Former Liverpool player Joe Cole has questioned how severely Manchester City should be punished for breaching the Premier League's financial rules
Joe Cole, TNT Sports Presenter, is seen during an Emirates FA Cup match
Former Liverpool player Joe Cole has given his thoughts on how Manchester City should be punished(Image: Photo by Kevin Hodgson/MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Former Liverpool player Joe Cole has appeared to raise eyebrows with his views on Manchester City 's guilty verdict regarding breaches of the Premier League 's financial rules and how the club should be punished.
It's been a couple of weeks since English football was rocked by the news that an independent commission ruled against the Manchester club, concluding it used what it described as "sham" commercial agreements between the 2009/10 and 2017/18 seasons in order to artificially inflate revenues and reduce costs. It was also determined that City made efforts to obstruct and frustrate the Premier League's four-year investigation.
The verdict is, of course, subject to an appeal, which City formally submitted a little over a week ago. The outcome of that remains to be seen, but the topic is unsurprisingly being discussed at length now that league football has resumed after the international break.
Ahead of the early kickoff between current champion Arsenal and Leeds United on Saturday, pundits Cole and Martin Keown shared their views on developments. Cole, in particular, who represented Liverpool between 2010 and 2013, seemed to take a sympathetic view toward City and highlighted a need for the rules to change.
"You have to start asking what the regulations are there for," he told TNT Sports. "The government wanted to keep the clubs playing on a level playing field, and Man City should be punished if they're guilty, but it's still up in the air.
"If you want to buy a football club in this country, like Roman [Abramovich] did with Chelsea. Now, for other clubs, it's not fair - for the likes of Newcastle, it's not fair.
"There are levels of cheating. There's drug doping and cheating with referees. But this also distorts it the other way. Man City need to be punished, but the only pure thing about football is what happens on the pitch.
Vincent Kompany of Manchester City lifts the Barclays Premier League trophy (Photo by James Baylis/AMA/AMA/Corbis via Getty Images)
Liverpool finished second to Manchester City in the 2013/14 Premier League(Image: Getty Images)
"For me, what they achieved is not tainted. It's not right to class it in the same way as match fixing. That is the pits. We need to change the rules and regulations for other teams to grow. I don't think they should be punished retrospectively."
City won three Premier League titles between 2010 and 2018, although it went on to add a further five in 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024. It also added a Champions League trophy to its growing list of honors in 2023 when it defeated Inter Milan in Istanbul.
It is not yet clear what sanctions City will face in the event its appeal proves unsuccessful. A range of options has been discussed in the media and beyond, including the stripping of titles, fines, points deductions or, in an extreme case, expulsion from the Premier League altogether.
While the process is ongoing, football does not stop. Liverpool takes on City at Anfield on Sunday afternoon in a bid to inflict a first defeat on Enzo Maresca's side this season.