It is always a pleasure listening to Pat Nevin. Not really. When he is not accusing Celtic fans of things they have not done, he is mounting inexplicable defences of positions which do not really need defending.
To be fair to him, he is not trying to argue that Manchester City did nothing wrong. That is not his position. What he is saying is that the English authorities have to be extremely careful about the punishment they impose because of the law of unintended consequences.
I think this is Nevin doing what he often does, trying to sound as though he is looking at the issue on some deeper and more sophisticated level than everybody else.
In reality, it is one of the dumbest arguments I have heard in this whole debate. The law of unintended consequences. Well, that is certainly a new defence.
I am sure Manchester City will listen to that one with great interest, although I very much doubt they are going to try to build their appeal around it. Because the great thing about unintended consequences is that, by definition, we do not know what they are going to be.
They are not only unintended. They are unknowable until they happen.
They are exactly what Donald Rumsfeld was talking about when he described the “unknown unknowns”, the things we do not know that we do not know.
But if you lived your entire life refusing to act because of things which might conceivably happen, you may as well sit at home all day and do nothing except watch television. Even that carries risks. What if a wheel falls off an aeroplane and comes crashing through your roof? You see where the logic takes you.
Or rather, you see the lack of logic?
Instead of speculating about consequences which nobody can predict, why not start with the consequences we actually can predict?
What happens if the authorities are weak?
What happens if Manchester City are found to have seriously broken the rules and the response is minimal because everyone is frightened of what might happen if the punishment is too severe? What message does that send?
It tells every club in the game that the rulebook is negotiable if you are powerful enough. It tells everyone that if you have sufficient financial resources, enough influence and good enough lawyers, you can push the limits as far as you like and then warn everybody about the consequences of holding you accountable.
That would be catastrophic.
Nevin talks about the consequences if the league is not perceived as fair, but that is precisely why his argument defeats itself.
If supporters believe that the competition is rigged, that some clubs are required to follow the rules while others can simply spend whatever they like and hoover up trophy after trophy, then why should people continue investing emotionally or financially in the product?
Why should supporters keep paying to attend?
Why should broadcasters keep handing over enormous sums for a competition whose rules are treated as optional?
If Nevin is worried about perception, then the worst possible perception is that the authorities know wrongdoing occurred and were too frightened to deal with it properly.
There are not many people south of the border making his argument, but there are a few, and I think they are badly mistaken.
What makes Nevin’s contribution more irritating is that he then drags the Ibrox situation into the discussion and muddies the waters even further.
He mentions what happened in 2012 and repeats the familiar line about Rangers going “down the divisions”, as though that is what actually happened.
And every time somebody imports that false version of events into the Manchester City discussion, it makes the debate less clear.
For the record, it is not only Celtic supporters who openly describe the Ibrox club as a newco. Supporters of clubs all over Scotland do it because that is what happened.
The old club went out of business. A new company sought admission to Scottish football. The battle was over where that new entity would enter the league structure.
That is not relegation.
I have said this a million times, but I will say it again; if somebody can show me the date on which Rangers were relegated as a punishment, show me the regulation under which that relegation took place and show me the formal decision imposing it, I will happily stop blogging tomorrow because I will have spent the last 12 years being wrong.
Nobody will ever be able to show me those things because they do not exist.
The Manchester City situation is fundamentally different. If Manchester City are relegated as a punishment, then that will happen because the rules governing their competition allow for that sanction in their case.
They are not a club disappearing through insolvency while a new entity applies for admission. They are an existing football club facing potential sporting sanctions. Those are not remotely the same thing.
Nevin’s use of the Scottish example is especially strange because the most important lesson from 2012 actually cuts directly against his argument about unintended consequences.
The only thing which saved Scottish football from making a grotesque and potentially unrecoverable error was the refusal of ordinary supporters to accept the route which many people in authority regarded as the most expedient one.
The easiest option would have been to find a way to place the new Ibrox club straight into the Premier League or the Championship.
Commercial arguments were made. Television arguments were made. Warnings were issued about what might happen to Scottish football if Rangers were not kept as high in the pyramid as possible.
And supporters across the country said no.
Not only Celtic supporters.
Supporters of club after club made it clear that if their boards voted for an arrangement which appeared to bend the rules simply to protect a commercial relationship, they would regard that as a corruption of the competition itself.
The clubs listened. And thank God they did.
Because if the Scottish game had simply forced through the most convenient solution in order to preserve television deals and revenues, the consequences would not have been mysterious or unknowable.
They would have been obvious. Huge numbers of supporters would have concluded that the game was fixed. Many would have stopped attending. The credibility of the competitions would have been shattered.
If Nevin wants to talk about perception and unintended consequences, that is the lesson he should take from 2012.
Sometimes the greatest danger lies in doing nothing. Sometimes the greatest danger lies in choosing convenience over principle. Sometimes the supposed safe option is actually the most destructive one available.
That is why the English authorities cannot allow themselves to be paralysed by speculation about what might happen if they punish Manchester City severely.
They have to start with the facts in front of them and the rules they are responsible for enforcing. If serious breaches are established, then the punishment has to reflect that. Not because of hatred or jealousy. Not because people want Manchester City destroyed.
But because a governing body which is unwilling to enforce its own rules against one of its most powerful members has effectively admitted that those rules do not mean very much.
And once that happens, the consequences are not unintended at all.
They are entirely predictable.
Every wealthy ownership group starts looking for the next loophole. Every regulation becomes something to be tested rather than obeyed. Every smaller club begins to wonder why it is playing honestly when the biggest organisations can simply overpower the system
The trust disappears. That is the real danger here.
Nevin is looking in completely the wrong direction. The English game should absolutely be careful about what it does next, but being careful does not mean being timid. It does not mean looking at Scotland’s false precedent and convincing itself that Rangers were simply relegated and everything worked out fine.
That is not what happened. The English authorities have their own rulebook, their own case and their own responsibility to protect their competition.
They need to get this right, and the worst possible way to get it wrong would be to become so frightened of hypothetical future consequences that they refuse to deal properly with the very real problem sitting in front of them.
That is not wisdom. It is cowardice. Very Pat Nevin, that.
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Can’t see anything happening for years. They are bound to launch an appeal in the courts even if the FA’s rules don’t allow it. This is a professional, multi million business and cannot see them allowing a bunch of privileged “amateurs” nearly destroy it. Rangers would still have been going to this day had the not government pulled the plug and it was up to the SFA.