City’s ‘lone ranger’ mentality is threat to what made Premier League great

Simon Stacpoole/Getty Blue moon setting? 

The Man City case threatens consensus the Premier League was founded on

Once the principle of collectivism is gone, where is the incentive for English football’s more traditional powerhouses – Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool – to keep up appearances?

4 Oct 2026 - THE GUARDIAN / Sport

Rory Smith

To paraphrase Super Hans: the secret ingredient is co-operation. Over the past three decades, that has been the single most important thing in transforming English football from a backwater into a gleaming citadel, a monument in glass and steel, dwarfing the rest of the game.

History played a part, obviously. The style of play was a factor. Packed stadiums meant an evocative backdrop. Little tricks – like ensuring the microphones around the pitch captured the noise of the crowd, rather than the players – made for a more compelling television product. And there is the language advantage, too, the fact it all takes place in English.

The rise of the Premier League might frequently have been presented as some sort of evolutionary inevitability, a reasserting of the game’s natural order, but the reality is a little bit less manifest destiny. The Premier League has thrived because, right from the start, the principle of collectivism was baked into its source code. The Founder Members’ Agreement – the document that laid out how the league would work if, and when, it broke away from the Football League – is the distinctly grandiose name given to the single sheet of paper, composed over the course of one two-hour meeting, which has come to possess the status of a holy writ, immutable and eternal.

It is there that the basic commandments of what would become the Premier League were first written: that each club would have a single vote, that decisions would be made with a two-thirds majority, and that the television revenue the breakaway league earned would be shared equitably between its members.

Reaching that decision required some compromise. Some owners, including Wimbledon’s Sam Hammam, wanted to adopt the NFL’s approach, and a straight split: taking the total sum and dividing it by the number of teams. Representatives of some of the larger clubs – what we would now call a cartel – felt they had a right to take the lion’s share.

Robert Chase, the Norwich City chairman, was the one who solved the riddle. He did not mind finishing the season having made less money than Arsenal, he told the meeting, but he objected firmly to starting the campaign knowing it would end that way, no matter how the two teams performed.

And so the clubs decided on a formula. Domestic broadcast revenue would be shared on a 50/25/25 ratio: half distributed equally, a quarter according to performance, and a quarter according to the number of TV appearances each club made. International television income was added almost as a footnote, but followed the same pattern.

In retrospect, that decision was a masterstroke. Effectively, it enshrined in the league the competitive balance that would – although, until relatively recently, massively exaggerated – become its calling card. In what is otherwise a monument to the full throttle, dog-eat-dog Thatcherism of most of the rich white men at that meeting, it is a little sliver of Americanstyle sporting socialism, one that binds the otherwise oppositional members of the league together in mutual interest, to ensure that a rising tide lifts all boats. The success of the Premier League, 35 years on, is proof of its importance.

That it is threatened by the mushroom cloud of fallout from the Manchester City case is something of an understatement. We can still, at this stage, only really guess at the outline of how City have appealed against the damning findings of the independent panel convened to rule on more than 100 charges of breaches of the Premier League’s financial rules, over the course of a decade.

And yet it seems clear that absolutely nothing is off the table, that the club – having already been found to have failed to act “in the utmost good faith” with the investigation – are prepared to burn the whole thing down in order to purge the merest suggestion of wrongdoing: to gum up the competition with legal action for as long as necessary, to use political and diplomatic pressure, to call into question the legitimacy of the panel, the rules, even the league itself.

All of this might be considered quite odd for a team that has a comprehensive body of conclusive proof of their own indisputable innocence, but even leaving that aside, the effect of all this seems fairly clear. Ferran Soriano, their chief executive, once wrote about his desire to see his former team, Barcelona, “win every game” rather than help their domestic rivals grow. City have internalised that logic. Their interests and those of the league no longer dovetail.

There are those who might welcome that, who would suggest that the rules as they stand are rigged to favour the established elite, who believe banning owners from investing in their own clubs is counter-intuitive, who are convinced we should let the market rip.

Strangely, though, that appears only to work one way. In this telling, City (and others) should be allowed to use the inbuilt advantage of their owners’ immense wealth but those sides they seek to overturn should not. In a wholly free market, for example, why would Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal – the league’s three biggest draws, by some distance – want to share television revenue? Why would they pretend their self-interest aligned with everyone else’s? Once that principle of collectivism is gone, not worth the single piece of paper it is written on, why would anyone continue to abide by it?