team bus.[22] Regardless of the circumstances of their promotion, Arsenal have remained in the top division since 1919, and as a result hold the English record for the longest unbroken stretch of top-flight football.[23] There appear to be no extant records of the meetings which elected Arsenal to the First Division in 1919, however the book Making the Arsenal proposes a different reason for their election in that year, arguing that match-fixing issues from the final year of football before the war (1914–15) were used by Norris as a weapon in his battle to get Arsenal promoted. He demanded that Liverpool and Manchester United (some of whose players had been found guilty of match fixing) be punished by relegation or expulsion, and threatened to organise a breakaway from the league by Midlands and southern clubs if nothing was done. To placate him the League offered Arsenal a place in the First Division.[24]

History of Arsenal F.C. (1886–1966) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[lancs blue]

Also, Interesting that arsenals first title was in 1931 and their 5th was in 1938. That can’t have been through ‘organic growth’ and today, they’d be up on charges…

Arsenal by-passed the maximum wage by getting their best players "jobs" with firms run by the Arsenal directors.

 

[TheGhost]

Another Arsenal scandal - pasted from Wiki

In the same year, Arsenal became embroiled in a scandal; footballers' pay at the time was limited by a maximum wage, but an FA inquiry found that Charlie Buchan had secretly received illegal payments from Arsenal as an incentive to sign for the club.[70] Sir Henry Norris was indicted for his part and banned from football, but Chapman escaped punishment, and with the autocratic Norris replaced by the more benign Samuel Hill-Wood, Chapman's power and influence within the club increased, allowing him control over all aspects of the club's business.

 

[StillBluessinceHydeRoad]

Would BMW be able to get together with other car companies to set limits on Peugeot investment. I don't think so. That might be a bit simplistic but that's the way I see it. I feel sorry for our owners because when they bought City their was no FFP, our owners business model never took into account FFP because it didn't exist. We have had to react to the goalposts being moved and its wrong. Maybe we should of took these clowns to court on day one instead of trying to comply with these artificial barriers being imposed.

I don't think this is the case. Sheikh Mansour was told that regulations to control spending were to be introduced when he was negotiating the purchase of the club. How much detail he was given, I don't know but I believe he informed FIFA that he envisaged an initial period of heavy investment but afterwards he intended the club to sustain itself from its own resources. This is very much what he promised in the open letter of September 2008. I agree that FFP and PSR do seem to drive a coach and horses through EU and UK commercial law, but they have not been challenged in court and so the "exception" of "competitive balance" (which FFP and PSR most certainly don't guarantee) still holds sway.

The thing is, of course, that City don't need to challenge FFP and/or PSR because because the club has ensured that UEFA will never be able tp pull a trick like the one they got away with in 2013 and City will never need to resort to any of the accounting irregularities the club is charged with. Our defence is based on the principle that the club has simply done nothing wrong.

 

[Coljj]

 

[M18CTID]

Another Arsenal scandal - pasted from Wiki

In the same year, Arsenal became embroiled in a scandal; footballers' pay at the time was limited by a maximum wage, but an FA inquiry found that Charlie Buchan had secretly received illegal payments from Arsenal as an incentive to sign for the club.[70] Sir Henry Norris was indicted for his part and banned from football, but Chapman escaped punishment, and with the autocratic Norris replaced by the more benign Samuel Hill-Wood, Chapman's power and influence within the club increased, allowing him control over all aspects of the club's business.

Yet when we got done for overpaying players some years before that - a practice that was recognised as being prevalent at pretty much every club - our manager was banned for life and the FA forced us to auction off our entire first-team squad in what was surely the heaviest punishment handed out in the history of English football.

 

[levets]

It wouldn’t have surprised me if the system was sold on a “per user” basis and clubs just decided to save money by buying one licence to share between multiple users. I’ve seen plenty of businesses being cheapskates in this way.

Not sure about that, because if it was it would perhaps never have been detected. They illicitly used the details of a City scout (Rob Newman)who was still at the club; I believe they did this in the belief (correctly) that it would appear it was Rob using the site.

 

[Maly]

You're actually largely incorrect on this.

The Liverpool one involved the former City employees using an existing enployee's login credentials. I don't know how they got that password (although I'm sure City does) but I do know that the City employee involved was still there a few years later, and may still be. So he wasn't sacked, suggesting he wasn't actively involved in whatever happened. It still puzzles me why we didn't go to the police over this, as it was a clear criminal offence under the Computer Misuse Act.

My understanding of the Pinto hack is that it involved an phishing email designed to look like it came from UEFA, which was opened by a senior club official. You can warn people all you like and carry out regular phishing tests, but there's pretty well no way you can guarantee security if someone doesn't carefully check an email address every time before they open it or click on a link.

Exactly this

 

[Citizen of Legoland]

Not sure about that, because if it was it would perhaps never have been detected. They illicitly used the details of a City scout (Rob Newman)who was still at the club; I believe they did this in the belief (correctly) that it would appear it was Rob using the site.

That all depends on the frequency of use of the off-site software and theoretically it could have been detected when the legit user was blocked due to a fraudulent user being logged in, or as part of an audit of ip addresses, or as a result of changing from simple password to 2FA or a number of other matters. I work with software that still to this day allows the same login to be used from different locations at the same time, too. Sometimes the two logins are unaware of each other, sometimes they conflict and "steal" the screen of the other back and forth.

My point then and now is that if an ex employee had stolen a login from another user and had continued to use it after leaving the company I would have expected that user to be charged accordingly. As that didn't happen, I suspect both sides wanted to play the issue down.