Manchester City's cheating scandal isn't really about soccer

The biggest scandal in the modern history of professional sports broke wide open across the Atlantic this past week. How much that reflects larger social, cultural and economic pathologies and whether it affects regular people's lives in any meaningful way is a complicated question.

At the very least, I would suggest that the Manchester City scandal, which has driven the already-overheated British media to new heights of hysteria, isn't really about soccer or sports. Man City (often simply called "City") is by far the most successful team in the English Premier League over the last 15 years and one of the four or five biggest soccer franchises in the world.

Last week an independent legal panel delivered a long-anticipated verdict, finding the clubguilty on 114 countsof systematic financial fraud, amounting to more than a billion dollars in fake revenues and sham commercial sponsorships. This scathing judgment only covers the years from 2009 to 2018, but no one thinks the actual or alleged fraud suddenly stopped after that.

Effectively, the verdict amounts to a finding that City cheated their way to the top of world football through a dizzying but blatant series of scams and shell games, allowing the team's petro-state owners to illegally outspend competitors and pump hundreds of millions into inflated salaries for star players like Norwegian thirst-trap Erling Haaland (he of the formerly golden locks), Kevin De Bruyne and Sergio Agüero, and illustrious coaches, first and foremost among them the Catalan genius Pep Guardiola. Along with winning numerous championships and tournaments, Man City changed the nature of the world's favorite sport and transformed the EPL from a medium-size U.

-based enterprise plagued by hooliganism, erratic attendance and crumbling stadiums into a global merchandising and marketing empire whose broadcasts, "kits" and online fan clubs extend from Indonesia to Arkansas. If you belong to the large proportion of humanity inclined to a shrug-emoji reaction - billionaire oligarchs, overpaid athletes, incalculable sums of dirty money; who cares?

- the first thing to say is that you're absolutely right and that's the only healthy response. But the salient fact that pushes the Man City narrative beyond a sports-business scandal and toward more cultural, political and even philosophical terrain is that virtually everyone who followed soccer and the EPL understood what was happening all along.

That sort of willful blindness or collective cynicism is by no means limited to sports or celebrity culture - and it has become a widespread corrosive force in our society. At any rate, everyone who was paying attention rapidly perceived the pattern after 2008, when Manchester City - a historically mediocre team with a modest fan base, sad-sack local rivals to Manchester United, who dominated the sport in the 1990s - was acquired by the Abu Dhabi United Group, a private equity firm closely aligned, shall we say, with the royal family of a Persian Gulf autocratic state.

(Exactly how closely, and whether ADUG can be considered a separate entity from the Abu Dhabi government, is one of the issues at stake in the byzantine Man City case, now heading into an appeal process that could take years. ) It's worth noting here that City Football Group, the ADUG subsidiary that has poured all that money into Man City, also owns or operates football/soccer clubs and related real estate projects around the world, including New York City FC in Major League Soccer, which at this moment is constructing anexpensive new stadiumin Queens, to be named - like everything else in the CFG universe - for Etihad Airways, Abu Dhabi's state-owned carrier.

Here we find the central conundrum of the Man City scandal: Abu Dhabi's petrodollars are deeply embedded in the economies of many Western nations, and any effort to punish or exile the emirate's big sporting property could have far-reaching ripple effects. Here lies the central conundrum of the Man City scandal, which is, like so much else about this story, a dirty secret that is no secret at all.