If the verdict about City breaking the Premier League’s financial rules is upheld, it will come at a heavy cost to the club and its reputation.
I feel there needs to be more attention paid to all of these rules, and their fairness, because professional football at the top level is now dominated by massive financial investment.
Even if you just consider player transfers, it’s not unusual for around a billion pounds to be exchanged between clubs in England and around the world during each transfer window.
While individual players at the top level are being bought and sold for more than £100m, smaller academies are being plundered by the bigger clubs.
They can hoover up the best young players for much smaller ‘compensation’ fees, enabling them to polish them up and sell them on later for much more – without any Financial Fair Play rules to regulate how much they profit.
That’s one way of dealing with FFP, I suppose, but is it for the good of the game, or the players involved?
Over many years of Premier League governance, clubs have broken the FFP rules that are in place. Some have not been caught yet, I’m sure, but others have and have been punished. It keeps happening, so are the current rules right?
Do we need to try to change them or are we taking a bigger risk by leading clubs to find different ways – or loopholes – to try to break the financial shackles that are currently in place?
The money in our game today is extraordinary and today massive corporations, billionaires and even countries are buying our clubs and want to invest more and more into the product but are not able to.
Gone are the days of local business owners buying their local clubs.
In the Premier League, Tony Bloom at Brighton and Matthew Benham at Brentford are the last men standing and, in the Championship, the Coates family at Stoke City and Steve Gibson at Middlesbrough are among the few to have had a taste of the top flight.
I always see the top clubs having the power financially to remain at the top but it’s important there is a way for the smart guys – people like those I named above – at clubs without the big bucks or big histories, to play a leading role in the top league in world football.
At the moment all the negative media attention is on what Manchester City have done wrong but the likes of Brighton, Bournemouth and Brentford have achieved success by being smart, without the ‘big club’ tag.
It’s great to see, but surely the rules need to reward all clubs for being smart. Doing the right thing should give everyone the chance to compete at the highest level.
Tony Pulis was speaking to BBC Sport’s Chris Bevan.
