So it’s the morning after the night before, and at the exact time of writing there has still been no official comment from the Premier League on the reports that Manchester City have been found guilty of practically all of the charges issued against them related to their financial shenanigans.
It’s entirely plausible that there won’t be one for a while, but nature abhors a vacuum, and with it coming on the eve of a weekend without club football, the media has been packed to overbrimming with hot takes. There has been huge discussion of what may or may not come next, what any punishment might look like, and what other legal action may follow.
As much as can be done for the time being is to try and catch a glimpse of the direction of travel that the whole story is taking. There certainly seems to be little-to-no interest in letting them off with a slap on the wrists. This story only took hours to spread around the world like wildfire, and it does ask questions about the Premier League’s position as the one global league that the game has.
The problem with trying to figure out what might happen next is that this is completely without precedent. True enough, Italian club football has had to deal with scandals of this nature before, most notably with the Totonero scandal of 1980, which led to Milan and Lazio being demoted to Serie B and twenty players receiving bans, and the Calciopoli scandal of 2006, which led to severe punishments for Milan, Juventus, Lazio and Fiorentina.
But that was Italy rather than England, and the interconnected nature of European club football is very different in 2026, compared to what it was like in 2006. It’s already been reported that Premier League clubs didn’t take long to take legal advice over what they might do next. A number of clubs missed out on a lot of money and opportunity because Manchester City were doing their best to hoover up as much silverware as they could.
The case involving Burnley and Everton earlier this year, which resulted in a big financial payout to Burnley, might be considered a precursor to the sort of case that will be brought against Manchester City. That case alone has cost Everton a reported £35 million, and another case brought against them by Leeds United has also been quietly settled. We don’t know the amount that this cost them, though it’s believed to have been substantially smaller than Burnley’s award.
And the scale of such action against Manchester City could be enormous. Every club that finished below them could have a case for compensation. Some will have missed out on sponsorship bonuses for failing to achieve European competitions or winning league titles. Other clubs have lost players or missed out on the chance to sign players because this juggernaut was rolling across the transfer market. The last two transfer windows alone saw City spend around £540 million on new players. And all of this largesse
City’s response to it all was predictably bullish. They still claim no culpability and continue to speak in the tone of the aggrieved party in this case. But the stain is already upon them, and it’s going to prove difficult to remove. We already know that they can’t refer this to the Count of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), as happened with their case with UEFA in 2020, and which resulted in them being acquitted of many of the charges brought against them which had resulted in a two-year ban from Europe which was later overturned.
The direction of travel regarding speculation over what the punishment might be is leaning towards an unprecedented level of it. There doesn’t seem to be much of an appetite for letting them off with a slap on the wrists, this time. After all, what use is a financial penalty alone when the owners of the club are richer than Croesus? What use is a points deduction - or even a demotion - if they can bounce back from it immediately? What level of punishment is appropriate in such unprecedented circumstances?
Whatever they may suffer as a result of punishments may yet come to look like a drop in the ocean, compared to the potential legal ramifications of all this. Tony Pulis wants the 2011 FA Cup. Rio Ferdinand wants two new medals. It was reported more or less straight away that clubs had been onto their legal advisors, even though it’s been widely reported that the response from within clubs was one of ‘shock’. It’s almost as though it’s a reflex reaction.
The Burnley vs Everton case was talked of as a “landmark” case at the time, and it took approximately three nanoseconds for the rest of the game to start determining what they could get from it all. And it doesn’t take long for the numbers to start becoming unfathomably large. Clubs who missed out on a league title or - and this is the real biggie - a place in the Champions League. Players who missed out on bonuses to which they would have been entitled had they won a league or cup that City won, or a Champions League place that they occupied.
The Premier League will have to issue some sort of statement soon. The big match of the first weekend back after the international break is between Liverpool and Manchester City at Anfield on Sunday 11th October. It’s surely impossible that they’re going to remain silent for the next 13 days, allowing a stew of increasingly unhinged comments to be made about a serious that is brand-damaging enough for them as things already are.
Because nature abhors a vacuum, and it abhors a vacuum more in this sort of situation than in any other that springs readily to mind. Ongoing radio silence from the League itself will only result with the air being filled by blowhards. At present, there are reasons to congratulate the Premier League, albeit in a highly qualified way. They could have folded over this, or attempted to sweep it under the carpet as soon as the scale of the problem became clear. But somebody within the organisation evidently believes that probity is important, and that this was a nettle that needed to be grasped in order to address it.
But we live in an angry, dysregulated and impatient society, and that patience with the League itself will not last for long. If this is the decision reached by the independent panel, then that needs to be clarified as soon as possible, and if there are to be sanctions, then they need to be decided upon and put in place as soon as possible too. The Premier League has long appeared bulletproof from the outside, but this is damaging the reputation of the “brand” and they will be under even greater scrutiny now over what comes next.