**When Manchester City were found guilty of breaking Premier League financial rules this week, most of football was thinking about titles, trophies and points deductions.**
Plenty of us West Ham fans were thinking about one thing: Divine Mukasa.
An independent commission found City guilty of 114 of the 115 charges, with only one charge, about co-operating with the investigation, not upheld.
They’re accused of “sham” contracts, misstated accounts and a funding scheme that inflated revenues and cut costs by more than £900m.
City deny everything. They lodged what they call a “comprehensive” appeal at 7pm on Thursday, and no punishment has been decided yet.
But the possible punishments are huge. The Premier League’s rulebook runs all the way from a reprimand to expulsion, with fines, transfer bans and points deductions in between.
The league can’t technically relegate them, but it could take away enough points to send them down anyway. And if City were thrown out altogether, nobody can say for sure where they’d end up. There’s been talk of the Championship, or even lower.
That would be extraordinary. And it’s exactly why I think our chances of signing Mukasa permanently might have just gone up.
Mukasa is with us on a straight season-long loan. There’s no option to buy, and City tied him down to a contract until 2030 this summer. Hammers News has reported a “gentleman’s agreement” that we can make an offer if he does well and we go up. That’s encouraging, but it isn’t a contract clause.
In normal times, City hold all the cards. They can name their price, send him out on loan again or keep him as a squad player.
But these aren’t normal times.
If City are hit with a heavy points deduction, a transfer ban or something worse, their whole model gets turned upside down. Big earners start looking for the exit. Revenue takes a hit. Selling homegrown talent for pure profit suddenly matters a lot more to the accountants. And a teenager on a long contract, who has already been loaned out twice, starts to look like an asset to cash in rather than a cornerstone to keep.
Mukasa left the Academy of Football for City in 2023 to test himself at the very top. If City end up in the Championship, or even League One, the very top isn’t at the Etihad anymore.
Why would a lad who has been running games for us want to drop down the leagues with a club in chaos, when the club he grew up at, in the borough he grew up in, is pushing to get back to the Premier League?
Now, there is of course the other side of the coin.
We wrote earlier this week that City’s charges might not help us at all, and that argument still stands.
If City are punished but stay up, or get stuck in the Championship for a season, they might well want to keep their best young players to rebuild around.
Mukasa is exactly that kind of player. And this appeal could take months. The rules say an appeal hearing should happen within 12 weeks, and we still don’t know when a punishment will come.
So this isn’t a done deal. Far from it.
But for the first time since he walked back through the door at Rush Green, City’s grip on Mukasa looks weaker than it did.
The bit we can control hasn’t changed. Get promoted. Keep Mukasa playing, enjoying his football and scoring goals like his double against Wolves. M
Then, whatever happens in Manchester, we’re in the strongest possible position when the time comes to talk.
City’s mess is not our problem. But it might turn out to be our opportunity.