SOS FFP

City are now preparing to pass through the "entrada principal" not the "salida" in UEFA's flagship tournament

"Governments crack and systems fall

....

Lights go out - walls come tumbling down!"

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The decision by the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland to overthrow the prior UEFA ruling against Manchester City has tossed the football world a story to chew on through the remainder of this sweaty, uncertain summer. 

It has also opened a can of worms that the sports governing body in Europe would do well to attempt to keep a lid on in the coming months.

To City the spoils of victory. The besuited legal teams, briefed up to their eyeballs and frothing with righteous indignation, have sent UEFA's cronies and their lop-sided legislations scurrying for the green bedecked Swiss hinterlands. 

Insufficient Conclusive Evidence

That CAS dismissed many of the supposed wrongs on a time detail shows UEFA to be inept in its basic manoeuvring. These are the simplest of details, to which the most rudimentally briefed legal teams would and should fix their expert attention.

UEFA have rapidly fallen silent. Others not so coy have alighted on the phrase "insufficient conclusive evidence" to suggest City are still rotten, despite the findings. Well, there is no smoke without fire, that is certain. But smoke also prevents any of us from seeing anything as clearly as we would like, so perhaps those that have taken the case apart line by line should be trusted in their judgement. They are, after all, the independent experts brought in to arbitrate, where all else failed. 

In essence City's vindication in maintaining an aggressive stance against this attack has been borne out. UEFA's clumsy hand has cuffed the club many times before, producing an uneasy relationship long before Aleksander Ceferin and his cronies turned up the thermostat over FFP. 

Wonky Thinking

The infamous game in Porto in the Europa League 2011-12, when City were fined more by UEFA for turning out two minutes late for the second half than the home side was for its Super Dragões hurling monkey chants at Mario Balotelli, for example. People don't forget these slights, they don't forget the wonky thinking that has bad time-keeping above racism on a list of misfeasance.

City continued their attempts to join the shiny elite in the Champions League, spending heavily to force a minor break-in on the lower rungs of the gold-crusted ladder occupied exclusively by Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Manchester United. The same United with David Gill on UEFA's Executive Committee since 2013. The same Bayern who weep and simmer every time another club outbids them in the transfer market despite their yearly pillage of their closest German rivals' best players. The same Real who started the whole charabanc rolling with their occupation of the European Cup's early years, turning it into what some people these days call their trophy. The same Real Madrid backed by the ineffable Javier Tebas of the Spanish FA, whose reaction to the CAS decision was to wonder if it wasn't time to do away with CAS. 

European away days like this one in Porto in 2012 are back on the menu. Ironically it was this trip that saw UEFA levy City for a late arrival to the 2nd half against FC Porto, while fining the home side a smaller amount for racist chanting.

Then City's fans were slighted with the grisly episode in Moscow, when - travelling to play CSKA, who had also been reprimanded for their fans' ugly behaviour towards black players - UEFA made the game behind closed doors but refused to countenance compensation to supporters already booked on trips. Lo and behold the noisy CSKA fans who managed to get into the game on the night too, cementing a relationship between City, City's fans and the governing body that has been at best frosty ever since.

Eager Noses

Michel Platini, that most graceful of midfield playmakers, but an execrable football administrator, devised FFP, perhaps with good intention, but brought it to the table as a muddled mess that ended up serving the elite more cleanly than it served the clubs it was designed to assist. Platini, a dinner partner of the eager-nosed French leader Nicolas Sarkozy, had also sniffed out opportunities. Paris St Germain would fall into Qatari hands and the World Cup would follow, with these unusual bedfellows carving football up without the slightest squeak from UEFA.

That one of City's "saviours" should be a Portuguese, sitting on the three-man panel at CAS to judge UEFA's punishment is ironic, as it was a countryman of Rui Botica Santos, Rui Pinto, who was responsible for the hacked documentation reaching the gleaming glass offices of Der Spiegel in Hamburg. That the giant glass and steel atrium overlooking the Ericusgraben in Hamburg harbour resembles a huge shining open goal is purely coincidental, but Der Spiegel are certainly reporting on a very different story today to the five day bonanza they had at City's expense two years ago.

The story spread, the punishment was meted out and City's reputation was thrown to the four winds. Journalists with axes to grind and others with a living to earn joined the throng to prejudge City on UEFA's terms, but something was changing, an undercurrent was moving, a counterflow was beginning to wind its way down the slopes. 

City had already been punished for overspending in the early days after the take-over in 2008. Football's impossibly greased pyramid for those scrabbling to join in the fun at the top of the sport had successfully repelled all invaders. The barons in Paris had a foothold admittedly, but their bling bling approach with Neymar and the young Mbappe wreaked of classless bauble-chasing. City may have splurged poorly judged cash on Eliaquim Mangala and Jack Rodwell, but theirs was a strategy built to be inclusive, built to last, built to find partners in the local community.  

A whole mini city was rising out of the besmirched dust of East Manchester. Regeneration was the name of the game. Community inclusion. Long term thinking. Like it or not, the empire was being built brick by solid brick by people who have watched, learned and listened.

And now the irony is almost complete. With FFP suspended this summer, City can build further with Champions League participation ensured. The piffling fine that remains will trouble no one in their sleep. Even that is for non cooperation with a process that has been proved to be flawed. Whether FFP survives longer than this season or not is also open to question. Its supposedly good intentions, ill conceived and ill deployed, have been shown up for what they are. The irony will be complete and UEFA's embarrassment too, if City hoist the trophy, UEFA's trophy, for the first time ever in Lisbon at the end of August. The gnashing of teeth that will follow if that transpires will be heard from UEFA's furthest outpost in the east to its westernmost cliff edges.