There are other, less abstract problems too. One is simply that, thanks to all the cheating, Manchester City is now one of the biggest teams in the most powerful league in the world. Guardiola and Rodri are gone as of the summer; de Bruyne left a year earlier. But Haaland, fresh off a breakout World Cup campaign that elevated his already superstardom to another plane, is still there, as are a host of other stars. A forced relegation, either via points deduction or other means, whether to the second division or out of the top four English leagues altogether—a punishment that has been floated—is more than fair given the extent of City’s crimes. But kicking the team out of the Premier League would not just necessitate a historic sell-off—and likely lead to some stars, [including Haaland](https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/manchester-city-star-erling-haaland-104724732.html), leaving England altogether—it would diminish the Premier League itself.
The Premier League’s emergence as a juggernaut—both in a financial sense and a sporting one—coincided, perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, with the rise of Manchester City. The league has, over the past decade, become by far the sport’s most profitable league and it has done so while most superstars—Haaland being a key exception—have played elsewhere. It is rare for all six of the league’s so-called “Big Six”—City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, and Tottenham—to be firing on all cylinders simultaneously (and a strong case should be made for excising Tottenham from the club altogether) but fielding several big-spending, if not always competitive, teams does matter. Spain has two (Barcelona and Madrid, though Atletico Madrid is hovering somewhere outside that duopoly and the sea of mediocrity below it); France and Germany have one; Italian teams are presently so broke they don’t even rate on this scale. Manchester City is undoubtedly a key pillar of the Premier League’s growing economic might and stature. Does that mean that it’s too big to fail? To put it another way, keeping City in the competition would diminish the prestige of the Premier League, but so would kicking it out.
That’s a thorny problem, but it’s the league’s problem, not ours. It’s one that will ultimately be solved by the lawyers and public relations executives who have been raking in billable hours for seven years. I have little faith that it will be solved in a way that feels just and even less that it will solve the underlying issues that created it. The Premier League may solve its City problem or it may not. But it won’t lay a glove on the real problem. City’s importance to the Premier League both as a brand and as a business is the real scandal here.