Pep Guardiola
If there’s one skill that the Manchester City manager has honed to a razor-sharp edge since his time in the English Premier League, it’s the art of sounding the alarm at the first sign of adversity. He’s quick to cry foul whenever the playing field tilts against his team or when the heat becomes too intense to bear. Like a sentinel standing guard, he’s always ready to raise a flag, determined to protect his charges from danger.
This behavior is the hallmark of a man who’s emotionally frayed in tight spots, and it’s easy to spot when the tension reaches a boiling point. Like a man with his back against the wall, he fights tooth and nail to prove his innocence to the world and silence his critics. He wears his desperation on his sleeve he becomes a gladiator in the arena of public opinion, battling to clear his name and emerge victorious.
Manchester City have been a club that has earned the envy of quite a lot of clubs in Europe (Europe can be debatable) and in the English Premier League, judging from how the club is run and how it has gone over the decades to transform into a dominant force in the league, pushing aside the traditional top 4 sides of Chelsea, Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal to the back seat.
And when the status quo is challenged, there is bound to be a rebellion. The rebellion comes in the form of the league’s standing regulations of Financial Fair play.
The Union of European Football Associations has put into place a regulation aimed at reigning in the big clubs that wield immense financial influence through their wealthy owners or backing from powerful states. The purpose of this rule is to level the playing field and prevent these clubs from creating an unequal advantage, leaving the smaller clubs without a fighting chance in the European Leagues.
These regulations are meant to serve as a checkmate that prevents clubs from spending well above their means and more on what it earns either from sponsorships, merchandising, sale of tickets, or TV viewership. In other words, the more a club makes from competing, the more it can spend, and if clubs cannot prove their spending power, they can be charged for breaching the regulations.
Pep Guardiola
This is the point Manchester City is at the moment, with the Premier League having found the club guilty of roughly 100 charges based on its investigations. There are allegations of the club creating fake sponsors from out of the blue to enable them to balance the books to ward off suspicions alongside other allegations brought on the club.
But earlier in Friday’s press conference, Manchester City’s manager and head coach pointed straight fingers at the 19 premier league teams in the English Division as the ones leading the charge in order to provoke an unmerited punishment on the club’s owners.
The Spaniard stands firmly in front of the media in defense of the club’s owners, the Abu Dhabi group led by Sheikh Mansur, who owns the club currently. Of course, this pointing of fingers isn’t the first for Pep Guardiola, and judging by the fact he has done so on more than 1 occasion beforehand, one can tell this wouldn’t be his last.
He once claimed Liverpool were the most loved team in the league last season by the English folks, when contrary to such claims, Manchester City stood the most favored by the English folks to win the league instead of the Merseyside-based club that has grown to earn itself quite the rivalry from dozens of clubs over the years.
In Guardiola’s luck, the bias he called out against Liverpool was able to remove the pressure off his team to steal the title on the last match day from the Reds.
Pep Guardiola has a Midas touch when it comes to calling out bias. Whenever he raises the issue, fortune seems to smile on his team in the grand scheme of things. And now, he has done the same in front of the media and in a press conference, laying a bias from the 19 Premier League teams. But the question remains, is he genuinely concerned about the outcome or simply playing a cunning game of media manipulation to ease the weight on his team? Like a puppeteer pulling the strings, Guardiola’s actions raise questions about his true motives.
Aminu Wada writes for Eko Hot Blog. This media platform reserves all rights to this article.
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