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Manchester City have become ‘Sham FC’. They deserve the heaviest punishment
It is, in short, a scandal. Or, to use the word that keeps coming up in the findings, a “sham”. Take the three seasons when City won the league (2011-12, 2013-14 and 2017-18) during the relevant period. According to City, the club received £360m in commercial income during that time from Abu Dhabi-based sponsors. In reality, the commission found that just £43m came from legitimate sponsors. The remainder was secretly siphoned in via Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG), the club’s owner.
As if that were not alarming enough, we are informed via the findings that some of City’s “important factual witnesses” supplied evidence to the commission that was “false in a number of respects”.
That alone is damning. Was it deliberate? Did people willingly lie? Well, it certainly seems that way, given the follow-up sentence alleging that some witnesses “knew (their testimony) to be untrue and so had been dishonest”.
Maybe, in time, we will find out exactly who this is referring to. Will any action be taken against them individually? In a court of law, it would be classed as perjury. It’s not the same, of course, in the football industry. Yet it has to be hoped the relevant people have been challenged.
VIA THE ATHLETIC FOOTBALL ON X:
No longer should it be a debate about whether the Premier League would dare to drum out Manchester City. Now the question takes another form: how can you justify anything else?
Attitudes can only harden now the first official judgment has been published, subject to an appeal, and the sheer scale of deception is clear.
It is not even close. No other club has swindled English football so brazenly. Nobody has gone about it in such a devious and heavy-handed fashion. It has disfigured several years of competition and, for that alone, City’s supporters might have to understand why they should probably brace themselves for the heaviest of punishments.
Enough to bring about relegation? It feels increasingly inevitable and justified, yes. Put it this way: there would be uproar, absolute uproar, if this form of serial offending encountered any kind of leniency. City deserve what is surely coming.