This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on November 2, 2026 - November 8, 2026

I became a Liverpool fan in the mid-1990s in large part due to Robbie Fowler, a player so gifted and beloved that he earned the nickname “God”. But starting my fandom in the mid-1990s means I missed the glory years of the 1980s. Like every Liverpool fan, I was starving for a first league title since 1990, arguably the team’s most important trophy.

In 2014, Liverpool got really close, leading the title race with three games to spare. My anxiety was palpable. All the years of Premier League disappointment had conditioned me to expect the worst, that the team would fall short after coming so close. So, when Liverpool lost 2-0 to Chelsea at home in the third-to-last match of the season, thereby choking the title away to Manchester City — the famous Steven Gerrard “slip” game — it was a culmination of everything I feared, taking a sledgehammer to everything I had hoped for.

Bill Simmons, my favourite sportswriter, describes this best in a 2007 column of his, “Levels of Losing”.  According to Simmons, the fourth-worst way to lose, “The Guillotine”, goes like this: “…your team’s hanging tough (hell, they might even be winning), but you can feel the inevitable breakdown coming, and you keep waiting for the guillotine to drop, and you just know it’s coming — you know it — and when it finally comes, you’re angry that it happened and you’re angry at yourself for contributing to the debilitating karma.”

This could not have been captured any better. I was angry that it happened and I was angry at myself for contributing to the “debilitating karma”. And maybe “angry” isn’t enough. Some kaleidoscope of anger, shock, regret, existentialism, despair and sadness would be more fitting.

Fast forward 12 years later. On Sept 29, 2026, the Premier League announced that an independent commission had found Manchester City guilty of concealing funding that came from its owners and understating its costs between 2009 and 2018, thereby allowing the club to spend (way) more than football’s financial rules permitted while appearing to comply with them and, at the same time, failing to cooperate with the Premier League’s investigation.

This period in which they had broken the rules included Liverpool’s 2014 Premier League title run. And so, after the announcement, I reflected on the implications for that 2014 Liverpool team. Now, there is still an appeal process and perhaps a sentencing but, taking a step back and even recognising the Molotov cocktail of emotions that the 2014 title race gave me, I find myself hesitant to pile on the City schadenfreude. Sure, they broke the rules, but what if the rules were unfair in the first place?

First, some context for readers who may not follow Premier League football. Manchester City was purchased by the sovereign Abu Dhabi United Group in September 2008. Excluding wages and other operating expenses, according to data from Transfermarkt, City’s net transfer spend (transfer fees paid minus transfer fees received) was €1.6 billion from the summer of 2008 to May 2024, while historical giants Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool totalled €1.4 billion, €0.9 billion and €0.6 billion respectively. Transfers are how clubs acquire players and City outspent everyone else.

In the mid-2000s, City was not considered a serious Premier League power, with their last league title coming in 1968. The historical powers were Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal as well as recent addition Chelsea who also received injections from Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich in 2003. Chelsea spent massively, leading to a 2005 Premier League title, its first since 1955. Since Abramovich’s purchase, Chelsea has become a member of the “Big Four’ alongside United, Liverpool and Arsenal.

Two sets of financial rules are relevant here: UEFA’s Financial Fair Play (FFP), approved in 2010, and the Premier League’s Profitability and Sustainability Rules (PSR), introduced for the 2013/14 season. Under both FFP and PSR, clubs are broadly required to keep spending reasonably close to the income they generate. But here’s the catch — cash injected into the club by owners is not counted as “income”. Sponsorship revenue, on the other hand, counts. And that is what the commission found City had done, disguising funding from its owner as sponsorship revenue — a finding the club is appealing.

Taken together, City’s owners were trying to make City competitive and to break the “Big Four” oligopoly. They tried to spend money, found that there were limits to how they might spend their money and, according to the commission, concealed owner funding to circumvent those limits. Had they gone “by the book”, could they have caught up to the Big Four, given existing income-based spending rules? Historically popular teams with greater global reach naturally attract more revenue. Clubs being allowed to spend based on incomes helps to prevent financial turmoil, sure, but it can further entrench the already entrenched.

Now, the Big Four might argue that competitive parity is increased via the Premier League’s mechanism of sharing its massive central commercial revenue and broadcasting revenue across all teams. This is perhaps why the Premier League has become especially competitive in the mid-table. While the top clubs in other leagues can match the Premier League’s best, once it gets to the mid-table, the Premier League is qualitatively stronger, as can be seen from recent dominance in the secondary European competitions.

But a higher floor does not automatically mean a higher ceiling. Much of a club’s revenue comes from club-specific sponsorship, merchandising and licensing, matchday income (bigger stadiums matter), among others. If the Premier League was truly more competitive at the top, Leicester City in 2016 and even Blackburn in 1995 would be norms, not exceptions. Prior to Manchester City’s title win in 2012, since the Premier League started, 18 of the 19 titles were won by Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea. Since 2012, City has won eight. City broke the oligopoly.

There is no denying that money helped City win. But so too did money help United dominate the 1990s and 2000s. Putting aside the broader philosophical point on whether money should matter so much for sporting results, it’s not clear to me why a club’s historical popularity should give it a persistent off-the-field advantage. Meanwhile, a challenger’s willing owner cannot fund the closing of that gap. So, City “broke” the rules. But what if the rules were ones that benefited the status quo in the first place?

This strikes me as a version of rich countries “kicking away the ladder”, in Ha-Joon Chang’s terms, of development from poorer countries. “Yes, you can spend, but spend it in a way that we agree with.”

Chelsea’s initial Abramovich spending spree to become part of the Big Four took place before PSR and FFP restricted the extent to which owners could fund losses. I don’t see why success or development should be first come, first served. If a country suddenly received huge amounts of foreign investment, but international regulation allowed them to only spend it on particular things which conveniently helped maintain the positions of rich economies, we too would snark at this sense of injustice.

Yes, City agreed to those rules and broke them. They should receive punishment, especially for a failure to cooperate. And yes, one might argue that they should have reported their finances truthfully. But maybe, that’s part of it — in this case, truthful reporting entrenches the already entrenched. However, more broadly, this incident raises much larger questions about power and rules that inadvertently, or deliberately, solidify the status quo. Sure, a Cinderella story like Leicester every now and then is wonderful, but when the oligopoly of the League is smashed by a new entrant, that’s suddenly not okay. Maybe it shouldn’t be such a bad thing to break unfair rules. Surely, we can find a way to protect the floor without necessarily shrinking the ceiling?

Nicholas Khaw is an economist and head of research at Khazanah Nasional Bhd

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