Manchester City are facing an anxious wait after being found guilty of all but one of the 115 charges they were alleged to have committed between 2009 and 2018. The report from the independent commission has not yet been released, and the Premier League has not commented on the news.
A City spokesperson told MEN Sport: "The Premier League process remains ongoing, with significant elements to be completed, and subject to strict confidentiality. As such Manchester City FC’s position remains consistent with the club’s statement of February 2023."
"The club has diligently respected due process for eight years on the basis the Premier League board and executive would behave as an independent, impartial and fair minded regulator, free from partisan influence." City have always proclaimed their innocence, and it is understood they will appeal the decision once it has been confirmed.
Fallout and appeal prospects
Speaking on talkSPORT on Friday, former City advisor Stefan Borson was pessimistic about the club's chances of both avoiding serious punishment and appealing the decision. "Anything is possible and all hell is now going to break loose, as this is going to go on for weeks, and weeks, and weeks," he said.
"It is going to be very hard for City to say anything or to contain the fallout from this scenario, and that is without being able to see what is in this decision. We will almost certainly soon see the decision of the independent commission laid out in great detail, it will give people huge ammunition to attack those individuals and the club."
"Then we will go into the process, which will be behind closed doors, around the sanction. Man City have denied everything all the way through, they have gone through a process that may have cost more than £100m between the two parties and they have been found to have breached everything. They are in very, very serious trouble."
On the appeal, Borson added: "An appeal on the facts is highly unlikely to succeed. Where we are now with City being found guilty of more or less everything, the decision itself will be scathing in terms of the club's conduct, the conduct of individuals, the behaviour of individuals and the hearing itself in terms of their credibility. There won't be any hiding place when that decision is published."
"To then have to present that to an appeal that does not have the benefit of listening to the whole case all over again, in terms of witness evidence, seeing all the documentation again, it is going to be extremely difficult for City to overturn those factual findings. City have hinted in the last paragraph of their statement, I think their suggestion is that the process and panel itself was in some way partial and biased and that they will in some way challenge the length of time it has taken for the decision to come out."
"All of those sorts of arguments, be it bias or something procedural, all of them are very unlikely to succeed. Overturning factual findings I would say is very, very unlikely. Ultimately, now I think City will have to take their punishment and it will be severe."
Possible sanctions and compensation claims
What that punishment will be, at the moment, is anyone's guess. Fines, points deductions, and immediate expulsion from the Premier League have all been suggested as possibilities previously.
Football finance expert Kieran Maguire weighed up the options on talkTV. "There is no doubt a points deduction would be the most likely outcome in the view of many," he said. "We have seen points deductions before for Nottingham Forest and Everton for breach of the financial limit rules. So that is feasible."
"There is a separate issue of whether clubs who have missed out on titles, could they put in for financial compensation for not getting into Europe and loss of prize money."
That reality is something that former Aston Villa chief executive Christian Purslow believes is a possibility. Being interviewed on BBC Radio 4's Today, Purslow said: "You have the question of sporting sanctions and that would most normally be some form of points deduction. Previous parties found guilty of breaching financial regulation have had meaningful points reductions."
"The seriousness of these guilty findings and the scale of them, 114, they are in a completely different level to anything that has gone before in terms guilty findings. We also have the issue of compensation."
"It's a sort of 'where does this end' because if you look at every single season, the nine seasons in which we now know Man City breached rules, then all of their 19 Premier League rivals in that season, to differing extents, suffered easy-to-compute loss. Every place in the Premier League is worth millions of pounds."
"Teams that came fifth that would have been in the Champions League maybe lost tens of millions of pounds. And of course teams that were relegated, let’s say the team that finished 18th would have been 17th if Manchester City weren’t there and they then suffered huge loss."
"If you add all those claims up over nine years... you can see that the potential for this to spiral out of control is huge."
