Tottenham questioned over ‘financial irregularities’ in wake of guilty Man City verdict | OneFootball

In the wake of the guilty Manchester City verdict – among the greatest sporting scandals in history – why is no one but former senior Spurs scout Bryan King asking ‘well, what about Tottenham?’

The Premier League has now confirmed that an independent panel has found City guilty on all charges related to breaches of their financial regulations over a nine-year period.

It was found that City had arranged “sham” contracts with commercial partners to inflate revenues and reduce costs to the tune of over £900m.

City maintain their innocence and are expected to appeal the ruling as we wait to learn the Premier League punishment and just how much they will have to pay their rivals in damages.

Many City fans, like their esteemed directors, are in denial and are also engaging in the inevitable whataboutery which comes with having your club’s cheating exposed in such undeniable and horrifying fashion.

And for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, so too is Bryan King, who worked as Tottenham’s senior scout between 2002 and 2008 and now offers up his opinions to Football Insider.

“Man City brought in the right players. Financially, whatever went on. The fact is, you can buy a player for £50m and somebody else will say, ‘we couldn’t afford him,'” King told Football Insider.

“‘He wouldn’t come to us because we couldn’t afford him.’ But there’s no guarantee that that player is going to perform. You’ve seen it in the past.

“Players have been brought in. Just look at a few of them now. They’ve been brought in for big money.”

They also brought in quite a few wrong players, Bryan. They signed Eliaquim Mangala, Wilfried Bony and Fernando in the same summer.

But also, the point is they could buy those right players – or at least some of them – because they claimed money that actually came out of their owners pockets came through sponsorship deals.

The independent panel weren’t ruling on whether Manchester City make good decisions in the transfer market or on the quality of their scouting department. They found that they bought those players, and very possibly paid the wages of their sporting directors and scouts, through money that the club hadn’t earned.

The Tottenham bombshell

But King rather buries the lead with that opening nonsense, as he then displays a quite astonishing lack of understanding of financial fair play rules.

“If anybody had said about financial irregularities, you’d have said, ‘well, what about Tottenham?’.”

Here comes the bombshell.

“They’re in massive debt with the new stadium. What gives them the right to be able to bring in players and spend £400m when they haven’t even paid off the stadium yet?

“There are so many hypocrites in the game at the moment. Nobody’s interested in losers anymore. They’re interested in winners.”

Love the last line. Tottenham are indeed losers. But Bryan, Tottenham can spend big precisely because of their brand spanking new stadium and the revenue it brings in through match day ticket sales, concerts and other sporting events.

So as much as we love to kick a dog while it’s down, one criticism we can’t aim at the dishevelled, starving mutt that is Tottenham Hotspur, their finances – as far as we know – are beyond reproach.