Top sports lawyer says City case should be held in public

The KC responsible for helping Leicester City find a loophole in the Premier League Profit and Sustainability rules Nick de Marco has said that such cases – including Manchester City’s battle of 115 alleged breaches of Financial Fair Play rules – should be held in public.

De Marco aided the Foxes in arguing to an independent panel that the Premier League had no jurisdiction to rule over Leicester, much to the surprise of the English top flight.

And he insisted, in an interview with the BBC, that Manchester City’s case should be public.

“In the past, everything was behind closed doors,” he said. “Decisions were made with no proper transparency at all, with no due process.

“It has gradually moved on as commercialisation, more money and more professionalism has come in.

“But a lot of sports regulators are very scared of losing control. They think the best way of having control is to do things secretly. My view is that doesn’t work in the long run. It makes people suspicious of you.

“I don’t know what is going on in the Manchester City case but let’s imagine a finding comes out later saying they preferred the evidence of one witness to another or that they thought someone was lying to them or someone said an arbitrator was biased.

“We have no way of understanding that or testing it. It is much better to be open and transparent.”