No surprise that Manchester City are one of only three clubs opposing the spending cap. It is, in part, the Premier League’s latest attempt to prevent Gulf sovereign wealth funds and the income from the expanded Champions League shredding any notion of financial parity between their competition’s haves and have-nots.
The great thing about having a Gulf state own you is that, as every Gulf-state owned club can attest, a phalanx of state-owned companies suddenly become frightfully interested in sponsoring you — and paying top dollar for the privilege.
In City’s case, there have been myriad other ways of bringing in extra cash to spend — like selling their own players’ image rights to a company they had an interest in, selling their ‘intellectual property’ to other clubs they owned, and similar acts of accounting gymnastics.