Friday’s announcement that the Premier League anticipated a guilty verdict on the majority of the 115 charges against Manchester City marked a watershed moment in English football history, potentially the first of many rapid developments. While the independent commission’s decision—which the league has yet to formally confirm, with City insisting they await final word—may be remembered as the moment a dynasty ended, significant fallout remains to be sorted through.
Beyond the immediate verdict, sanctions still need to be determined, yet even these could shift as Manchester City may appeal the commission’s ruling. During this process, questions will inevitably arise regarding the future of the club’s expensively assembled squad, its current status, and what actions rival clubs might take to seek recompense for the damage they believe has been inflicted upon them.
What Happens if City Appeal?
Although City have publicly insisted the process remains ongoing, an appeal is a prospect rather than a certainty, though the industry has long expected the club to challenge any guilty verdict. Premier League regulations dictate that City will have 14 days to file an appeal once a verdict is announced.
Many fear this will entangle English football in further months of litigation. However, Premier League rules indicate otherwise. Rule W.86 states that an appeal should “not exceed five days in duration and be heard in one block,” with a 12-week time limit set after the appeal is filed.
Should the appeal fail against City, who have always denied any wrongdoing, they would not have the option to appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, though they could pursue arbitration. Here, City would need to argue that the independent panel acted beyond its jurisdiction, exhibited fraud, malice, or bad faith, committed “procedural errors so great that the rights of the applicant have been clearly and substantially prejudiced,” perversely interpreted the law, or reached a decision that could not have been reached had they applied their minds properly. In short, the barrier for success at arbitration would be exceptionally high.
Could City pursue further avenues beyond arbitration with the league? An email published by Der Spiegel in 2018—decried by the club as “out-of-context materials purportedly hacked or stolen”—revealed the view of Simon Cliff, the club’s representative, regarding chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak’s stance on UEFA’s financial investigations. “Khaldoon [Al Mubarak] says he would rather spend £30m on the 50 best lawyers in the world and sue them [UEFA] for the next ten years than agree a financial penalty.” If such a belligerent attitude persists at the Etihad Stadium, legal wrangling will continue for a long time.
Al Mubarak’s first public statement following the verdict offered little indication of City’s next step, beyond an insistence that their innocence would be proven. “Following Friday’s media reporting, many of you will have spent your evening answering questions and responding to messages from friends, family, and colleagues. So have I. Here’s what I said to my family: The Premier League process still has a long way to run, and our confidence and intent in proving the club’s innocence is just as strong as when this began. While some people have been quick to reach their own conclusions, and there is so much noise swirling around us, nothing has changed. We have faced challenges together before and have prevailed. There remain many who want to undermine the momentum of our club. We will not give them that opportunity.”
What Punishment Might City Face?
Should any appeal fail, the sanctions available to the original panel are quite comprehensive. Fines, suspension of points, deductions, or even expulsion from the Premier League are all on the table. The panel’s sanctions can encompass any combination of these, in addition to “such other penalty as [they] shall think fit.”
Furthermore, there is the question of retrospective punishment. The charges against City date back to 2009, the year after they were purchased by their Abu Dhabi owners. Everything the club has achieved on the field since then is colored by the rules the panel concluded they broke. This means at least three Premier League titles won up to 2018, as many EFL Cups, an FA Cup, and a Community Shield could potentially be stripped. What of those titles won in a period where the club was deemed to have not cooperated with investigations? After all, it would be difficult to argue that this team would have morphed into Europe’s finest without the investment of their current owners. Juventus were stripped of their Serie A titles in 2005 and 2006 following the Calciopoli match-fixing scandal, with the former left vacant and the latter awarded to Inter. Many who finished second to City will undoubtedly want to see punishment, while others will question whether players should pay the price for rules broken before their arrival.
Former Manchester City midfielder Rodri captured this sentiment on Friday: “What we did, they cannot take out of us. It’s something that is not paid by money. It’s paid with effort, with the damage, with, you know, being shoulder to shoulder every day. I can tell you that everything was deserved, and I’m glad that I could live one of the best eras of English football in here.”
Would This Punishment Be the End of the Crisis?
Perhaps not. At least four Premier League clubs have launched holding claims, reserving the right to claim compensation from City over lost earnings resulting from their breaches. Arsenal, Tottenham, Liverpool, and Manchester United are understood to be that quartet, while other clubs are considering their options. Former Liverpool and Aston Villa executive Christian Purslow noted that the threat is significant for the league as a whole. “It’s a sort of ‘where does this end?’ Because if you look at every single season—the nine seasons which we now know Manchester City breached rules—then all of their 19 Premier League rivals in that season, to differing extents, suffered easy-to-compute loss. Whether it was a place in the Premier League—every place was worth £3m. Teams that came fifth who didn’t make the Champions League maybe lost tens of millions of pounds—and of course teams that were relegated. Let’s say the team that finished 18th would’ve finished 17th if Manchester City weren’t there, and they suffered huge loss. If you add all those claims up, over nine years, and that’s just in the Premier League, you can see that the potential here for this to spiral out of control is huge. I really hope that common sense prevails here and that there is a comprehensive solution between the authorities and Manchester City that looks at all these issues and tries to draw a line in the sand.”
What About the City Squad?
Should serious sanctions be imposed, questions will inevitably follow regarding the future of an expensively assembled squad accustomed to competing for the biggest prizes in sport. Relegation could be a very real risk for City, complicating the futures of some of their brightest stars. According to CBS Sports sources, several members of the squad do not have release clauses in their contracts that would allow them to depart for a set fee if City were to slide out of the Premier League.
This reflects how City’s approach throughout this process has been to assume their innocence will shine through, hence the heavy investment in Enzo Maresca’s squad this summer, where over half a billion dollars was poured into players like Elliot Anderson, Ayyoub Bouaddi, and Enzo Fernandez. At the time of writing on Saturday, September 26, none of the City squad had addressed the news. On his Instagram page, Maresca posted an image of bare feet on grass captioned “Time to breathe. Time to analyse. Time to learn.”
