Tottenham Hotspur chairman Daniel Levy weighed in on Manchester City’s various legal battles with the Premier League during a frank appraisal of many topics.
City have been accused of more than 100 breaches of the Premier League’s financial regulations in a seismic case which will have lasting repercussions on the wider landscape of English football. Pep Guardiola’s side were first charged in February 2023 yet a final verdict is not expected until October this year at the earliest.
Levy, whose Tottenham are famed for their financial caution, warily touched on this legally charged topic in a recent interview with Gary Neville on The Overlap. “I think it would be really unfair of me to talk about another club in the Premier League,” the Spurs chief began.
“All I would say is that it’s going through a process which I think has gone on for far too long. It needs to be brought, for the good of the game, to a conclusion one way or another.”
City are also embroiled in a separate legal dispute with the Premier League relating to the division’s Associated Party Transaction (APT) rules. These regulations were effectively brought in to prevent clubs from concocting inflated sponsorship agreements with entities which they also had a stake in.
The dethroned English champions, who are majority-owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the vice-president of the United Arab Emirates, are still in the midst of a spiky back-and-forth with the Premier League regarding these rules, which they believe to be anti-competitive and in breach of public law principles.
Levy was more confident in coming out on the Premier League’s side when this subject was raised. “One of the biggest threats is related party sponsorships,” the Tottenham chairman warned. “That’s the area that has to be controlled because if you end up having clubs that are owned by states, which I have no issue with, they can do deals with themselves and that puts them in a competitive advantage over everybody else. That’s an area that must be looked at.”
The controversial executive was keen to point out that Spurs have not benefitted from any outside assistance in their push to become the ninth richest club on the planet.
“If you look at what we’ve done, we haven’t had somebody pumping hundreds of millions into the club, we’ve done it all on our own,” Levy proudly pointed out. “We have been entrepreneurial and have increased our revenues to enable us to compete the best we can today.”
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as ‘Biggest Threats’—Tottenham Chief Aims Dig at Man City.
