If you run a football club, and you sell your two best players in one summer and bank the profit, and the club across the way sells nobody of note and buys the most terrifying goalscorer on the planet and also reports a profit, you might quietly wonder what the difference is between your accounting and theirs. Jesse Marsch did not wonder quietly. He managed Leeds United in 2022 and 2023, the season of that exact summer, and now that he coaches Canada he is happy to say the quiet part into a microphone.
“I think Man City should be punished severely. I think they should have to go down, and by the way, everyone knew about it. Everyone knew,” Marsch told the Guardian in an interview published on Sunday, according to Reuters and CBC.
The background: an independent commission found Manchester City guilty of serious breaches of the Premier League’s financial rules across nine seasons, from 2009-10 to 2017-18. The league alleged the club used “sham” commercial contracts to inflate revenue and understate costs by more than 900 million pounds ($1.19 billion). City denies wrongdoing, says the verdict contained material errors of law, principle and fact, and filed an appeal on Thursday, to be heard privately by an independent three-member board. All of which means Marsch’s “go down” demand is at least a live question — relegation, along with fines, points deductions and even the removal of titles, is among the sanctions that have been discussed. It remains unclear whether any punishment lands before the appeal is decided.
What makes Marsch’s intervention fun — and it is fun, in the way that only a man with no skin left in English football can be fun — is that his evidence is not a leaked email or a forensic audit. It is the transfer window as experienced from the cheap seats. In the summer of 2022, Leeds sold Raphinha to Barcelona and Kalvin Phillips to City.
That summer (2022), us and Man City were the only teams that said we made money. For us, we did make money, because we sold Raphinha, we sold Kalvin Phillips. We had a lot left over from what we bought.
“At the time, we weren’t in a position financially to not save. Our ownership didn’t have deep pockets,” he went on. “Whereas when Man City says this, I was literally like, ‘Are you kidding me? Is this some kind of joke?’”
And then there was Erling Haaland, signed from Borussia Dortmund that same summer. “When they said they got Erling Haaland for £52m, it’s like: ‘Yeah, OK, sure!’” Marsch said. “So, I knew there were inconsistencies in it, but what can you do? You just put your arms in the air and go, ‘This is football’.”
I think the interesting question buried in here is what “everyone knew” is worth. The honest answer is: nothing, procedurally. A manager’s nose for fishy accounting is not evidence, and Marsch’s skepticism about the Haaland fee is a vibe, not a charge sheet; the commission’s findings rest on years of documents, not on anyone’s arithmetic about one striker. But in the economy of the sport, vibes are information. The people whose job is to build a squad with the money they actually have areRunning the same numbers every window, and when the market leader keeps reporting profits while buying everything, the competitors notice. Marsch is just the first one with a current pulpit — Canada, conveniently, is not in the Premier League — and nothing to lose from saying so.
The mechanism of what happens next is less satisfying. City’s appeal goes to a private three-member board. The possible sanctions run from a fine — the traditional outcome, in which a very rich club pays money — through points deductions to relegation, which is the sanction Marsch wants and the one that would actually mean something to a club owned by people for whom fines are a rounding error. That, presumably, is why he said it. Reuters has contacted Manchester City for comment on his remarks.
For now the only certain punishment is the one Leeds already served: it made money the honest way, sold its best players, and got relegated anyway, a year after that summer of prudence. City, which according to the league understated its costs by more than 900 million pounds, has appealed.
This is football, as the man said.