Man City spending warning highlights problem Premier League clubs seem to be ignoring

It is coming up to four years since nine Premier League clubs tried to keep Manchester City out of European competition.

There wouldn't be many at the Etihad who could smile at the irony if the anniversary is quickly followed by most of those clubs voting against the Blues this June and potentially handicapping all English teams playing abroad. That is the prospect that has now been raised by the latest suggestion by 20 clubs who all have different ideas about how to make the game fairer and different reasons for wanting it.

We are of course talking about the proposed Premier League spending cap, an idea that was waved through this week by member clubs despite the objections of City, United, and Villa and the abstention of Chelsea. This would help to replace the Profitability and Sustainability Rules (PSR), which were tweaked last year by clubs to ensure swifter justice for simple cases and are now a source of resentment by several clubs because swifter justice has been brought for simple cases.

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The latest idea is yet to have the fine details clarified but essentially involves anchoring the spending of all clubs to a multiple of the least commercially popular in the division, with the intention of reducing inequality within the division. Any such rule would come on top of the existing rule that a club can only spend a certain amount of its revenues, and the intention is that it would stop the cycle of it being increasingly more difficult for clubs coming into the league to compete with those as the top; while the rich have got richer, the three