Justice in the Court of Public Opinion

Image via Manchester City

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Early one Friday morning, reports were released that Manchester City Football Club had been found guilty of 114 out of 115 Premier League charges regarding major financial rule breaches between 2009 and 2018. This marks the end of an 18-year-long saga involving Abu Dhabi’s 2008 takeover of the club, a 2018 leak of internal communications, a 2020 ban from European soccer overturned on a technicality, 115 charges brought by the Premier League (PL) in 2023, and finally a 2026 verdict. 

The charges allege that Manchester City executives intentionally submitted inaccurate financial information to the PL so that Abu Dhabi United Group, the club’s owners and financial backers, could pump additional money into Manchester City. The ruse included inflating revenue by over $1.1 billion, paying managers and players through no-show sponsorships (sponsorships in which the recipient isn’t required to perform any action to receive the money), and deliberately destroying evidence to cover their tracks. 

The more interesting aspect of this incident is the punishment that will inevitably be dealt. Manchester City is choosing to appeal the conviction itself and, later, the punishment, ensuring the battle between the club and the Premier League will last for the foreseeable future. A vague precedent has been set by the smaller transgressions of Everton FC and Nottingham Forest FC, but the clubs’ transparency at the end of their respective investigations undoubtedly led to lighter punishments. Everton was deducted 8 points for two separate breaches of the league’s Profitability and Sustainability Rules, and Nottingham Forest was deducted 4 points for a similar offense.

The sheer magnitude and extent of Manchester City’s wrongdoings mean that no one really knows what the sanctions will be when the case is finally settled. Still, that has not stopped people from speculating and making rulings with an iron fist. The lightest plausible punishment is a heavy fine and a ban from the transfer market for several years, while the most severe have included removal from all English leagues, $100 million payments to each of the affected clubs, and the stripping of all titles won during that period. The vast majority of public opinion is concentrated on the more severe side of the bell curve.

The sports leagues in the United States are not unaccustomed to this type of scandal, with the National Basketball Association also dealing with the fallout from its own scandal. Over the summer, the NBA charged the Los Angeles Clippers with deliberately circumventing the salary cap by illegally paying star forward Kawhi Leonard through no-show sponsorships. The investigation, while slow, did come to a rather satisfying end when owner Steve Ballmer was barred from all team activities for a year, and the organization was fined $30 million and docked 5 first-round picks. These consequences incapacitate the team for the foreseeable future. The general reaction was positive; the league was not content with a mere slap on the wrist, but rather used the incident as an opportunity to set a firm expectation for all actors moving forward.

What’s notable isn’t that the NBA acted with severity. It’s that most people agreed it was right for them to. Nobody defended Ballmer. Nobody argued that the Clippers were being persecuted by an overzealous league office. The verdict landed, and the public’s sense of proportion landed with it, instantly and without controversy.

We have an uncanny ability to understand sports corruption, but this sense of fairness suddenly disappears when focused on the government. We know exactly what punishment should be dealt and why it should be so severe, but we struggle to apply the same standards to governance. Whether the cause is a lack of caring is unknown and largely irrelevant. The all-important repercussion is that politicians and bad-faith actors are more than willing and able to point their crooked fingers at those unable to protest, diverting attention from the true injustice.

Nowhere is the double standard more visible than in the ongoing campaign to police what Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program recipients are allowed to put in their shopping carts. SNAP feeds over 42 million Americans and represents a mere 1.5% of total federal spending, yet it remains a target for those hyper-fixated on exposing fraud and abuse in government welfare programs. 

In June of this year, the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a hearing titled “Combating Waste, Fraud, and Abuse in SNAP,” a potentially noble pursuit if focused specifically on reducing inefficiencies at the macro level. However, the most popular moment of the hearing was an exchange in which U.S. Representative Brandon Gill questioned the use of food stamps for sodas and other non-water beverages. Gill, hiding behind the guise of nutritional science, was, in reality, blaming SNAP recipients for making poor choices about their food. 

It’s an easy political victory for Gill because it sparks an immediate sense of outrage about your tax dollars being spent on soda products. Unbeknownst to you, it shifts accountability from the policymakers to the recipients. Suddenly, the onus of fixing SNAP and its ongoing issues falls on the recipient, not on those with the power. 

The same problem is true in other government programs, including Supplemental Security Income, which provides monthly financial assistance to adults and children who are disabled, blind, or age 65 or older with limited income and resources. The whole program, which was likely created with only good intentions, immediately and decidedly places the administrative burden on those in need. It is on the state to submit the pay stubs monthly, even though the state already has them. It is not on the state to re-prove a disability that has already been approved. It is not on the state to decode an undecipherable system that treats a late form or misunderstood instruction as grounds for punishment. The burden always lands upon those with the least room to carry it.

The Social Security Administration reported that the SSI improper payment rate reached 10.62% in FY2023, which may sound high, but most of those improper payments stem from self-reporting errors. It’s a remarkably low number for a program designed to trip the applicant up. Still, the discussion and ensuing policy consistently focus on eliminating minimal to non-existent fraud in these programs rather than expanding or simplifying them to help more Americans. 

Compare that 10.62% – a figure driven almost entirely by paperwork, not deception – to the scale of fraud and deceit that sits untouched atop the same government that does the scrutinizing. The cases of Manchester City and the LA Clippers are simply appetizers to the five-course meal that is corruption in this country. Take Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for example. Our healthcare policy leader is lecturing us about vaccines causing autism and fluoride being linked to low IQ while taking all-expenses-paid trips to Fiji and Greece, and accepting $4 million in book advances from a publisher who monetized Make America Healthy Again. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is setting economic policy in this country while ‘inadvertently’ failing to report holdings of $100,000 of JPMorgan stock owned by his husband. 

No one blames the kit man for a club’s malfeasance. No one blames the hospitality worker for the team owner’s wrongdoing. We all have an unmistakable understanding of justice in sports, but where is it when it affects our bottom line? It’s there; it’s simply pointed in the wrong direction. It’s aimed at a single mother buying a case of Coke with her EBT card, at an adult with a disability trying to navigate a mess of a bureaucracy, and at every recipient of every program, too small and too powerless to lawyer up. Meanwhile, the actual scoreboard – the one with nine zeros and dollar signs, the one with undisclosed stock trades, and the one with shady book deals and paid vacations – hangs unexamined. There is only the silent hope, held by everyone with something to hide, that the crowd stays focused on the spectacle in front of them and never looks up at the scoreboard above.

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This article was edited by Matias Enrique Origgi and Seraphine Saghafi.