Tie the ribbons on the trophy. Unsheathe the engraver’s scalpel. We have a winner. Yes, the award for the most hilariously deluded disciplinary action by a sporting administrative body 2015-16 goes to Uefa and its decision to charge Manchester City after the home support booed the Champions League pre‑match jingle on Wednesday night.
At first glance this already looks a pretty straightforward wrong turn. The outrage at Uefa’s move following the match against Sevilla at the Etihad has been genuine and entirely justified. Freedom to offer dissent is a basic tenet of western democracy. Freedom to sneer and snark and shout things like: “REFEREE YOU’RE A WASTE OF SKIN!” is a basic tenet of being in a football crowd. Case closed, you’d think. Another false step taken, another sign of Big Football’s basic disconnect, another waft of alienation.
Except there is a little more here. Dig a little deeper and all of this – Abu Dhabi millions, financial fair play fines, freedom of speech – starts to turn in on itself, to get a little tangled up in its own entrails. As George Costanza once said: “This thing is like an onion. The more layers you peel, the more it stinks.”
In the anatomy of a booing charge we start, naturally, with a basic feeling of weariness. What exactly is Uefa thinking here? What principle does it imagine City’s fans could possibly have offended? Uefa has the power to fine clubs for racism or violence in the stands. It may have an understandable interest in protecting the concerns of its sponsors, preventing ambush marketing and so on, the Bendtner’s Pants Rule. But in this case City’s fans were effectively booing a ditty, a bit of branding, a piece of cod-operatic pre‑match incidental music.
Let’s be clear, there is no “anthem” here. Despite the best efforts of football’s governing bodies to present themselves as an autonomous global nation state, Uefa is not a country, or a race of people. It’s a set of offices, an unceasing buffet lunch, a hidden world of perma-tanned mendacity and murky political power-play. It cannot, in any serious sense of the word, be offended. What we have here is, in effect, a victimless non-crime.
If the booing itself is fair game, the reasons for doing it are only semi-convincing to the non City-fan. Uefa’s half-baked punishment of CSKA Moscow for racist abuse of City players was genuinely shabby stuff. Against that only the most partisan supporter can successfully cast a £50m fine for breaching financial fair play rules as a case of valiant underdogs struggling under the thumb of our Nyon-based overlords.
At which point you may start to think the most remarkable thing about all this is its basic pointlessness. City will probably escape without punishment, the booing reported simply as a matter of course by match observers. Which leaves us with a perfect storm of pointlessness: the pointless booing of a pointless song, for pointless reasons, now the subject of a pointless censure.
And yet there is another layer to this, a kind of wormhole effect, the sense that the closer you look the less sense it all starts to make. The most obvious consequence is that the booing stays. Where once it might have been a little deflating, creating a tinny, oddly draining atmosphere, a self-defeating sourness, the booing will now be triumphant, defiant, inspiring. The booing is legitimised simply by the fact somebody out there thinks it’s unacceptable – in the process making themselves entirely boo-worthy. And not only by City. Every English club should boo. Every club in Europe should boo just to show they can, to make the point once again, as Bayern Munich’s travelling support did at the Emirates, that football without fans isn’t worth a penny.
And second, if we really did go down this road, how would it play out exactly? City’s legal team are planning to defend Uefa’s charge by arguing the fans’ right to freedom of speech is being infringed. At which point the maths of the situation starts to become a little confusing. City want freedom of speech on one hand and freedom to spend on the other. The refusal of the latter has in part led to the exercise of the former. The Abu Dhabi ruling family may offer them plenty of ready cash. But how do they feel about dissent?
Perhaps we should ask Abdullah Qassem of the Arabian Gulf League club al-Dhafra, a 29-year-old United Arab Emirates international who was this week imprisoned in Abu Dhabi for criticising his national team manager. It is, let’s face it, a slightly painful irony. Free speech and boos in Manchester. Prison in Abu Dhabi. Certainly it would be fascinating to listen in on the attempts to explain to Sheikh Mansour, whose people can be imprisoned for criticising the government and beheaded for blasphemy, that what must be protected here at all costs is the fans’ basic right to defy authority. Who, you wonder, is Sheikh Mansour going to go with here? The angry masses?
Indeed it is at moments such as this that the ground starts to shift a little, that football starts to look altered and strange, City’s fans rather caught in the middle. Certainly the club’s owners have more in common with the controlling hierarchies of Uefa – who fined Dundalk €18,000 for a fan flying a Palestinian flag, who have given four games at Euro 2020 to Azerbaijan – than they do with English football’s 150-year history of bile, booze and boisterous free association.
So carry on booing. Boo for the City fans refused entry in Moscow. Boo for Abdullah Qassem in prison. Boo because booing is now against the rules. If City are fined for it, let’s hope they refuse to pay, stand their ground, take it right to the top. As tedious and nonsensical Uefa charges go, this is certainly one of the more interesting.
