How long will Manchester City’s appeal take to resolve?
This is only sort of a compliance story, but did you see what UEFA did to Manchester City last Friday? On Valentine’s Day, UEFA issued a statement that said this:
The Adjudicatory Chamber, having considered all the evidence, has found that Manchester City Football Club committed serious breaches of the UEFA Club Licensing and Financial Fair Play Regulations by overstating its sponsorship revenue in its accounts and in the break-even information submitted to UEFA between 2012 and 2016.
The Adjudicatory Chamber has also found that in breach of the regulations the Club failed to cooperate in the investigation of this case by the [chamber’s Club Financial Control Body].
We’re not going to get deep into City’s alleged violations of the Financial Fair Play rules. A million places out there already have. But the penalty for all of this is a €30 million fine and a two-year ban on playing in the Champions League. The latter sanction is a biggie. The best players in the world really don’t like to miss out on playing in the Champions League, which is basically the highest level of club football in the world. When free agents are deciding on their next moves, playing in that competition is a huge draw – and its absence can steer the best players to other pastures.
Manchester City plans to appeal UEFA’s decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. But players and coaches will want to make decisions soon. The longer it drags, the more the uncertainty will push players to join other teams. We had two questions when we first heard about City’s issues.
What is the Court of Arbitration for Sport?
A 2012 paper by Louise Reilly says:
The founding purpose of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) was to take international sports disputes out of national courts and provide a highly specialized forum where those disputes could be heard and decided, quickly and inexpensively, according to a flexible procedure. Since its inception, CAS has gained the recognition and trust of the international sports community and today, is the last instance of appeal for parties involved in a wide-range of sports-related disputes, including those related to all Olympic sports and many non-Olympic sports, football disputes, doping infractions and international commercial contracts. CAS has come to provide sportsmen and women, their respective governing bodies and other entities involved in the sports world with an efficient, cost effective and final resolution to their disputes.
The CAS is based in Lausanne, Switzerland, though hearings can also be held in New York and Sydney.
How long will it take for Manchester City to appeal UEFA’s decision?
We don’t know! This article says, “There is no timescale on how long an appeal will take although it is likely that all parties would want the situation sorted before Champions League qualification matches start in July.”
I imagine they would like it sorted out before July. But can they get it done? We have some idea. Under Article 62 of the UEFA Statutes, a decision taken by a UEFA organ may be disputed exclusively before the CAS in its capacity as an appeals arbitration body. You can read CAS opinions addressing appeals from UEFA decisions here. If you do, you can see that the last twenty took an average of 254 days to go from the initial UEFA decision to CAS resolution. That’s more than eight months! The longest, involving Turkish clubs Trabzonspor and Fenerbahce, took 557 days to resolve. The shortest, involving another Turkish team, Eskisehirspor Kulubu, took only 36 days.
254 days from last Friday is October 25, 2020, well after the start of next year’s Champions League group matches and the start of the Premier League season. We can imagine both UEFA and Manchester City will be eager to get this matter resolved quickly, but will they be able to? Pressure on players will mount between now and then.