At Manchester City, uncommon greatness but at what cost?

The problem with Manchester City, as Arsène Wenger saw it, was not simply that it possessed an apparently bottomless well of wealth. It was that City was smart, too.“Petrol and ideas,” as Wenger, the former Arsenal manager, put it, “Money and quality.”

Wenger, of course, spent much of his career railing against soccer’s inexorable drift into the grasp of oligarchs and plutocrats, vainly espousing the virtues of sustainability as the game swooned before leveraged billionaires and sovereign investment funds. It was Wenger who first introduced the idea of “financial doping” to the sport, preaching parsimony during a gold rush.

By the end, though, even he did not believe City’s success could be explained solely by its balance sheet. Its pre-eminence could not have been achieved without the billion-plus pounds provided by its backer, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan, but it would not have been so complete had that money not been spent so wisely.

The most obvious manifestation of that has been on the field: Pep Guardiola’s team won the Premier League last season with more points and more goals than any team in the modern era. It did so with such style, such ruthless élan that England as a whole will “forever be grateful” for Guardiola’s presence, as the former striker Gary Lineker put it. When England’s national team reached the semifinals of the World Cup last summer, many credited Guardiola, at least in part, for helping to smooth the introduction of a more modern approach.

Off the field, though, the modern City has also become a point of reference to many. City Football Group, the umbrella organization that owns City and its interlinked network of sister clubs, has been consulted by the Chinese Super League on how to run its teams more sustainably. In the United States, in particular, Major League Soccer has made use of the vast database of information held by City’s recruitment department when assessing potential signings from minor European leagues.

Even Real Madrid, a club more accustomed to leading than following, was impressed by City’s model. Executives from the Santiago Bernabéu told City’s chief executive, Ferran Soriano, that it was not something they could copy — Real’s prestige would be diluted by franchising, they felt — but they admired the concept. Like everyone else in soccer, they accepted that City was about more than just oil: it had ideas, too.

Increasingly, it seems as though that combination is simply too much for the rest of the Premier League. Guardiola’s team has dropped only four points this season; it remains on course to equal, or beat, its points total from last year. It will go into Sunday’s derby against Manchester United as a firm favorite; United, for so long the shadow City could not escape, now seems the underdog.  Guardiola was asked if the league as a whole would eventually suffer for City’s unimpeachable excellence. “I don’t know,if it’s a problem.”

Manchester City’s Spanish manager Pep Guardiola

Similar success in the Champions League, the competition its executives — if not its fans — cherish more than any other, has proved more elusive. City does not need the trophy, though, to know that it has already joined Europe’s front rank of teams. In the documents released by the opaque whistle-blowing platform Football Leaks to the German magazine Der Spiegel, five Premier League clubs were named as party to a plan to launch a breakaway European Super League — replacing the Champions League — starting in 2021. City was among them. The petrol, and the ideas, have brought City to the head table.

Those documents, though, have painted an entirely different picture of City from the one that had convinced so many of its opponents to follow its example.

In a weeklong exposé of the methods the club has used to circumvent UEFA’s Financial Fair Play regulations — to, in a comment attributed to Simon Pearce, one of the club’s most influential executives, “do what we want” — Der Spiegel and Football Leaks have depicted a club that has, for almost a decade, worked tirelessly to deceive and co-opt the game’s authorities, to make sure the rules do not apply to City; and whenever it has not gotten its way, it has reacted with petulant anger.

There are details of inflated sponsorship deals designed to mask covert cash injections from the club’s owners; of closed payment loops with spurious third-party companies for players’ image rights; of a former manager’s salary that seems, at least in part, to have been bolstered by an “advisory” role with another club owned by Sheikh Mansour; of a secret partnership with a Danish team that may have breached rules on a club’s influence; of legal threats toward not only UEFA but to the accounting firm sent in to examine the club’s accounts; and of back-room deals with Gianni Infantino, at the time the general secretary of UEFA and now the most powerful man at FIFA.

Nobody comes out of the revelations well: not Infantino, craven and crawling; not UEFA, willing to prosecute the minnows while the sharks swim free; not the clubs, led by Bayern Munich, who talked of leaving not only UEFA but FIFA itself in search of more money; not Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, who has called for those guilty of “dirty tricks” to be punished, which would coincidentally help several of the teams in his competition; not the clubs or organizations who should be righteously angry at flagrant rule breaches but who have maintained the silence of the complicit; and certainly not City — or, for that matter, Paris Saint-Germain — who signed up to a set of rules and promptly searched for ways to break them.

Guardiola this week rejected the idea that his team’s success was related only to its wealth. “If people say it is about money, we accept it,But that point of view is completely wrong.”
The New York Times has not seen the source documents Der Spiegel has obtained, and cannot verify them. But City has not declared any of the information reported so far to be false. It has simply dismissed the documents as a “clear and organized attempt” to smear the club’s reputation.