The findings of the Premier League’s independent commission into Manchester City’s breaches of financial rules were published yesterday and make for a fascinating 40-page read.
Football fans among us will start to piece together losses, relegations and player sales that they can pin on City, who were found to have arranged ‘sham’ contracts with commercial partners to inflate revenue, filed misstated accounts and committed multiple breaches of co-operation duties.
Even for non-football followers in the legal profession, the ruling is fascinating for the sheer scale of the commission’s task.
The substantive hearing took place over 42 days in the last quarter of 2024. Oral evidence was given by factual and expert witnesses over the course of 34 days.
By the end of the hearing, just the index to the hearing bundle ran to more than 750 pages, while the core bundle of key documents filled many tens of thousands of pages.
Millions of documents had to be searched as part of the disclosure process. The club served witness statements or documentary evidence from 24 witnesses, most of who gave evidence at the hearing. In total the witness statements relied on by the parties ran to well over 700 pages.
As the sports journalist Nick Miller noted: ‘The first five pages of the Premier League ruling is just about what a pain in the arse the whole thing has been.’
The commission itself reflected: ‘The proceedings were at all times extremely hard fought on both sides. We in no way mean that as a criticism of either party; it is simply fact. No stone was left unturned. Both throughout the interlocutory stages and at the hearing issues were fiercely contested between the parties.’
The Premier League explained that at this stage it was permitted to publish only a redacted version of the summary of the commission’s ‘core findings’. This still didn’t really explain why the names of any barristers were redacted – especially when they have been widely identified for years by the media.
Curiously, the summary did identify that these anonymised lawyers were instructed respectively by Bird & Bird and Clifford Chance.
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