By Kachi Okezie, Esq

There is a profound, almost farcical irony in the Premier League’s current posture of righteous indignation. Whenever the league’s grandees step before the cameras to cast themselves as the stern guardians of sporting integrity, one is struck by the sheer audacity of their amnesia. Some of us are not impressed.

For years, as the financial architecture of English football was aggressively reshaped by state-backed hyper-capitalism, the league’s administrators preferred the comfort of a gentlemen’s club ethos.

They presided over a system built on handshakes and good-faith assumptions, blissfully looking the other way while modern elite clubs morphed into multi-billion-dollar transnational corporations.

Now, as the long-running saga surrounding Manchester City results in landmark findings of systematic rule-breaking, the Premier League demands applause. We are expected to praise the fire-fighter who arrives with a garden hose long after the entire neighbourhood has burned to the ground. Not this time.

Let us be entirely clear: the fact that a violation of this staggering magnitude—involving over nine hundred million pounds in disguised funding and sham commercial deals across nearly a decade—could occur, persist, and compound across years is not merely a reflection on the club in the dock. It is unimpeachable proof of the monumental ineptitude and incompetence of those responsible for protecting the competition. That is just as egregious a collapse of internal controls and regulatory oversight as any offending act complained of.

This systemic regulatory failure and façade of audits raises an even more glaring question that society has been far too slow to ask: Where was HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC)? Why did the UK tax authorities not deem it necessary to aggressively inspect, audit or intervene in Manchester City’s corporate books by year two of these multi-million-pound financial machinations?

When corporations—football clubs included—utilise complex webs of offshore entities, shell companies and disguised funding schemes to funnel millions through separate jurisdictions, they are playing a high-stakes game with public revenue as well as sporting fairness. Yet, British tax and regulatory watchdogs notoriously operated with a similar institutional inertia, treating football as an exceptional cultural artefact rather than a high-risk commercial sector. By trusting glossy, independently audited statements at face value without performing deep forensic tax audits on state-backed cash flows, public authorities effectively gave a free pass to financial engineering that bypassed standard scrutiny. If a local bakery faces rigorous tax audits for minor discrepancies, how did multi-state corporate entities obscure nine-figure income discrepancies for years without setting off alarm bells in Whitehall and elsewhere?

A core tenet of effective regulatory design is prevention and early detection. Yet, the Premier League’s financial rules operated more like a rusted weather vane than an early warning system. If a member club could allegedly misrepresent its financial position, obscure manager and player remuneration, and artificially inflate sponsorship values for nearly a decade (as in TEN YEARS!) without tripping a single internal alarm, the oversight mechanism was fundamentally broken. It simply proves that proactive policing, as a football league’s regulatory philosophy is just another myth.

Crucially, the league did not uncover these systemic anomalies through its own forensic brilliance. It launched its formal investigation only after investigative journalism, sparked by Der Spiegel publishing leaked internal emails, forced its hand. Investigative reporters and whistle-blowers did the heavy lifting that the league’s compliance audits and government tax inspections were handsomely paid to do. When external journalism functions as your primary internal control, your regulatory framework is not just failing; it is entirely non-existent.

Part of this failure stems from an acute structural mismatch. The Premier League has long suffered from a crippling information asymmetry. As a private entity, it possesses no statutory subpoena power; it cannot raid offices, seize encrypted devices or compel foreign corporate entities and offshore banks to hand over documents. It naively relies entirely on voluntary compliance from the very entities it is meant to police.

When pitted against the formidable resources of state-backed ownership models, this structural weakness was exposed as fatal. The league found itself locked in an asymmetrical legal war of attrition, facing elite legal teams capable of challenging its jurisdiction, rules and evidence-gathering methods at every turn. But acknowledging these limitations does not absolve the regulators. On the contrary, it indicts their hubris. Why did they spend years pretending they were fully equipped to referee global financial superpowers when they lacked both the legal teeth and the forensic competence to do so?

Furthermore, the league has long harboured an inherent conflict of interest. It functions simultaneously as a commercial behemoth tasked with driving global broadcast revenues and a regulatory body policing its participants. Cracking down harshly on the marquee clubs that draw international eyeballs created a profound commercial disincentive. For years, this dual mandate bred a culture of compromise, slow intervention and cautious looking-the-other-way.

This systemic failure is precisely why the landscape of English football is now fundamentally shifting. The sheer duration, expense and paralysis of the Manchester City dispute, alongside financial crises at other clubs, became the undeniable catalyst for the UK government to pursue an Independent Football Regulator (IFR). That is the reckoning that could not be ignored.

The widespread consensus among sports economists and legal experts matches a harsh reality: football governing bodies have proven beyond all doubt that they cannot effectively police themselves. A system that takes well over a decade to litigate historical financial compliance is not a functioning or competent deterrent; it is a bureaucratic farce, unfit for purpose.

It is now time to strip away the sanctimonious rhetoric emanating from league headquarters. Before the administrators lecture anyone else on sporting integrity, they and the state financial watchdogs that slept on the job must subject themselves to rigorous self-introspection. Until they own up to the institutional negligence that allowed these violations to flourish unchecked for so long, their righteous posturing will remain precisely what it is: an empty shield designed to deflect blame from their own historic incompetence.

-Okezie is a sports lawyer, chartered mediator and consultant.