Former German international Philipp Lahm has put a question mark next to the biggest trophy haul in Manchester City’s history.
“But what are achievements on the pitch worth if they are accompanied by rule-breaking?” the former Germany captain asked in parallel columns for The Guardian and Die Zeit on Wednesday.
The question lands at a specific moment. On 29 September an independent commission’s verdict found City guilty of 114 charges of breaching the Premier League’s financial rules between 2009 and 2018, with the club’s income judged to have been “hugely overstated by over £830m”, according to The Independent via Yahoo Sports. City have lodged an appeal.
Lahm worked under Guardiola at Bayern Munich between 2013 and 2016, and his column stayed admiring of the football itself. His complaint was with the club.
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50+1 as the alternative
In The Guardian, Lahm argued that football must not be detached from its roots in the way it had been at Manchester City, and held up Germany’s 50+1 ownership rule as the alternative.
Under 50+1, the parent members’ club, the non-profit section of a professional club, keeps the majority of voting rights, limiting how far an outside investor can push the institution away from the people who support it. Lahm’s case is that the rule has kept German clubs tied to the communities they came from, and that the City model is the opposite path.
That is a direct challenge to the state-backed ownership that took City from mid-table to the trophy years under Guardiola.
Infantino ‘may fall’
Lahm did not stop at the Etihad. In Die Zeit, he welcomed what he described as pressure building on FIFA president Gianni Infantino.
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“When behaviour like that in Manchester and at FIFA is punished, that is a good thing,” he wrote, according to Absolutfussball.
“UEFA is taking a hard line on Gianni Infantino. The FIFA president may be brought down.”
Per Absolutfussball, UEFA sent Infantino a catalogue of 42 critical questions at the start of this week. The context, per Lahm’s columns, includes Infantino’s attempt to privatise parts of the World Cup, and the lifting of a red-card suspension against United States forward Folarin Balogun during the World Cup. Infantino is seeking re-election in March 2027.
The sanction currently expected is a points deduction severe enough to send the club down to the Championship. City continue to deny wrongdoing and have appealed.
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