For many within the Premier League, the latest Manchester City case is stark: it is “another decisive battle in the war for football’s future”.
That is the only conclusion many executives can come to after weeks of poring over the various strands that inform this latest crisis. It is why there was an initial calm when The Times broke the story of City’s legal action against the Premier League on Tuesday, even if the public reaction whipped many into a resurgent fury. Everyone in the competition has known about this for months. It is really something that has been building up for years, another case that serves as a distillation of so many of the game’s many issues, alongside the pending 115 charges for alleged breaches of cost-control rules. City stress their innocence there. This entire story reasserts the most important of those issues, which is the true significance of state ownership like Sheikh Mansour's of City.
