Inside the week that blew up the Premier League

Autumnal sunshine bathed Manchester City's stadium on Friday morning and all seemed well with the world. The stadium exterior provided reminders of glorious times in the club's history when the only fights that mattered were on the pitch.

Appearances were deceptive. The glow could not disguise the significance of an extraordinary and unprecedented week which has set City against the Premier League in a way which, as an executive at one member club describes it, leaves the competition's organiser facing an 'existential crisis.'

The sound and fury of Monday seemed seismic enough. That was the day City and the Premier League offered radically different interpretations of a 175-page ruling on City's legal challenge to financial controls, established to prevent sponsorship being used to funnel potentially limitless sums into clubs and destroying competitive integrity.

But City's response to the league's interpretation of that ruling — an email to all 19 other clubs sent late on Monday — has been the source of greatest astonishment, leading some clubs to conclude that these divisions are irreconcilable.

The email, signed by City general counsel Simon Cliff, described the League's interpretation as 'incorrect' and threatened further legal action. But it was the sign-off, telling 'any members clubs with questions' that City would be 'happy to assist them as best we can' which clubs have found most breathtaking. That offer has been both ridiculed and viewed as an escalation, in some parts.

'It's extraordinary. Without precedent,' a source at one club tells Mail Sport. 'They are telling clubs, "Any questions — just ring us". The inference being, "Just so you understand, we run the game. We'll help you take the League on".'

Another source adds: 'They seem to think they run this league. "We are who we are. We do what we want".'

That reaction is by no means unanimous. This week's ruling leaves the Premier League now needing to get 14 of its 20 clubs to back a re-stated form of 'associated party transaction' rules, to prevent what is described as 'sponsorship' becoming a source of vast financial imbalance.

But clubs nursing grievances with the League, or those concerned with generating cash to survive in the top-flight rather than Gulf-state superiority, may make that consensus hard to find.

One football agent who works with Premier League clubs says: 'Why would you get involved in something that's none of your business, as there is a good chance it will be you facing the same accusations in six months?'

The alliances for and against the league's wish to reinstate the APT rules will become clear at a meeting of the 20 clubs to discuss the fallout, scheduled for Thursday.

Nothing will be decided at the meeting — which a number of clubs expect City to dominate with a lengthy exposition of the failings of the current system — and the Premier League will not even be attempting to lay out a timetable for a new APT system. Some clubs are expected to attend in person and some online.

'I would expect the League will try to get an idea of what factions have formed, how easy it will be to get changes through and what legal risk there is,' says one of our sources. City's email warns that any attempt by the Premier League to make swift amendments to the system of APT rules will bring legal threat.

Chelsea, whose co-owners Clearlake have received billions in Saudi investment, Saudi- owned Newcastle United, and Aston Villa, who want to spend more, are thought to be sympathetic to City's stance, while the findings of the arbitration panel also disclosed that Everton had backed them.

Outgoing Everton owner Farhad Moshiri may have been behind that decision, given that the club are currently in limbo, have no chief executive, and a temporary board mostly made up of experts in infrastructure projects and close associates of Moshiri.

Everton's motivation may be the charges it twice faced last season for breaching spending rules, which brought a collective deduction of eight points. The name of the individual who testified for Everton was redacted.

Nottingham Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis might prove another City ally. He told Mail Sport last year the Premier League had acted inconsistently in imposing a points deduction on his club and that profit and sustainability rules (PSR) were 'an unfair system'. It is unclear where Leicester stand, having also faced a court battle with the League to fend off a points deduction.

The clubs known to have given support for the Premier League at the tribunal are Arsenal, Manchester United, Liverpool, and West Ham, with letters written in support of the APT rules from Brentford, Bournemouth, Fulham, and Wolves.

'The problem is there's such a downer on the Premier League for some reason that people are more willing to see it as the Premier League being the cause,' says one of the club sources.

'A number of clubs have got it in for the League and people want to act on that grievance. I don't think people are explaining the significance of this enough.'

There certainly is significance. City's challenge to APT rules represented the greatest potential threat to the league's competitive balance, with the Gulf state clubs currently poised to benefit most.

If there were no limit on the amount Abu Dhabi state-controlled 'sponsors' such as Etihad Airlines, Etisalat, or Saudi state entities Saudia and Saudi Telecom plough into clubs, the prospect of any others challenging them on the field will be gone..

'We might as well walk away from the idea of competing with them. It will be like the French league. A total mismatch,' says one source.

This week's findings revealed that the arbitration panel emphatically supported the APT system, finding for the Premier League in 20 of the claims City lodged against them, when claiming that the entire system was anti-competitive and rigged against Gulf clubs.

But the seven flaws the panel found in that system — the most serious of which was the League's decision to accept legal advice that soft loans from owners should not form part of PSR calculations — means the rules of the system must be renegotiated by the clubs. A number of clubs fear that a long delay in reformulating the rules will allow City — and others — to strike lucrative new deals during the hiatus, which the Premier League will subsequently find impossible to challenge by the time a new system is in place.

City's email this week stated: 'Given the findings, this is the time for careful reflection and consideration by all clubs, not for a knee-jerk reaction.'

The most vivid part of the arbitration report was the section detailing the size of the task assessing and adjudicating on the fairness of City's Etihad Airlines vast sponsorship deal. The report painted a picture of work which seems almost overwhelming and the three retired judges considering City's case expressed considerable sympathy with the Premier League.

The League judged that deal to be 'above market value' — artificially inflated. The panel judged that decision to be unfair, on the technical point that City had not been granted full sight of all the data on which it was based. So the deal — vital to City's income — must be resubmitted with City having seen that data, when the new APT system is in place — which could be months away.

Some clubs view City's legal challenge, and their response to the findings, as a way of undermining the League to help their own defence at the ongoing independent commission hearing considering City's 115 alleged rule breaches. 'The 115' as the case has now become known.

The verdict certainly didn't land any major blows which would help in that respect. A judgment supporting City's claim that the APT system was rigged in a way which was 'anti-Gulf' might have helped, though the judges rejected that.

They sided with a witness — identity also redacted — whom City's lawyer had accused of such a bias. The witness told the court that he would have responded no differently to sponsorship deals 'if we were talking about a takeover of another club by an American consortium who had links to lots of American companies'.

City's furious response to a report which claimed the hearing had not ruled in their favour underlines how any finding against them in the 115 won't be the end of that matter, though the decision is binding and supposedly not subject to appeal.

The significance of this week's case pales in comparison to the 115. Because for Abu Dhabi, buying City in 2008 was a means of building global reputation and influence. The public ignominy of being held up to censure in that court would blow that part, creating the kind of reputational damage that they would find almost impossible to bear. City deny all the charges.

In the week in which Labour are meeting clubs about football's proposed new independent regulator, some in football conclude that government oversight is the only way ahead.

Others mutter darkly about whether any notion of Premier League collective decision-making is dead — and say that if City can set their own rules on unfettered sponsorship, then others might just go their own way and strike individual TV deals.

'It all feels untenable,' says one. 'City's owners knew the rules when they took over. There was a time when we worked with them and now it's come to this.'