Manchester City’s problems with the Premier League are not the only ones now circling its lawyers.
The Solicitors Regulation Authority has confirmed it will examine the independent commission’s findings against Manchester City for signs of professional misconduct by solicitors, once the full, currently redacted report is made public. The club was found guilty of all but one of roughly 115 charges relating to serious breaches of Premier League financial rules between 2009 and 2018, a verdict so significant that Premier League chief executive Richard Masters called it “the most significant decision in Premier League history.” City lodged a “comprehensive appeal” on 1 October, just ahead of the deadline, insisting the ruling “contains clear material errors of law, principle and fact and is unsafe.”
Here is where the SRA comes in. Manchester City’s first general counsel was Simon Cliff, a solicitor who trained at Freshfields before moving to Shearman & Sterling, and who represented the Abu Dhabi United Group in its 2008 takeover of the club while still in private practice, before joining Manchester City’s own staff the following year. He is now group general counsel of City Football Group, the club’s parent company. Companies House records show Cliff was a director, between June 2012 and July 2013, of a company then called Manchester City Football Club (Image Rights) Ltd, now Fordham Sports Image Rights Ltd. That is one of the entities the commission’s findings describe as “little more than a front,” used to disguise the club owner’s own investment as sponsorship income rather than declare it as the ownership funding it actually was.
None of this means Cliff personally faces action; the SRA has said only that it is monitoring the situation and will review the unredacted ruling when it emerges. A spokesperson put it carefully: “If, and where, we identify any suggestions of potential misconduct by solicitors or law firms, we will consider them carefully before deciding on potential next steps.” That is regulator-speak for: we are watching, and we are not ruling anything out.
It is worth explaining why a solicitors’ regulator has any business in a football finance dispute at all. Being a company director or a general counsel at a commercial organisation does not switch off a solicitor’s professional obligations; the SRA’s rules follow a solicitor wherever they practise, in a City law firm or inside a Premier League club’s boardroom. If a company structure used to mislead a regulator or governing body was set up or run with a qualified solicitor’s direct involvement, that raises a separate professional conduct question entirely independent of whatever sporting sanction eventually lands on the club itself.
Reports suggest City could additionally be ordered to pay the Premier League’s legal costs, estimated as high as £50m, on top of whatever sanction follows its guilty verdict. The appeal could still take years to resolve, much like the rest of this saga. The SRA’s inquiry, by contrast, barely needs a verdict at all. It only needs a redacted document to stop being redacted.
Author: Thomas Greatbanks
Leave a Reply