Man City and Real Madrid got what they wanted but now face new Champions League playoff problem | OneFootball

By now, Real Madrid and Manchester City have met so often in the Champions League that Florentino Perez and Khaldoon Al Mubarak have a distinctive relationship. Close observers have noted how the City chair can act deferentially towards the elder figure, while Perez adopts an intrigued demeanour.

It’s all rather superficial, of course. The two have been on opposite sides of one of the main divides in the modern game, and the rest of football knows how hard-line both clubs can become.

On Thursday, Premier League chief executive Richard Masters wrote to the 20 clubs confirming that City had made a new arbitration request seeking that the November amendments to Associated Party Transaction rules are declared “unlawful and void”. The changes – voted through by a majority of 16-4 – came after a previous legal action by City, at the same time the entire football world awaits the outcome of the Premier League hearing concerning alleged breaches of financial regulations.

That same Thursday, LaLiga president Javier Tebas said Real Madrid had “lost their head” after the European champions themselves wrote a formal letter of complaint to Spain’s High Council for Sports as well as the RFEF – the Spanish FA – about refereeing. The correspondence claimed that officials are biased against Madrid, “rigged” and “completely discredited”. It went on: “Decisions against Real Madrid have reached a level of manipulation and adulteration of the competition that can no longer be ignored.”

This itself comes as Madrid, fronted by A22, have engaged in their own legal warfare against Uefa in the form of the Super League case.

Tebas, who also accused Madrid of wanting “to harm the competition”, was far from the only figure to speak on such lines. Sevilla president Jose Maria del Nido Carrasco criticised them for “trying to destroy Spanish football”, describing the complaints as “intolerable and unacceptable” as well as “going against football’s integrity”.

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Real Madrid’s Florentino Perez (left) and Man City’s Khaldoon Al Mubarak (right) have developed a distinctive relationship (Getty Images)

They sound similar to some of the comments about City over the past few years. Rival clubs have openly discussed whether they can continue to work with notional “partners” who constantly take legal action against them. “It’s front like you wouldn’t believe,” one senior executive exasperatedly complained.

Tebas, who has also taken fire at City, did touch on a key sentiment. LaLiga’s president spoke of how Madrid “have built a story of victimhood”.

Many rival clubs would consider that idea a joke since the double use of the club’s celebrated slogan, “that’s how Madrid win”, has always been that they benefit from favourable refereeing decisions. There is nevertheless a serious point here, especially amid wider challenges to the sport.

These two clubs are very much the modern elite. Their familiarity with each other, as they meet for the fifth time in six years, illustrates the point. They have together won the last three Champions Leagues, meeting in the semi-finals twice. While Madrid have lifted two European Cups to City’s one in that time, the English club have won five domestic titles out of six, compared to three in five for the Spanish champions.

Either way, the point is that the system has served these two superpowers better than anyone else.

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Manchester City have enjoyed a trophy-laden few years... (Getty Images)

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...and Real Madrid haven’t done too badly out of the current system either (Getty Images)

And yet they are the two clubs who look most willing to take that system down. No other club has launched a legal action against their partners in the way that City have done with the Premier League. It’s unprecedented. No other club has written a letter to Spanish sporting authorities to complain of referees in the manner Madrid have done, to say nothing of what the Super League represented.

The very institutions of the sport, in other words, are being challenged.

There are a lot of parallels you could draw with modern politics from all that, with the added symbolism of the nature of the two club leaderships. City are owned by a senior royal in Sheikh Mansour, who is essentially the Abu Dhabi state, where the family have absolute power. The unique nature of regulating this has prompted the APT crisis.

Perez has meanwhile been described as a “Spanish oligarch”, and is reported to have told one politician that “Real Madrid is a Spanish brand standing above the government”. There is then the symbolism of how he is the democratically-elected president of a member-owned club and yet circumstances have evolved so he is the only viable candidate.

The two clubs can put forward robust legal arguments for every one of their positions, which can sound reasonable. Even senior executives who are critical of City have sympathy with them on the point of interest-free loans in the APT rules and admit the Premier League could previously have just waited for the outcome of open arbitration to implement the amendments. Many more people admit that Madrid have made very valid criticisms of the modern Uefa.

That isn’t quite the point here, though, and it is telling that the legal route for both has been through competition law.

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Real Madrid are challenging football’s institutions (Getty Images)

Sporting rules were never intended or required to be as robust as national legal frameworks, however, since the point is just to fairly put on games. That social contract starts to come up apart once the norms are challenged.

This is a problem that arises when you have interests of far greater power and it is why figures at clubs like Arsenal have been arguing the game needs institutional support within competition law to protect it.

And yet, of course, these two clubs mostly dominate actual competitions. The question is really how much is enough? There are other societal parallels there.

Many of these complaints, like the penalty given to Espanyol or the APT vote, represent rare moments when these powers didn’t get their way.

It is the same with this play-off eliminator in the Champions League, which is why it also represents quite an irony. As has been written on these pages before, the new format is a direct consequence of super-club motivations, which these two clubs have taken to extremes. The same format has now played havoc with their squads, leading to the fitness issues that have left them fighting to get into the last 16.

They got what they wanted – and it’s too much. It will also dictate the actual football on the pitch, which suffers from so many distractions.

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Man City have been going through a bad moment this season and those who run the club are partly to blame (Getty Images)

Without Rodri, whose Ballon D’Or victory prompted another Perez tantrum, City look specifically vulnerable to the pace that is Madrid’s most abundant weapon. Vinicius Junior may even be the player to most benefit. On the other side, however, Madrid are missing so many senior defenders.

That’s what’s most interesting about this tie. It is a rare moment when these two elites are incomplete, which may skew things. Otherwise, it’s many of the same themes we’ve been discussing for the last few seasons: Pep Guardiola against Carlo Ancelotti, system against individualism, state ownership against fan-ownership… to a point.

Perhaps such familiarity is why they’ve both been so invested in the new horizons of Fifa’s expanded Club World Cup, which already represents another great disruption to the modern game.

You might say the world is not enough.