The Legal Prospect of United Seeking City Damages
A Man Utd Man City compensation claim running into tens of millions of pounds is being talked about in legal circles, even though nothing has actually been filed and no verdict has been reached. It’s a theoretical prospect for now, but a serious one.
The logic behind it is straightforward enough. A club that suffers financial harm because a rival broke the Premier League’s spending rules can, in principle, sue for damages once guilt is established and any appeal has run its course. For United, that harm would centre on two second-place finishes behind City between 2009 and 2018, and a Champions League qualification defeat on goal difference in 2015/16.
None of that means Manchester United have started proceedings. The club hasn’t confirmed any intention to sue, and the entire conversation only becomes real if City are found guilty and lose any appeal that follows.
Unverified Charges and the Burnley Compensation Precedent
Reports this week claim City are set to be found guilty on 114 of the 115 Premier League charges brought against them.
City have already said they’ll appeal any decision that goes against them, whatever it turns out to be. That alone suggests this process has a long way to run before anyone starts talking seriously about compensation.
There is a precedent worth watching closely, though. Burnley received £35 million from Everton in June, after Everton were found to have breached profit and sustainability rules. That case, covered in detail in this analysis by Manchester Evening News, gives us the clearest template yet for how a club-versus-club compensation claim in English football actually works.
Proving Causation and Counterfactual Loss
Sports litigation lawyer Tom Murray, speaking to Manchester Evening News, says the real difficulty in any case like this is proving causation. He explains:
“Historically, compensation cases brought by one club against another were rare. The challenge in these types of cases is proving causation. This involves constructing what is known as a counterfactual, which means carrying out a hypothetical analysis of what would have happened had Manchester City not breached the Premier League’s rules.”
In United’s case, that means showing City’s alleged breaches directly cost them the title or Champions League football. Murray puts it plainly:
“This could involve demonstrating that had Manchester City not breached the Premier League’s rules, a particular club would have won the Premier League or would have qualified for the Champions League. If you think about it, that can be quite challenging.”
Success and Spending are different
He’s also careful to separate spending from success.
“It doesn’t necessarily follow that in a situation where Manchester City had less money to spend on players that they would have had less sporting success. Whilst there is a correlation between the amount a club spends on its squad and its sporting success, the is not necessarily a causal link between the two,” Murray says.
The bar United would have to clear is high.
“Clubs need to demonstrate that the breach of the rules conferred a sporting advantage, and that sporting advantage led to a specific loss which has been suffered. So for Manchester United, that could be, ‘Well, we would have won the title but for City’s breach,’ or ‘We would have qualified for the Champions League.’ And there are clear financial benefits that come with being a Champions League football club,” he adds.
Can United claim losses for 2015/16 Champions League miss
That’s exactly why 2015/16 matters so much here. City edged United on goal difference for that season’s Champions League spot, which is about as narrow a margin as football produces. Anyone who followed United’s near misses in that period, including the players and finishes covered in our earlier report, will know how tight those campaigns felt at the time.
Murray says tight margins actually help a claimant’s case. Asked whether narrow finishes make causation easier to argue, he says:
“Absolutely, because the margins are much more narrow.”
He contrasts that with a title won at a canter:
“Whereas if someone ran away with the league, it gets harder and harder to show that the only reason they ran away with the league was that they managed to get away with breaching the financial regulations.”
Financial and statistical experts would do the heavy lifting here, much as they did for Burnley.
“There’ll be experts that are brought forward,” Murray says. “So in the Burnley v Everton case, there were different experts who came forward and did an analysis to try and connect how much money Everton spent in excess of the upper loss threshold and the sporting advantage that was conferred as a result of that overspend. There’s lots of statistical and financial analysis that’s adduced.”
He adds that this kind of forensic accounting is now a growing field in its own right.
“There’s a real industry for accountants and financial experts who are able to do this analysis and present a case to show that if Manchester City hadn’t breached the rules, then a particular club wouldn’t have been relegated, or a particular club would have qualified for the Champions League or the Europa League,” he says.
Appeals, Timelines and the Multi-Million Pound Horizon
Even if City are found guilty, an appeal would almost certainly follow, and that alone could push any resolution well into the future. Only once that process ends could United, or any other club, seriously begin building a Man Utd Man City compensation case.
Murray is honest about the size of the numbers involved.
“It’s definitely not going to be easy to calculate, but it will be significant, tens of millions of pounds, potentially,” he says. He’s equally clear that the maths can’t really start until the legal picture is settled: “But I suspect that they’re going to have to wait until they have the decision to be able to work that out.”
Working out the actual figure, once causation is proven, is the more straightforward part.
“The type of process that some would be looking at is, assuming you can prove causation, how much money would we have received had we won the Premier League or had we qualified for the Champions League? And that’s a feature of financial analysis which isn’t too difficult to carry out,” Murray explains.
Proving that link in the first place remains the sticking point.
“The hard thing is showing that Manchester City’s breach meant that you didn’t qualify for the Champions League or meant that you didn’t win the league,” he says. “Again it goes back to causation, trying to connect the breach with a sporting advantage and a particular loss suffered.”
United fans are watching a legal process that hasn’t produced a verdict, let alone a claim. But the framework Murray describes, and the money Burnley already collected from Everton, shows exactly what’s at stake if City’s case eventually goes against them.
