Manchester City are expected to be found guilty of the majority of charges in their seismic 115 case with the Premier League. Having been investigated for more than four years, it has taken another three for the evidence to be heard and judged, but a verdict has finally been reached.
That verdict is still not public yet, and City will appeal any guilty verdicts, so we are at least months if not years away from a final conclusion. However, Friday's developments are the most significant in ages and leave Blues with plenty of questions around what happens next.
What are the club actually guilty of?
Nobody knows - or at least is able to admit publicly. Both the Premier League and City have had the verdict of the three-man independent panel given to them, but it has not been published yet. A leak from the report's findings, first reported by The Athletic on Friday, is that City are guilty of the vast majority of charges, but it is unclear yet what that does - and doesn't - refer to.
It sounds very bad for City - one of the worst possible outcomes for them - but it remains to be seen what the exact damage will be. There have been some reports that one of the most serious charges was not proven, yet to the frustration of everyone nothing has been officially confirmed; City have not denied the reporting, however.
What will happen to the club now?
Nothing significant for a long time. The scale of the expected defeat inevitably has invited mountains of speculation about the club being bombed out of the Premier League if not the entire football league, and websites have already started linking star players with moves to rival clubs; Arsenal in for Erling Haaland has been the silliest one so far.
In reality, as the chairman mentioned, there will not be any material change for a while as City focus on Liverpool away and then Paris Saint-Germain at home. The chances of a serious change for the club and its fans is far more likely now, yet it is still no certainty and a way off yet.
When will it all be over?
Months, if not years! Any appeal from City won't start for a couple of months and will then need time to be heard and another decision reached. If all the verdicts stick, it will take an enormous amount of time for all the compensation claims from clubs to be assessed and all payments sorted.
In the meantime, hopefully for everyone's sake, the initial decision can be published imminently so that full details of what the club have been found guilty of can be seen with the evidence alongside it. Once that is known, the most realistic punishments can be narrowed down.
Where is the irrefutable evidence?
For three years, City have referred to their statement made when the charges first dropped in February 2023. That set out that the club had an 'irrefutable body of evidence to support their position' that they were innocent of all charges, and Pep Guardiola, Haaland, Maresca and other senior figures have since said that they have been told confidently by their bosses that this was the case.
The suggestion that City should simply release this evidence while the process is ongoing is said either idiotically or in bad faith - breaching the confidentiality of an ongoing process - would break more Premier League rules. But fans are entitled to wonder where all this evidence is if an independent panel appears to have ruled so strongly against the club.
Why are the club still insisting on their innocence?
Once again, nobody knows! It almost certainly has much to do with the irrefutable evidence that they claim to have, but nobody knows what that is because the whole process has been confidential from the start.
It felt fairly notable that Khaldoon Al Mubarak published an open letter to supporters on Saturday though claiming that 'nothing has changed'. The club are defiant that there is a long way to go in this process and that even the guilty verdicts that are expected to come against them should not be seen as final; a club statement said 'significant elements' of the process were still ongoing.
City are proud to say that they fight to the end on the pitch, and this is another battle that the Blues are refusing to give up however difficult it looks for them to claim a win.
What would it mean about what they have seen the club achieve?
This is, on the one hand, a complicated question. City's achievements over the last 15 years will now be tainted and asterisked by many non-City supporters, because the alleged cheating gave the club an unfair advantage - and some Blues will agree.
Other though will take the view that Rodri articulated from a player's point of view on Friday evening, which is that their memories are genuine achievements that cannot be taken away from them regardless of what has now come to light. Even if City's cheating is confirmed, it is very easy to argue that it is too simplistic to say that City won what they won simply because they had an unfair advantage underpinning their squad.
Rodri has his view, others will have theirs, but the most important thing for supporters is that nobody can tell them what they should believe. Supporting a football club is deeply personal, and every opinion is valid.
Why are people having a go at them?
Unless there is evidence to the contrary, City fans haven't done anything wrong. Just because they may end up paying a big price for something done by people who arrived at the club long after most of the supporters were born, that doesn't make them culpable.
Andy from Ancoats wasn't responsible for any of the alleged illegalities and it wasn't the responsibility of Carol from Clayton to uncover any mass cheating operation. It has taken a professional hacker and a five-year investigation from the Premier League that has cost at least tens of millions of pounds to get to this point, so the idea that City fans could have done anything different is stupid.
They could have been more skeptical of their owners generally - many are if you bother to speak to them - but even taking aside the fact that being a football fan is irrational and emotional, why should they have been asked to assume guilt about their own club without any evidence to back it up? Indeed, can you blame some for sticking to that stance given there is still no evidence out in the open?
Talk to most Blues and you will find they fully accept that the club must be punished if they have cheated, even if they don't agree with the way those rules were brought in as City and Chelsea began to threaten the established elite. However, the usual suspects online will take some of the more extreme reactions and tar the whole fanbase with that brush because it conforms to their own view and suits their interests. Don't give them the time of day.
