Former Liverpool striker Stan Collymore believes Manchester City should be expelled to the bottom of the football pyramid
Manchester City players prior to this season's Community Shield (Photo by Ian Cook - CameraSport via Getty Images)
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Former Liverpool striker Stan Collymore has called for Manchester City to be "expelled" to the National League if their appeal against 114 breaches of Premier League financial rules fails.
On Tuesday the Premier League published a decision that revealed City had been found guilty on the majority of their financial charges. The findings showed the club had artificially inflated their commercial revenue by £830m between the years of 2009 and 2018.
Chief executive Richard Masters said City had "systematically broke Premier League Rules for nearly a decade" and the 40-page redacted version of the decision refers to "sham" contracts set up at the Etihad in an effort to circumvent financial rules.
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City confirmed on Friday they have lodged an appeal and both the Independent Football Regulator and the Football Association have indicated they could become involved at some stage in a story that has become one of the biggest scandals in British football history.
Collymore, who moved to Anfield for a British-record fee of £8.5m from Nottingham Forest in 1995, believes City need to be sent to the bottom of the football pyramid if the guilty verdict is upheld.
"I would exclude them from the Premier League for a period," Collymore told Canadasportsbetting.
"I would expel them from the EFL, which means they would have to start from the lowest National League. They would have to get promoted all the way back again.
"I would say that they would have to expel them, because if you just put them in the Championship, they are back in a year or two they will be back and that's not a punishment.
"If the EFL decides to keep them and just put them in the Championship, then I would want the Premier League to expel them from the Premier League in five years.
"That obviously means that if they won the Championship five years in a row, they would still stay in the Championship. That would have a big financial consequence, and players like Haaland, Anderson, Enzo Fernandez, and others would stay there for five years.
"That would be a fitting football punishment. From a financial point of view, I am not sure, but I think it should be about giving back from the moment it started happening and here I am talking about all sponsorship revenue, Premier League prize money, television money.
"I would come up with a figure that would be given to all the other teams that have lost points, that have got into the Championship, lost the titles and so on. Then you would send a massive message, saying; It doesn't matter the name of the club, it matters what that club has done.
"And I repeat. If it was the club I supported or a club I played for, I would be saying the exact same thing. I would be saying the same thing if it was Aston Villa. We have to remember how bad the alternative would be, which would just be a slap at the wrist.
"Then other clubs will just do the same things moving forward. You know, if it is just about one relegation and then getting promoted again, it is worth doing the next ten years.
"If we get our supporters going to Wembley and winning Champions League titles, everything would be worth it, because we know that one day in ten years, if we get caught - because don't forget this was only due to hacked emails - there will be no punishment, so let's just do it, you know.
"The punishment has to fit the crime, regardless of it being done by Manchester City, Aston Villa, Liverpool, Man United, Rochdale, Sheffield United, Bromley, or whatever. So be it. I don't care about the name of the club."
Collymore, who made 81 appearances for the Reds between 1995 and 1997, added: "If any of the clubs I played for were found guilty of what Manchester City has been found guilty of - of course still waiting for the appeal, but for now - I would take all trophies of those clubs, including my own, both for that period and the period after as one leads to the other.
"Pending appeal, they could be proved to have cheated from 2009 to 2018 and built a club that is then super successful afterwards, so you would need to take the trophies they won after 2018 away from them again.
"You can't win in the following years without what happened in the years they allegedly cheated. That's just common sense. I would not give those titles to other clubs.
"I think you would have to give the years an asterisk, saying that no titles were won because of the Manchester City case, and then people would be able to search up the reason behind it in a history book one day."