With more and more money pouring into the Premier League from increasingly dubious sources than the last, it can be difficult to keep track of all the financial irregularities going on in the English top flight.
In recent times, attention has rightly shifted to Newcastle United and the new ownership of the Magpies, a consortium containing PIF (Public Investment Fund), controlled by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
However, in research shared on Twitter by @Millar_Colin, scrutiny may yet return to Manchester’s blue half and it appears all is not as it seems with Manchester City’s Asian betting partner 8XBet.
Man City make ‘profits’ from a bookmaker of highly dubious authenticity that operates from, you guessed it, the United Arab Emirates. The nation where gambling is illegal and punishable by imprisonment. Welcome to soccer in 2022. https://t.co/brbxyT79QU
— Colin Millar (@Millar_Colin) September 20, 2022
Beyond the worrying lack of a genuine social presence, the company’s dubious origins (it appears that the social accounts are currently run from the United Arab Emirates) would certainly suggest, at the very least, that something is a bit off about the company. Ultimate Sky Blues. camaraderie.
“The Manchester City website claims that 8XBet was founded in 2018 by a certain ‘Ryan Li,’” Jack Kerr, Philippe Auclair, Andy Brown and Steve Menary wrote for Josimar.
“However, the 8xbet.com domain was up for sale in November of last year, as the Wayback Machine shows.
“The .com domain of 978bet, the bookmaker’s previous name, was up for sale in 2019 and blank in November 2020.
“There are several mirror sites associated with each of these brands: but the ones we checked were registered in 2020 (for 978Bet) or around Christmas last year (for 8XBet).
“This means that if it was operating in 2018 as claimed, it may well have been doing so illegally – the bookmaker is licensed in Curacao through a company called 978 Tech NV, and Open Corporates shows this was only registered on March 2021.
“As for its founder, when we searched for “Ryan Li” “978Bet” on Google, the only result was Josimar’s earlier article about the bookmaker.
“A search for “Ryan Li” “8XBet” returns no results before March 2022, when he began to be named in promotional-style news articles announcing a partnership between 8XBet and Teddy Sheringham.
“At least two journalists who quoted ‘Ryan Li’ did not speak to him but received email quotes from a British public relations firm they were not free to name.”
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This is not the first time that Manchester City have been accused of trying to circumvent financial fair play rules with a previous investigation by UEFA suggesting the Premier League club had ‘artificially’ inflated their income for several years.
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The murky nature of the rules on prescribed offenses means that Pep Guardiola’s men have largely gotten away with their supposedly dodgy off-pitch dealings.
That said, if such investigations were to gain traction as far as official bodies are concerned, one would think that the defending champions would be under threat of serious sanctions.
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