Jock - I have copied and paste this excellent article just in case anyone has missed it:
The European Super League clubs will get away with it – because it’s one rule for them, another for Wigan Athletic
IAN HERBERT APRIL 28, 2021
You only had to look in the eyes of people like Paul Cook, less than a year back, to know how it feels to have points taken away from your team for circumstances way beyond your control.
He was the manager of Wigan Athletic, a club he’d known well since 1984 and where he was beginning to build something special. Then, ‘owners‘ he had never met, in a country on the other side of the world, ripped that club up. One Hong Kong-based company took it over and sold it to another, which dumped it into administration within a week. The EFL had approved each of these takeovers, deeming both ‘owners’ suitable to run the club. Yet the same EFL took 12 points away from Wigan and relegated them anyway.
It meant 70 people being made redundant, players being sold and Cook taking his leave. As The Daily Mail’s Matt Barlow reported a few months later, Wigan found precious few favours from the ‘football family’ at that time. Chelsea, in the midst of a £200million spending spree, refused to pay more than £20,000 in compensation for coach Anthony Barry who joined Frank Lampard’s backroom staff.
The point is that none of this was Wigan’s fault – not the fans, not the staff, not the executives – and yet there were consequences. ‘Rules are rules.’ And that is why it will be a scandal if the ‘big six’ Premier League clubs that were planning to flounce off into a European Super League sunset just a week ago are not deducted Premier League points.
Their breach is there, in black and white, in the Premier League rulebook. Regulation L9 states that any member club needs prior written approval by the league’s board to enter a new competition. Needless to say, the violation is vastly more fundamental than that. It goes to the very sanctity of the people’s game as we have always known it. So of course, a points deduction is right, appropriate and necessary.
You can bet the bank that this won’t happen, though.
From the corridors of some of the other 14 clubs, word is already coming back that the big six will not be penalised in such a way. That impression was reinforced by a remarkable observation by UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin during an interview with The Mail on Sunday published at the weekend, in which he differentiated between the English six and the other members of the putative ESL.
‘They pulled out first,’ said Ceferin. ‘They admitted they made a mistake. You have to have some greatness to say: “I was wrong.”’ The ‘greatness’ of the English clubs’ owners, who only left the project because they faced the wrath of the nation. Remarkable.
The clubs will avoid a points deduction because everyone knows they will head straight to the courts – as Manchester City did, to very significant effect, when UEFA found them in breach of its financial spending rules last year.
They will avoid a points deduction because of the extraordinary powers of rhetoric we all know they will bring to bear. Witness Jurgen Klopp at the weekend, adroitly and breathtakingly shaping the narrative to Liverpool’s end. On Friday, he was suggesting Liverpool’s owners made ‘a bad decision’ but were ‘not bad people’. By Saturday, he was telling fans to move on – effortlessly curating an argument in which any negative sentiment was the act of mindless outsiders, ‘trashing a place I love and am now proud to call my home’.
Cook speaks exceptionally well, too, though few were hanging on his words last year when he was eloquently describing why a club he loved the bones of should not be punished, having being traded like a piece of scrap metal in the Far East. There are never many listening when Championship managers sit down before the press. It’s like a one-to-one interview at times.
It would be a little easier to come to terms with Klopp’s suggestion that the owners ‘made a mistake’ and ‘know it’ if there had been something more from them this past week than those slick PR statements, issued from the sanctity of a lavishly furnished home or office.
A £20million contribution from each of the six to the FA’s Football Foundation, perhaps? An appearance by each of them on a supporters’ forum? A live broadcast interview by each with Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher? A ten per cent reduction on the season tickets fans at managerless Spurs have just been asked to stump up £1,000 for?
Don’t hold your breath. The clubs will probably be punished in a way that will not materially damage them at all – formal censure, exclusion from some committee or other – though there will be consequences if that’s how it all plays out.
It will be a graphic demonstration of how it is one rule for Liverpool and one rule for Wigan; one for City and another for Stockport County. And the collective memory of how football’s grand dukes got away with their high-handed arrogance will resurface every time some Godforsaken club, without power and influence, goes through the Wigan experience.
The captain of that demoted Wigan side, Sam Morsy, was still reflecting on the sense of injustice when he spoke at his new club, Middlesbrough, a few months ago. ‘They didn’t cheat,’ he said of the club. ‘They didn’t try to bend the rules. They didn’t try to use anything for gain.’ But no one was listening. It made a few paragraphs in the local papers. That was all.