United

I watched the F1 film with Brad Pitt the other day, and there’s a moment where his character asks to add something to the car that isn’t really in the rules. The FIA punishes it, but the team can still race with the earlier car. It made me think. In F1, the best teams live at the edge of the regulations. Sometimes the FIA allows what they’ve found, and sometimes it says that goes too far. Occasionally the rules are rewritten afterwards. Now, City. I’m not defending them. A commission found they entered into sham agreements and broke the spending limits. A sham is an arrangement that isn’t what it claims to be, so that’s a different thing from using a gap nobody had spotted. City deny it and will appeal. But I find it useful to ask/reflect on how people inside the club see it. From their point of view, PERHAPS they believe they were doing what elite competitors do: looking at the rules, finding the limits, challenging interpretations and moving faster than the regulatory system. From the outside, you might look at that and say, “That’s cheating.” From inside the organisation, they might say, “We found something nobody had thought of.” If you believe you’ve found a way to bring money in, more or less within the rules (and the commission said it was not in the rules and it was cheating), you might tell yourself you’re just being a sharp competitor. We are all asking “did City cheat?”. But I find this question interesting too: “how did City come to believe they weren’t?” And understanding a mindset, or trying to, isn’t excusing it.