Manchester City’s guilty verdict brings football’s great sell-off crashing to earth

AI Summary

A ruling against Manchester City found that the club used sham contracts to artificially inflate income by £900 million, intensifying scrutiny of football’s corporate ownership and finances. The verdict landed during a politically charged Labour Party conference, where speakers were also debating Britain’s political direction.

On the day Andy Burnham spoke of the wrong turn Britain took under Thatcher, football was facing a day of reckoning over its own story of corporate acquisition It was somehow fitting that Tuesday’s damning ruling against Manchester City landed in the heart of the Labour party conference, in the afterglow of Andy Burnham’s rapturously received prime minister’s speech. I was there, and read the astonishing 40 pages of findings – that City created “sham” contracts to boost income artificially by £900m – on my phone during a long meeting of the Socialist Campaign Group, where people were celebrating Keir Starmer’s ousting and Burnham’s more leftwing direction. Continue reading...