Manchester City’s hierarchy surpassed themselves with the aggression and ferocity of their response to the Valentine’s Day blow from Uefa, the two-year ban from the Champions League and €30m fine for deceit in their financial submissions. City have been hostile and adversarial in their public statements, and conduct of their case, throughout the investigation by European football’s governing body that followed the leaks of the club’s emails published by Der Spiegel in November 2018.

This time City went further and made it personal, reacting to the very serious finding that they did mislead Uefa by overstating their sponsorship revenue, principally from the Abu Dhabi state airline Etihad, between 2012 and 2016. The statement City unleashed immediately included the same notes of a tune the club has been playing for a year now, but with added volume. The Uefa club financial control body (CFCB), two semi-independent panels of distinguished lawyers, politicians and professors which oversees financial fair play compliance, had run a “flawed”, “consistently leaked” and “prejudicial” process, which was totally biased.

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The statement singled out “the Uefa Chief Investigator”, the former Belgian prime minister Yves Leterme, alleging that by a comment he made in December 2018, he “publicly previewed the outcome and sanction he intended to be delivered, before any investigation had even begun”. The club claimed Leterme oversaw a biased process with “little doubt in the result that he would deliver” and that “this is a case initiated by Uefa, prosecuted by Uefa and judged by Uefa”.

City are angry and indignant, of course, particularly as the emails that have damned them were exposed by Der Spiegel’s source, Rui Pinto, who is now on remand in his native Portugal accused of 147 criminal offences including computer hacking, which he denies. But this attack looks intemperate in two principal ways: in the specifics of the allegation that Uefa’s scrutineers acted improperly, and more broadly, in the magnitude of disrespect for European football’s governing body.

Financial fair play is depicted as a wicked European plot by elite clubs to pull up the drawbridge. The contradictions in this argument are rarely acknowledged

To take the second first, perhaps somebody who loves City might have tried to reason with the club’s hierarchy that now is not a great time in Britain to be whipping up their supporters, and anybody else prepared to listen, to believe the worst of a European institution. The perception they are generating of Uefa, the sporting bureaucracy which has organised Europe’s elite football competitions since 1955, and introduced FFP in 2011 to encourage financial sustainability, has parallels with the toxic Brexit campaign. Actual facts struggle for proper recognition, while misinformation and sweeping allegations are easier to digest.

Financial fair play, the injunction to spend within revenues which has transformed European football from basket-case losses for many clubs to general financial health, is depicted as a wicked European plot by elite clubs to pull up the drawbridge.

The contradictions in this argument are rarely acknowledged: it was no kind of fair competition anyway pre-2011 that the only clubs able to compete with the elite had to be funded by a Gulf state interest or an oligarch. Fairer “competitive balance” is a different issue from FFP; from the beginning of professional football, it has been achieved only with an equitable sharing of the game’s money, not by a flawed dream to find a rich owner.

That battle should be fought with the elite clubs – including City, who now Sheikh Mansour has funded them into the grounds of the gilded castle, were among the most aggressive in the “big six” to demand a greater slice of the Premier League’s international TV rights.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Manchester City’s Nicolas Otamendi tangles with Shakhtar Donetsk’s Tete in this season’s Champions League group stages. Photograph: Peter Powell/EPA

Then there are the specific allegations, that this European body is flawed, its processes and officials improper and prejudiced, for reasons unexplained. On the specific allegation against Leterme, City’s hierarchy understand – clearly – that in framing the statement they were alleging bias, prejudice and impropriety by every member of the CFCB’s two “chambers,” who looked at City’s “irrefutable evidence” and found themselves unconvinced.

The 2018 comment by Leterme that City have escalated into proof of institutional bias was brief and quite noncommittal, given to a magazine, Sport and Strategy, in Belgium, where he was prime minister from 2009-11. “If it is true what has been written, there might be a serious problem,” he said to questions about the Der Spiegel coverage. “This can lead to the heaviest punishment: exclusion from the Uefa competitions. If the information is correct, this possibly goes against truthful reporting.”

So there were two ifs, one might and a possibly in his brief reply, which was little more than a general note that if City had lied in their financial reporting of the sponsorships, that is serious and can lead to the most severe punishment. That applies to any person or organisation in any sport: deceit, or lying, is a breach of trust, so worse than any failure to abide by technical rules.

It was abundantly clear from Leterme’s remark that it all remained to be investigated. Yet City, having welcomed the investigation when it was announced in March, are now telling their supporters that now their “irrefutable evidence” was not deemed convincing, it shows the process was biased due to a brief comment made by Leterme four months earlier.

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A genuine look at Uefa’s FFP system has to acknowledge it is quite sophisticated for a sporting body. The rules themselves were developed with Deloitte and other legal and accounting experts. Serious efforts were made to clear them in principle and avoid an anti-competition challenge from the European commission, which succeeded largely because the prime purpose, to encourage financial sustainability, is recognised to be valid.

The two-stage chambers manned by semi-independent appointees is designed to avoid as far as possible an organisation being the prosecutor, judge and jury that City claim to be the case. The adjudicatory chamber, which heard the charges when they were made by Leterme’s investigatory chamber, is chaired by José Narciso da Cunha Rodrigues, a former general prosecutor in Portugal. After hearings last month, he reached the finding that City were guilty, as did the chamber’s other members: Christiaan Timmermans, a Dutch law professor; Louis Peila, a very experienced Swiss judge; Adam Giersz, a former Polish sports minister; and the English barrister Charles Flint QC. He is president of the UK’s National Anti-Doping Panel and trusted enough in Abu Dhabi’s neighbouring emirate of Dubai to be a director of its financial services authority.

So City’s reaction to the considered conclusion of these distinguished European professionals was to allege that all were biased, and reached a prejudged conclusion signalled by Leterme.

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City will go furiously to the court of arbitration for sport, where they say three other European judges will see what those serving the Uefa panels were unwilling to: that contrary to the meaning of their own emails, Sheikh Mansour was not subsidising a significant portion of the Etihad sponsorship.

Due process means they have the right to make their case at Cas, and both City and Uefa must accept the result. In the meantime, City might consider the tone and scale of the allegations they are making, in a time of already undermined trust in Brexit Britain for great European institutions.