Former Manchester City striker Paul Dickov has urged supporters to keep believing in the club's owners after an independent panel found the club guilty of all the serious charges brought by the Premier League. Speaking during a visit to local supporters club branches this week, Dickov acknowledged the difficulty of commenting while the process remains confidential.
Guilty verdicts and appeal
The independent panel found Manchester City guilty of everything serious the Premier League accused them of, from disguising more than £900m of equity as sponsorship to refusing to co-operate with the investigation. The club are appealing, with chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak and Ferran Soriano both issuing messages to convey their insistence that City will ultimately be found innocent based on the "irrefutable evidence" to support their claim.
A three-man panel of experts has already rejected that, yet City insist the decision will be overturned just as it was six years ago when the Court of Arbitration reversed UEFA's call to ban them from the Champions League. A 40-page decision from the panel was damning of the club, but also heavily redacted and its explanations were unpublished.
Dickov's message to fans
Dickov, who scored the injury-time equaliser that helped City complete an improbable comeback against Gillingham in 1999 to climb out of League One, said he has dusted off his boots as a joke but admitted there is little humour for Blues at the minute. He told the Manchester Evening News: "There's a cloud [over the club]. I've had a lot of people want me to speak to them, and I don't really know what to say. Until the verdicts are made and sanctions are made, nobody really knows what's going on. There's a lot of big voices out there at the minute who are making big statements without actually knowing what the outcome is going to be."
"Personally, I've not got a clue. I don't think anybody does you know and until that point I don't think there's an awful lot you can say. One thing we've always done, especially recently, is believe in the owners and believe in the fantastic things they've done for the club. We can only go along with that until the verdict is made and sanctions are made or whatever the outcome is going to be."
Supporters club visit continues
City insist it is business as usual, and a planned visit to four local supporters clubs with Dickov in attendance to donate a shirt signed by the squad went ahead this week. It was felt in summer with so much change at the Etihad that the local supporter clubs deserved a token of the club's appreciation for their loyalty, and no guilty verdicts or damning reports were going to stop that.
Dickov added: "You've got to believe Ferran and what the chairman has come out with in his statement. You look at social media, you look at the news, and sometimes you look at it and you don't know what to believe, but we can only take confidence in what the owners have done for the club since they've come in. Some of the stuff they've done is unbelievable. You know, the regeneration around the stadium, the time for the community. It's getting overlooked at the minute, and I get it and I understand it. But as I said, until we actually know what's going on it's just really difficult to comment on."
