What Punishment Will Manchester City Get?

In this Q&A episode, Gary, Alan and special guest Miguel Delaney - Chief Football Writer for The Independent answer your questions on the biggest story in Premier League history. Are the public right to condemn City before the appeal has even played out or should we be more cautious, given what happened with the old UEFA case against City? What punishment will City actually get? A fine? A points deduction spread across multiple seasons? Expulsion? And if they do get expelled, what happens to the relegation places? Do two go down, or is it still three? Could City’s owners face retrospective fit and proper person test and could they be forced to sell? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:09Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to The Rest is Football with Alan Shearer and me, Gary Lineker. On today's episode, we'll be answering your questions all about Manchester City and the latest verdict on the 115 charges. And to do that, we're joined by journalist and expert on this, Matt and Miguel Delaney. Miguel, thank you very much for joining us. I imagine you've been quite busy over the last week or so.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Just saying to Alan before he came on, I think since this broke on, what was it? Well, we actually had murmurings on Friday morning, maybe Thursday evening last week. And since then, it's just been non-stop. And even this week, it feels like every few hours, when you feel like it's maybe calming down, there's a new kind of escalation to the story. But obviously, the kind of main development of the actual decision on Tuesday to since then, elements like this latest story with Etihad, the Prime Minister offering comment on it.

• 2:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've got actually the Prime Minister's quotes here. Andy Burnham said, "I would be really concerned to lose them." Manchester City's owners, he's talking about. They've been such a huge partner in the building of modern Manchester. Obviously, the building of Manchester City into the global force that it is. "I can't intervene more in the process. It would be wrong for me to do that. It would be wrong, I think, to jump to a conclusion before having really studied all the detail." But obviously, it's ongoing because it's still contested by Manchester City. Then I think it's right that I don't say much more. I do actually thank the City Football Group and the wider ownership for the money that they didn't just put into the Etihad and the campus around it, but also into the city.

• 2:46Speaker 00

  It leads me perhaps to a first question, Miguel, and that is from Connor, who asks, "Are the public right to condemn Manchester City prior to the appeal process? Or should we still be cautious after they were found not guilty on appeal during the UEFA hearing? Although wasn't that because it was time barred that they were not...?"

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was down to a technicality and a different context. And look, this is actually a very direct legal question for journalists and how we can speak about it, right up to, I would say, fundamentals of this story, like whether you can use the word cheat. And the legal advice is we can because the core of the process is completed. We have an outcome. There is liability. Now, we're still awaiting sanctioning, as you say, appeal. But appeal is a choice. A lot of clubs, they don't take up the option to appeal because often it can make things worse, it can make sanctions worse. So as of right now, we can talk freely about what the outcome is, what the verdict is. And I suppose freely use comment.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  Yes, I think as journalists, certainly, we would always say now pending appeal, you would still say City insist upon their innocence, but that isn't the same requirement, say, as it was before Tuesday this week. Because, I mean, as of now, the charges have been proven, or almost all of the charges have been proven.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  You said about the how busy you've been in the last week or so, whatever it may be. I mean, the noise is not going to go away. If anything, when Premier League football returns, because of the fixture that we're all going to be looking at, Liverpool, Manchester City, leading up to every single game that they play, the noise will get louder, no?

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, completely. And look, even standing back from that. So basically, since December 2024, I think a lot of us have been on high alert for every international break, just because the expectation was that the Premier League, they wouldn't want to disrupt the kind of the match week by having this massive outcome in a Premier League. And there are issues maybe in kind of how it affects teams, even if City say at the moment that is potentially unavoidable. But obviously, they keep going on and then every time it comes around and there's a bit of a murmur, you're initially a bit dismissive because you heard it so many times before. This time, it was immediately very different from the chatter back. But also, and like just relevant to the point about the games, this is obviously the

• 5:12Speaker 01

  longest international break we've had outside of a tournament. So it's basically a long, long time for the waves of this story to keep coming around to rising. And yeah, usually in these sort of situations, when you've got kind of big stories in the news cycle, the games disrupt them. So like a classic, actually, that is almost a sister story to this summer or autumn, which was the Infantino crisis. And it's like, I mean, it's amazing, some of the stuff that's been discussed about that in the last few days, because as if kind of people in UEFA say, or whatever, using the distraction of Manchester City to talk about everything, talk about governance matters in different ways. But Infantino, say, was banking on the league's coming back to just, you know, distract from the story. He was right.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  In this case, suddenly we have all manner of new questions. We've got Enzo Maresca's first press conference. We've got all the details are going to happen when the Man City team get back together for the first time. I mean, just from speaking to people around the England camp this week, say, some of the players are obviously interested in it. This is their teammates. I've heard from a few sources that players have maybe naturally a bit of concern from the City players. Up until Tuesday, I don't think City actually spoken to players. And naturally, with players, say, they'd want them all back together. Everyone will have seen that video of Ruben Dias and Haaland talking after the game. We don't actually know what was said to them. And then, of course, as you say, Alan, the opposition and the venue.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  I mean, Liverpool would probably see themselves as one of the teams to suffer the most from, if not the 2009-2018 period of investigation, the consequence of that, which is what City were able to become and how they would feel they had this truly historically special team in Klopp's Liverpool that probably didn't win what it could have won because of who they were up against. And I'd say Anfield are going to let City know. I mean, like, you can already see how it's going to go, can't you? You can see what, a banner with Sham on it or something a bit more creative than that.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  Therefore, then it's like, it's imperative for the Premier League and for everyone that this is sorted ASAP.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  It's not going to go away until the sanctions are put upon them. I guess then the appeal, but it's so damaging for the game, isn't it?

• 7:25Speaker 01

  So I've actually done a piece in this for The Independent this morning, and I was talking to a few people this week about this, where like someone said to me, "I don't think people realise how much of a farce some games could be." Because like the line that was used to me was, whatever about previous seasons, every single game now is going to have an asterisk on it. There could be a massive points deduction by the end of the season. There might not be. The appeal process, if say, especially if City go to the High Court, might go on into next season, which would be very damaging.

• 7:53Speaker 00

  A question from Whitey. "I guess the obvious question is, how can Manchester City be so confident as to say they're innocent and have the evidence to prove it? Is this just chest puffing or is there a sliver of a chance that the Premier League have dropped a clanger?" Well, it's an independent ruling for a start, wasn't it? Not necessarily the Premier League.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, and look, obviously with every step of this, I must say, I'm well acquainted with a fair few lawyers now because you want to be on some way on top of the detail. Obviously, we're journalists, not lawyers.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  But they would say that the consensus seems to be that this is going to be very, very difficult for City to overturn. And one of the reasons for that is, if you read the decision so far, we still await the main document, which could run to 1,000 pages. But they would point to how most of this case is based on the evidence. It's not about matters of law where you could potentially pursue angles of appeal. And also appeals, at least certainly before the High Court, would have to come down to procedure. And we have like this big part of the case, which has almost become a cliche, but City are still repeating it. This, the initial description was of a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence. Well, I mean, the process we've had so far is when that evidence would have had to be shown.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  It's going to be very difficult to introduce new evidence to this case, except in exceptional circumstances. And the Premier League seems to have found it quite refutable. So there's always the chance. You have to allow for the possibility and speak in those ways. But even like the constant reference to cast a court of arbitration for sport, that came down to a few different elements, like the main one was the technicalities of time barring, where with one of the sponsorships, UEFA had the most evidence and meant they could draw inference from patterns of behaviour for other examples, according to Swiss law. It came down to a vote on whether what mattered was that was the date of payment or the date

• 9:51Speaker 01

  of submission, because it had to fall within the May 2014 to May 2019 time period. And two of the judges against the other one decided that date of submission was more important to the date of payment. So that an entire tranche of evidence was just stricken off, couldn't be entered, hence it couldn't be proven. The Premier League haven't had that. So it is a different context to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. And also, of course, they can't appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

• 10:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it's almost certain, I would imagine, there's going to be an appeal. Can the Premier League still give them the punishment during that appeal? Do they have to wait to the end of it? And will the appeal take as long as the actual case itself took, which was obviously a substantial amount of time?

• 10:41Speaker 01

  With this, because the scale is so big, it's verdict first liability, as they put it. And because there is a chance that could be appealed, it means there's no point imposing sanctions right now, because suddenly you're putting them on potentially within six weeks, you have to overturn them again. So purely on the Premier League process, I think the expectation is this could, so City have until Friday this week, Friday 2nd of October, to appeal, that we know they will appeal. I think the timescale has been put forward, even if it does potentially take time to get the panel together, given that has been one of the issues and why this case has been so long running. I think the most optimistic expectation is it would be in November, maybe more likely

• 11:26Speaker 01

  into January, and that is when sanctions would be imposed. And then it comes down to, suppose, whether City want to take it to the High Court, which does, I mean, there's still the small possibility there, from speaking to legal sources, that that could end up the absolute farce of this going to a retrial. But I think that's, that's a discussion for into the future.

• 11:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, a question from Chris. Is there a chance that the club will face criminal charges? Will HMRC and SFO be keeping an eye on the outcome? Misstated accounts, fraudulent trading, tax avoidance, et cetera?

• 12:00Speaker 01

  So I think there is an expectation, if the outcome after appeal ends with City still guilty of nearly all the charges, and especially the key charges, it would go further. And there's two relevant sections, a lot of that. Section 2 of the Fraud Act 2006, I'm going to have to read these, because I suppose the detail is important, that states that dishonestly making a false representation, such as false financial accounts with the intention of making a gain or avoiding a loss, can lead to individuals being imprisoned for 10 years and facing an unlimited fine. The quote, "A representation is false if it is untrue or misleading, and the person making it known that it is or might be untrue and misleading," says the Act. Then Section 5 of the Companies Act 2006 states that "It is an offence to deliberately

• 12:41Speaker 01

  make or be reckless in material false statements to the company's auditors, with a maximum sentence for individuals of two years in jail." Section 1112 of the same Act states, "It is an offence to submit a false statement such as accounts to the company's house. No intent is required for this offence, and the maximum sentence is an unlimited fine." So, I mean, it's one of many reasons the dimensions of this case go so far.

• 13:05Speaker 02

  So I say about the ramifications are just like staggering of where this could actually lead to and go to.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, and at least, I mean, we're talking about potentially having to revise 15 years of Premier League history, and there is, this is another side to it, there is this kind of sense that regardless of what happens now, and even if City get off on a second technicality, as with the UEFA case, the court of public opinion, for want of another phrase, is pretty much decided because of the scale of info. I mean, that is one difference with UEFA as well. With UEFA case, they never released the report of the adjudicary chamber. So basically, the stage we had on Tuesday with the Premier League, that was essentially suspended until the Caspian, which meant we never got a lot of the details. And they came out subsequently in that YouTube documentary, Football's Biggest Scandal, I

• 13:57Speaker 01

  think it was called, question mark, where they got access to that report and quoted from it, and it was quite damning. In fact, one of the lines in that report was, and I suppose this is so relevant to what we're talking about, "A sophisticated, thoughtful and fundamental attempt to circumvent or violate the rules," which points to, you know, industrialised cheating, as the description has risen over the past few days. Whereas in this case, we do have the decision, we're expecting another document. And because all that information is out there, that embeds in people's minds, and suddenly the last, everything going back to 2012 and that title and Aguero, the perspective of it has just changed.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  It really has. Cathal McCarthy, "There are people that were involved in Manchester City over the last 10 years that currently have positions of power at other football clubs. Could they lose their jobs because of being involved with City when all these charges occurred?"

• 14:49Speaker 01

  That is something that's difficult to answer right now, and it does come down to people, at the moment, I would say, people named in the emails. So just as a most prominent example, Manchester United were proactive in responding to, you know, a lot swirling around on social media about their chief executive, Omar Barada, and pointing to how he isn't under investigation or has not been questioned.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  Onto Renato, "Can UEFA also intervene in any financial fines, punishments towards Manchester City for all the prize money awarded to City during the nine-season period of their financial breaches? Prize money for qualifying group stages, knockout rounds, match bonuses, et cetera?"

• 15:32Speaker 01

  As far as I understand it, it's more relevant to the actual clubs that were aggrieved. And this has been such another big strand of this story. I did a news story on this on the Friday night it broke, where this is essentially the core of that detail, that four clubs, Arsenal, Manchester United, Liverpool and Spurs, basically exercised an option to send in a legal letter before the statute of limitations expired, to reserve the right to sue if we had this outcome. So that, I mean, that's what a lot of that comes down to.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  So what they can potentially do with a legal claim is, it's not just loss of earnings, say, like if, you know, Manchester United didn't qualify for the Champions League in 2016, they finished fifth. So it's not about that extra 25 million or whatever it will be. It's also about loss of chance. So essentially, like, and even that concept comes down to what happened with City after 2018, it's what you could have done with that opportunity. I actually think the most prominent example of this, say, is Tottenham Hotspur with the Chelsea case. And I do think Chelsea were fortunate not to have titles stripped. But if, say, so Pochettino, 86 points in the last season at White Hart Lane in 2016, '17, a genuinely brilliant season, a brilliant team, and they didn't win the title because of a Chelsea victory that had been under question in a different investigation from

• 16:48Speaker 01

  which they were found guilty. Had Pochettino won the title that year? I mean, Spurs' modern future is just completely different. He probably doesn't get sacked 20, in two years later, because he is a Premier League champion. Spurs, suddenly, all the kind of identity of the club, like, still, you guys as players will know, I'm sure, the kind of, what a club feels like, it changes if suddenly they're champions for the first time in nearly 60 years. And I think that, like, that comes down to the core of that question, loss of chance. But as regards UEFA, I mean, so part of this, City have breached UEFA rules, but at this point, it would be outside the statute of limitations. Another, another big thing with this story is, although only four clubs have definitely

• 17:32Speaker 01

  reserved the right, apparently there is a grey area that because of the way the information came out, other clubs and other aggrieved parties, and we are potentially talking even players here, given their contracts were different, they would have got better bonuses, better pay had they qualified for the Champions League, that they could at least investigate the possibility, and you couldn't completely write it off.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  Okay, we're going to take a break in a second. Just one very, very important question here from Kryptonah. Will Lineker finally remove his mouth from Pep's balls and look into how he cheated and doped his way to trophies? So I've now officially removed my mouth from Pep Guardiola's balls, if that keeps you happy. Let's take a break. This episode is brought to you by Guinness. Now that the Premier League is back, we've had a few weeks to settle into those familiar matchday rituals. So what, do you have a plan at home, Alan?

• 18:27Speaker 02

  I do, yeah. If it's a three o'clock kick-off, then I'll go with my pals at half twelve, one o'clock to the pub in town, have a couple of pints of Guinness, and then walk up to St James' Park.

• 18:38Speaker 00

  Micah, when you're not working?

• 18:39Speaker 03

  No, just in, well, at home, cinema room, you know, got the game on, nice little Guinness.

• 18:46Speaker 00

  My favourite days are Sundays. Cook a roast before, boys come round, we sit down, watch the footballs, nothing better. And a little Guinness helps as well. Head to the Guinness GB Instagram page to see how you can get your own personalised glassware at select Tesco stores and enjoy your matchday pint in style like us. Make your matchday lovely with Guinness, official beer and non-alcoholic beer of the Premier League. 18 plus for the facts, visit drinkaware.co.uk. Please drink responsibly.

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• 21:07Speaker 00

  Welcome back to The Rest is Football with me, Gary Lineker, Alan Shearer and today our special guest Miguel Delaney. Let me go straight on to another question. You've sent so many questions and thank you for that. We'll try and get through as many as we possibly can. Simon D. "Is it wrong that a club owner can't invest in his own business to get it to a stage that it becomes self-sustainable like Manchester City have, while Manchester United owners can build up debt in the club of over a billion pounds? Which one is more sustainable? The rules are nonsense." But I would say, Simon, they are rules.

• 21:45Speaker 02

  Well, just before Miguel comes in, I mean, I can relate to that because what we achieved at Blackburn would never ever be allowed to happen today because we had an owner who was a local guy who became self-made millionaire and wanted to invest in his town and his club that he supported and he put his own money into that club and his money helped us win the Premier League. So that would never ever be allowed to happen nowadays. But we had four years of unbelievable success and had such a great time and he was a genuine, down-to-earth, self-made millionaire who wanted to buy his club.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  And it's exactly that I say why I have, I must say, complicated views on this, but it's something I have written about a lot. So just on the, he mentioned Manchester United. I would still say that that is, it's actually in its own way, one of the, in purely football terms and business terms, I suppose, one of the great football tragedies, that a great institution like Manchester United was allowed to be bought in that way with a leveraged buyout. So, and that type of leveraged buyout, that extent of it, is actually now against Premier League rules. I think it's telling that you cannot do that anymore. And I think the situation has ultimately become normalised, where when you look at United's accounts from two weeks ago, which seems such a small story now, the fact that they have to pay off so much money just to keep the debt at the same level. And there is an argument, and this

• 23:08Speaker 01

  comes to the core of what we're talking about, when these rules were devised, obviously a lot of the big clubs wanted to keep debt like this out of the rules. I would say at this point, there's an argument, it should be, I mean, it's not going to happen, but debt should be included to disincentivise this type of, and ensure something like this starts to be addressed. And it's, it is a disgrace that it's ongoing with United. On the other side of the question, though, about business owners being able to put money in. So yes, that would seem fair when you look at it purely from a business perspective, but sport and football obviously isn't a, isn't primarily a business. It's a sport

• 23:51Speaker 01

  with business elements bolted on, really, something that's evolved over, over a century or more. But also, the business of sport is dependent, like the product you put out, for want of a better phrase, is dependent on being able to have competitive games. And it's like, this is something that's actually, it really goes to the core of English football identity. So back in the 1890s, they realised that if we just have clubs here, with a few of them from the big cities, the big cities would just dominate because they've got massive attendances. So they initially, they immediately had a rule where 25% of gate receipts had to be shared. And that lasted until the 1980s, or at least it lasted in some form since

• 24:30Speaker 01

  the 1980s. And the problem, if you outsource competitiveness to who your owner is, it destabilises that. Like, to be honest, that is one of the reasons we have rules in the first place. It's because up until 2006, 2005, some of the more responsible people in UEFA were seeing that clubs were overextending. Leeds United are one of the biggest examples, Valencia. And it was also because of the inherent competitiveness of the sport and the wage rates meant clubs couldn't stop themselves. And the initial name of these rules, financial fair play, comes from, it doesn't actually relate to competitive balance, which should be more of a concern. It comes down, fair play relates to, they would have situations where a club would try to buy a player, they know they could pay the first instalment of the fee,

• 25:14Speaker 01

  but had no idea if they could pay the second. People overlook this, and obviously a lot of this always gets looked through the prism of the top end of football and who wins the trophies. But a huge concern for you in UEFA in that period was, if wages are inflated at the top, which they were, especially with the Abramovich takeover, that has a drag all the way down. Suddenly you're in League One or League Two or in a league around Europe. And it doesn't just cost you more wages to buy players, it costs you more to keep them. And obviously the pressure is to do that. And like, one of the considerations in the rules was, well, we've got situations of, regardless of the best paid players on the planet, there are people, the example that was actually cited to me, given I'm Irish and I was speaking to people who worked on this, was clubs like Shelbourne, who their players on everyday wages couldn't pay for Christmas presents because they hadn't got

• 25:58Speaker 01

  paid. And it seemed just so wrong in a sport awash with money. Like Jack Walker, like that's an example, I suppose, of, it's a scale that is manageable for football. And it did lead to, like, as you say, like, the virtue of a club like Blackburn being able to win the title. But eight years after that, you've got Abramovich, who was so well, I mean, like, I'm talking about instalments there. One of the things that really struck when Abramovich came in was, he could go to a club, like, they, like, I think the example cited to me was Joe Cole at West Ham. Whenever you got a previous deal, like the instalments and all that, with Abramovich, the money would be in their account immediately. And it was this inflationary event for football that people couldn't come up with. And suddenly,

• 26:40Speaker 01

  if you've got that level, that scale of financial power, it becomes very difficult for anyone else to keep up. And I would say, the danger of that is, it makes football less competitive rather than more. I mean, like, consider what would happen if City, given, we are talking about ultimately an oil economy with trillions, really unlimited money, if there were no restraints. So my answer to that would always be, I think the rules are important because they are, they are fundamentally cost control rules and they're necessarily, what football is. I think the issue is the other side. And I know people go on about kind of the red cartel and how the big clubs have kind of forced the rules. That's not quite true to financial rules. Where that criticism is more relevant is that basically,

• 27:22Speaker 01

  that example I cited earlier about shares of gate receipts, every single decision for the last 40 years has been basically, in terms of where money goes, has been the big clubs applying pressure, especially Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich even, that they get more and more of the share. And the Super League was the ultimate example of that. And to be fair to the Premier League, for all the criticism they get, over the last few years, like this was a peak in 2016, you had the old big six, including City within that, pushing for more and, well, we should, we're the ones that bring in the value, we should get more of the TV revenue. Whereas unlike Spain through the Messi Ronaldo era, the Premier League did keep it quite well anchored and did keep it quite balanced. But that would be my, my solution to this, basically, football needs to drastically think about

• 28:06Speaker 01

  where its ample money goes.

• 28:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. Thomas Smalling. "City's cheating didn't just break the rules, it messed up the whole competitive balance for a decade. Liverpool missed out on titles by a point. United lost on Champions League money. How do you even compensate clubs whose players and fans never got those moments back?"

• 28:26Speaker 01

  This is actually a bit of a psychologically complex one, I find. Because I was thinking about it with Rodri's comments on Friday. Because as far as Rodri is concerned, he just went out and he played honestly. And there was, there's still a purity to it. But the problem is, you can't separate that from the context that he walked into. So he had a better chance to win trophies because of who he could play alongside. And look, had City not, maybe not been able to build themselves up to that point, then maybe they couldn't have signed Rodri in the first place. This is why I think the Premier League, aside from getting into a Tour de France or Serie A situation where you don't want these gaps in your record, it's why there's a reluctance to strip titles. And like, the word up to now has been, they won't, there won't be retrospective punishment, basically stripping

• 29:09Speaker 01

  titles. Because you also get into all sorts of variables. I mean, so say like,

• 29:14Speaker 00

  Kind of worms.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. But even, but even you guys, like, how would, how would you feel if you were, if you had missed out?

• 29:21Speaker 02

  If you're in an opposing club, i.e. Liverpool or Man United or whoever, then you wouldn't, in years later, if someone comes to you in the next month and say, there you go, lads, you actually did win it, it's like, doesn't mean anything. You wouldn't want it, would you?

• 29:36Speaker 00

  I'd never won one else, so I'd claim a Premier League title.

• 29:40Speaker 02

  I've only won one, but there you go.

• 29:42Speaker 00

  I don't, I think ultimately, I mean, obviously this is, I mean, you say it's nothing to do with the players, but you know, maybe one or two of them have benefited because of it. But footballers just want to play and they concentrate on winning stuff. And it's actually the joy of the moment that is so great, isn't it, more than perhaps anything else?

• 30:03Speaker 02

  I think in most cases, Gaz, I would say, yeah. But I think the scale and the size of this, I don't know, will it affect the players in going into games? I mean, I think obviously mentally it would have to because the noise has been so loud and that isn't going away when City go into every game they play now while this is still hanging. I guess from a player's point of view, Obviously, they've never had anything like this before, but I think mentally it would be so difficult for them because of the noise that's going on in the background.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  I was wondering that because I suppose like siege mentality, which Guardiola used when the charges came out in February 2023 and they went on to win a treble, that can, that obviously can be very powerful. But you wonder how much it can be sustained, especially with an outcome like this. And I was talking to someone else in football who was like going on about how, especially how modern football is and how intense pressing is such a part of it. And like with managers like Arteta and Guardiola, they're willingly, like if there's a doubt about any player, they'll just get rid of them. And like, so how does doubt like this manifest? Like, would you, like, obviously you've been hoping and anything comparable, but when there is kind of a noise around a game or a team, would that affect you lads?

• 31:17Speaker 02

  Well, I guess the manager's gonna have to, have to mention it anyway. When everyone's back next, whenever it's Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, when they've got all the players, it has to be spoken about in the dressing room. The manager has to address it. The players, without doubt, would have been texting each other anyway now and they'll speak when they get back all in the dressing room together. So from that dynamic as well, you know?

• 31:39Speaker 00

  Everyone will be talking, all the players, whether they say it or not, they will be talking about this in the dressing room. I know I gestured about the little joke at my expense. Well, I think it was a joke because I don't think it was literally, I had these balls in my mouth. But this leads to a question from Toe Burrow. Is there now a massive asterix against Pep's entire playing and managing career? Considering that he was found guilty of doping as a player, Barca's success was built off the back of paying officials and bribery, to a degree. And now all of his City achievements are the result of financial doping.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Just on the doping one, Riyad Al-Samrai did a really good piece in this in the Daily Mail at the weekend where that did end in, he did get off, although Riyad points to a lot of kind of questions he would have in the process. And I think the line Riyad uses, if this was any other sport, there would be more of a kind of, more debate around it. As I would still, I would still separate that from, or any discussion about that from what he is as a manager. And ultimately, Guardiola has changed football. His mode of thinking has basically, it's influenced, like even discussions like we're having in the summer about England DNA, especially against like Spain winning it. That is all

• 32:59Speaker 01

  shaped by what Guardiola is. And like, that comes down to an idea. From that sense, it doesn't change. And also, that Barcelona team, I mean, ultimately, everything in his career has been almost kind of a second act or a kind of a postscript to what he did with Barcelona between 2008 and 2012, which I was at both of those Champions League finals. That's the best team I've ever seen play. And that kind of, that stands as his legacy. I suppose it's about when you're getting into kind of bigger debates about where he actually stands against the rest of his peers, against people like Ferguson, suddenly there's more of a debate around the number of titles he's won since.

• 33:38Speaker 02

  What was the feeling amongst the journalists when Pep came out on Wednesday, I think it was, and said what, what he did, put a statement out in terms of 100% backing and whatever? What was the feeling amongst the journalists there?

• 33:52Speaker 01

  I think it was surprising. It's funny, I was talking to Riyad, who did that piece the weekend, and he said there was a surprising amount of credulity about that statement, especially from someone who has gone in the past that, you know, when we get the, I'll have questions. Well, he didn't seem to have questions. But then, I mean, it's a little bit like the players and I suppose, I guess, I suppose some of it comes down to how elite sports people think as well. That so, exactly given this discussion, so much of his current identity and what he is as a kind of figure is wrapped up in these successes he's had and kind of, I suppose, on the pitch, given his approach, reducing the Premier League to rubble, given, look, going back to 2016, people thought his football couldn't work in England, all this kind of thing. So I suppose maybe a certain amount of tunnel

• 34:35Speaker 01

  vision is inevitable. And also, yeah, like, yeah, I suppose in this sort of situation as well, given the scale, given that we're talking about this potentially diplomatic pressure from Abu Dhabi, you'd have to think someone sent in a message to Guardiola saying,

• 34:51Speaker 00

  Well.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  Give us support, especially with the fans as well.

• 34:53Speaker 00

  It was slightly cryptic. He basically just offered his support and said everything's going to be okay. He didn't, he didn't actually challenge the decision, I noticed. Let's spend the last part of this episode talking about the possible punishment, sanctions, et cetera. Giuseppe, a lot of people, myself included, think the most appropriate punishment for City is to receive a points deduction that sees them start on negative points for the next three to five years. However, is something like that possible? And how many points a season is the just amount? I've seen so many people talking about what should be done, whether it could be 25 points a season for the next even nine years because it were

• 35:36Speaker 00

  nine years of complaints. I've seen, you know, big points deduction, automatic relegation, send them down to League Two, whatever. What are the realistic options, Miguel?

• 35:47Speaker 01

  And this is one where there are so many layers to it as well, especially when, I suppose, any sanction, because the independent commission will take recommendations from all sides of what the sanctions should be. And as has been put to me, it has been rare to say if the Premier League, say, recommends 60 points, the commission goes beyond that. Then you've got considerations like, I suppose, having to show the rules have teeth, having to fit the language. And I think this is the biggest thing for me, to be honest. The language was so strong. Like, I was talking to someone who has worked in football regulation about this, and I've never seen a judgment so partial. But even the fact that, like, the word sham is used eight times.

• 36:27Speaker 00

  In Utah, isn't it?

• 36:27Speaker 01

  That's remarkable. Yeah. And even from a journalistic perspective, the way suddenly, because that appears in writing in a judgment like this, you have a licence to use sham. And look, you saw it in all the back pages, we'll see it on banners. But I think that was so strong that the punishment has to fit. And that is why people are talking about expulsion. Now, from what I've been told, expulsion would take, even if the body, even if the commission were to recommend it, that it would have to go to a special vote of the shareholders, which is basically 20 Premier League clubs, and that would acquire a vote of 15. And like, given everything at play here, I'd be a bit dubious as to whether

• 37:09Speaker 01

  we'd get to that. Because then there's another consideration, and this is precisely why the independent commission, where the commission is independent, and we all know what City have been talking about in the last few days as regards that. But, because this is actually a debate that's come up, say, with previous cases like UEFA, and where there's suddenly a bit of a, almost a conflict in that they want to show their teeth as regulators, but strong regulation might affect your product. So again, like, if you are, if you're throwing a team that have been champions for 10 years, so does that affect your, your commercial value? But that is precisely why there is an independent commission here, to try and

• 37:49Speaker 01

  kind of insulate any decision from those sort of, from those sort of considerations.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  It does feel there's a bit of a momentum at the moment towards expulsion. I don't, I don't think it would go that far.

• 38:04Speaker 00

  What, expulsion just from the Premier League?

• 38:06Speaker 01

  The way that would work is, and this is where it gets even, again, you go into all the other layers. If you're expelled from the Premier League, it's not relegation. What would, what would have to happen then is City would have to apply to get into the EFL?

• 38:17Speaker 00

  That's my point, because we're two, did two different governing bodies.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah. And then like, obviously, even if the, even if the application is successful, what division do they go in? Would the, I mean, what do, what do EFL clubs think? Well, hang on a second, this is a place taken up. What about the National League? And who comes up? So that, and then if that happens, then you get into a world of other discussions about like, I mean, would, would the ownership see, you know, would, would they be as interested? Would they see that as viable? Would, I mean, would that be a story they could put in a documentary? But of course, there is, we have yet another variable in this. And this is actually really important now. Had this, had this case been concluded two years ago, and we all know about kind of the discussion about the delay, there would have been no independent football regulator. Now there is an independent football

• 39:01Speaker 01

  regulator, and for the first time in history, we have a body, a football body with statutory powers. And among those powers, and I made a big song and dance about this a year ago, and we had the Morecambe and Sheffield Wednesday cases, was they can force the sale of rogue owners.

• 39:15Speaker 00

  Actually, Miguel, that takes me to a question from Dave McDonald. Can owners of a club retrospectively deemed unfit? If so, can they be forced to sell the club or forcibly removed?

• 39:26Speaker 01

  So yeah, the independent football regulator absolutely has those powers. I suppose then it comes down to a question of appetite. It also comes down to, and this is where, so there's a story in the Financial Times today on Thursday morning about how City's chairman, who was seen as basically the most important non-royal in Abu Dhabi, the de facto Prime Minister of UAE, Khalid Al Mubarak, who wrote the letter to, to the fans on Saturday, he has diplomatic immunity. So that would make it feel that.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  Look, I'm speaking purely speculably here. It does feel like if, if at the end of an appeal process, City's guilt is still proven, it does feel like we may see individuals go rather than necessarily getting that far. But it does speak to the scale of this case that all of this is, we can, we're discussing all of this now.

• 40:13Speaker 00

  One final question on this. Ronan, if City were to be expelled from the league, do two go down with them or is it still three?

• 40:22Speaker 01

  Even speaking of this, there's been a bit of debate whether you could expel them mid-season or it would have to be, it would have to be in a closed season. Because suddenly if they were expelled mid-season, you've got 19 teams there. Yeah, that is one I can't answer, I have to say. And I haven't actually, there's been so much to this, I haven't even thought about the mechanics of that yet. So I haven't asked anyone.

• 40:41Speaker 00

  And I've got, I'm just going to finish here with actually, it's not a question, but it's a, it's a tweet from the Football Leaks Foundation who leaked actually the internal files at the very start, Rui Pinto. He's, he's put out a tweet saying, "Back in 2014, there was a man who was already aware of the irregularities involved in Manchester City. That man now runs FIFA. The infamous Gianni Infantino, then UEFA General Secretary, abused his authority, shared confidential documents and in short outmaneuvered the investigatory chamber, doing everything in his power to ensure that both Manchester

• 41:22Speaker 00

  City and PSG would merely receive a fine, avoiding a deeper investigation that could have led to a Champions League ban. All of these details were also revealed through Football Leaks. Given his actions as UEFA General Secretary and more recently as FIFA President, I can only say in my humble opinion that Gianni Infantino has become a cancer on football and should have no place in the future of the game."

• 41:45Speaker 01

  I think there's a lot of merit in what Rui Pinto says. It is something I've been thinking about a lot. Like I did a book on all this and how this stuff links together. State of Play, I probably should get some plug in there. But, but I've been thinking a lot about how a story like, say, the Infantino crisis and this have come in such close proximity. And we are talking about the biggest stories in generations, really. And I think a large part of that is because ultimately, football is now subject to powers it can't control. Like so much of the City story comes down to the fact that it is ultimately a state actor owned and the club that leads into kind of a greater scale of power that a sport can really handle.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  I think that was one of football's biggest mistakes, allowing states to control football clubs. And it's a train that's left the station. I don't know what would do about it.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Basically, yeah. And like almost an original scene from kind of light regulation. But within that then, a little bit of a mirror to that, you've got a figure like Infantino. And it's amazing. I mean, this is a guy, he's not just the president of FIFA. His office basically means he's executive president. He's got all like, he almost bestows the power of football around, or power of the World Cup at least, which is very powerful. And like this is basically just some random guy. Like who is he essentially to have risen? Not just, whatever about the position itself, but the power of the position. And as we're in this era where football is subject to all of this external power and like just these greater dimensions, he doesn't seem to be, he basically, he just throws himself open

• 43:16Speaker 01

  to autocratic leaders, to like, I mean, politicians like Donald Trump. It's like he embraces that power rather than kind of, rather than kind of positions FIFA as an ultimate safeguard. And that's, that email, that, or that story that Rui Pinto points to, and funny, like we talk about Pep Guardiola is undeniably one of the most influential figures in football history. For very different reasons, so is Rui Pinto. Like his, his actions, whether you think he's a hero or a villain, have resulted in, in all of this. But, so obviously Infantino was involved in that UEFA case that did end up in a settlement, even though a settlement wasn't part of the rules. And it was because the legal pressure City brought to bear. So many of the most notorious quotes around this case come from that. Like, you

• 44:01Speaker 01

  know, "We can do what we want", as Simon Pearce, one of the Abu Dhabi figures at the top of City said. You know, that line about getting the 50 best lawyers in the world and for 30 million, maybe it's the other way around with the figures, and suing them for 10 years. But that comes from this case. And like, within Infantino, I've got the email here, it's quite short. What it is emails to City is, "You will see that I have sometimes chosen a wording which looks more strong in question marks, or sorry, in quotation marks, before signing off with the message, 'Let's be positive.'" And this is a regulator. And there is an argument, had UEFA been stronger at that exact point, had Infantino been stronger, that it doesn't spool out into this, into this kind of massive

• 44:42Speaker 01

  crisis. And that's, that just, as Pinto has pointed to there, that does reflect the massive importance of actual proper regulation of football. And it is one thing to be said for the Premier League, to be fair. But after years where the Premier League was, it could fairly be criticised of light regulation that allowed a build-up of issues. I mean, this is as strong a regulation as you can get.

• 45:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, it really is. Just before we finish, gut feeling, where does this go?

• 45:10Speaker 01

  I think it will end up with pending appeal, I should say. And we don't, at the moment, all lawyers seem to think that City have a very slim, slim chance of overturning this. But we can't say that for certain. Going off that though, I can't see it getting as far as the other club is voting for expulsion or actual for sale. I think staggered points deductions that limits them for a few years. But I mean, that also has the effect, I suppose, of ensuring a line isn't drawn, this is going to go on for a few years, which is just another consideration. But yeah, that's my gut feeling.

• 45:45Speaker 00

  What's your gut feeling now?

• 45:46Speaker 02

  I don't know about my gut feeling, but I know I want it done because it just affects the game. And we're just going to be talking about it every single week. Whenever City are due to play, this is going to be brought up and it's, whatever happens, it needs to happen as quickly as possible for the sake of the game.

• 46:02Speaker 00

  It's been a dark day for football really, isn't it? I mean, it's, it's, whatever way you look at this, there's, there's, it's just grim, grim all over.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Ultimately, we don't want to be talking about this.

• 46:13Speaker 00

  No. And the Premier League, and that's, I think it's important to say, the last thing in the world the Premier League would have wanted is this. It's incredibly damaging for both the Premier League and for our sport. But I think we'll be discussing this well into the future. Miguel, thank you very much for your time. You're very generous with it.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  Thanks, guys. Thank you.

• 46:34Speaker 00

  I know you'd be doing the rounds again more, but.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Still a few days off, but I'm not sure when they're going to come.

• 46:40Speaker 00

  Good. Thank you very much. That's it for this episode. The rest is football. Goodbye from me.

• 46:44Speaker 02

  Goodbye from me.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  Thank you.