Manchester City Faces Appeal Over Premier League Financial Ruling, Potential Penalties Loom

Friday's revelation that the Premier League were expecting Manchester City to be found guilty on the majority of the 115 charges levelled against them was a watershed moment in English football history, perhaps the first of many in rapid succession. While the decision of the independent commission -- yet to be formally confirmed by the league while City insist they await final word -- may go down as the historic moment where a dynasty ended. However, there is much fallout still to sift through.

For one thing, there are still the sanctions to be applied, but even those could change as Manchester City appeal the commission's decision. While that process continues, there will be questions over the future of City's expensively assembled squad, over the status of the squad and what action rival clubs might be inclined to take now to earn some measure of recompense for the damage they feel has been done to them.

What happens if City appeal?

Given that City have publicly insisted that the process remains ongoing, we must consider an appeal as a prospect rather than a certainty, though it has long been expected across the industry that the club would challenge any guilty verdict. Premier League rules mean that City will have 14 days to appeal once a verdict is announced.

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The fear for many will be that that tangles the English game up in many more months of litigation. The Premier League's rules seem to indicate that that should not be the case. Rule W.86 states that an appeal should "not exceed five days in duration and be heard in one block". It sets a time limit after the appeal is filed of 12 weeks.

Should that appeal go against City, who have always denied any wrongdoing, then they would not have the option to appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, however, the option would be available to take the decision to arbitration. Here City would have to argue that the independent panel had either acted beyond its jurisdiction, acted out of fraud, malice or bad faith, committed "procedural errors so great that the rights of the applicant have been clearly and substantially prejudiced", perversely interpreted the law and reached a decision that could not have been applied if they had applied their minds properly to the case. In short, the barrier for success at arbitration would be extremely high.

Could City pursue further avenues beyond arbitration with the league? An email published by Der Spiegel in 2018, decried by the club as "out-of-context materials purportedly hacked or stolen", relayed the view of the club's Simon Cliff as to how chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak would deal with UEFA's investigations into their finances. "Khaldoon [Al Mubarak] says he would rather spend £30m on the 50 best lawyers in the world and sue them [UEFA] for the next ten years than agree a financial penalty." If such a belligerent attitude persists at the Etihad Stadium, then there is plenty of time left for legal wrangling.

Al Mubarak's first public statement following news of the verdict  offered little indication as to what City's next step would be, beyond an insistence they were still confident their innocence would be proven. "Following Friday's media reporting, many of you will have spent your evening answering questions and responding to messages from friends, family and colleagues. So have I. Here's what I said to my family: The Premier League process still has a long way to run, and our confidence and intent in proving the club's innocence is just as strong as when this began.

"While some people have been quick to reach their own conclusions, and there is so much noise swirling around us, nothing has changed. We have faced challenges together before and have prevailed. There remain many who want to undermine the momentum of our club. We will not give them that opportunity."

What punishment might City face?

Should any appeal fail, then the sanctions available to the original panel are quite all-encompassing. A fine, suspension points deductions, even explusion from the Premier League is on the table. The panel's sanctions can encompass any combination of these sanctions in addition to "such other penalty as [they] shall think fit".

There is also the question of what retrospective punishment might come. The charges against City date back to 2009, the year after they were purchased by their Abu Dhabi owners. Everything they have achieved on the field since then is colored by the rules the panel concluded they broke. That means at least three Premier League titles won up to 2018, as many EFL Cups, an FA Cup and a Community Shield. Could City be stripped of them? What of those that followed in a period where the club were deemed to have not cooperated with investigations? After all, it would be hard to argue that this team would have morphed into Europe's finest without the investment of their current owners.

Juventus were stripped of their Serie A titles in 2005 and 2006 after the Calciopoli match-fixing scandal, the former left vacant and the latter awarded to Inter. Many of those who saw their team finish second to City will doubtless want to see punishment. Equally, there will be those who question whether players should pay the price for rules broken before they arrived.

Former Manchester City midfielder Rodri said on Friday. "What we did, they cannot take out of us. It's something that is not paid by money. It's paid with effort, with the damage, with, you know, being shoulder to shoulder every day. I can tell you that everything was deserved, and I'm glad that I could live one of the best eras of English football in here."

Would this punishment be the end of the crisis?

Perhaps not. At least four Premier League clubs have launched holding claims in which they reserve the right to claim compensation from City over lost earnings resulting from their breaches. Arsenal, Tottenham, Liverpool and Manchester United are understood to be that quartet, while it has been reported that other clubs are considering their options. Of course there are many clubs who may attempt to argue that their finances would be in a different situation had City acted differently.

The threat, former Liverpool and Aston Villa executive Christian Purslow noted, is significant for the league as a whole. "It's a sort of 'where does this end?' because if you look at every single season - the nine seasons which we now know Manchester City breached rules - then all of their 19 Premier League rivals in that season, to differing extents, suffered easy-to-compute loss. Whether it was a place in the Premier League - every place was worth £3m," he said on BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"Teams that came fifth who didn't make 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've finished 17th if Manchester City weren't there. And they, of course, suffered huge loss.

"If you add all those claims up, over nine years, and that's just in the Premier League, you can see that the potential here for this to spiral out of control is huge. I really hope that common sense prevails here and that there is a comprehensive solution between the authorities and Manchester City that looks at all these issues and tries to draw a line in the sand."

What about the City squad?

Should there be serious sanctions for City questions will inevitably follow as to what this means for an expensively assembled squad that has become used to competing for the biggest prizes in sport. Relegation could be a very real risk for City and that would complicate the future of some of their brightest stars. Several of the squad, according to CBS Sports sources, do not have release clauses in their contract that would allow them to depart for a set fee if City were to slide out of the Premier League.

That reflects how City's approach right the way through this process has been to assume their innocence will shine through, hence the heavy investment in Enzo Maresca's squad this summer, where over half a billionm dollars was invested in the likes of Elliot Anderson, Ayyoub Bouaddi and Enzo Fernandez.

At the time of writing on Saturday September 26 none of the City squad have addressed the news. On his Instagram page, Maresca posted an image of bare feet on grass captioned "Time to breathe. Time to analyse. Time to learn."

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_Originally reported by [CBS Sports](https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/manchester-city-appeal-process-penalties-premier-league-financial-ruling/)._