Finn Hoerl | staff writer

The footballing world has been given one of the most impactful verdicts in its history — an independent panel found Manchester City guilty of financial fraud and non-compliance, which was 114 of 115 charges presented.

This is an unreal result that threatens the integrity of the Premier League through the cheating scandal by one of its most prominent clubs — a club that should be expelled from the League.

The Premier League issued a statement days later, announcing that City was guilty of all 115. The charges are from 2009-2018, which were the first 9 seasons under the club’s Abu Dhabi-based ownership by a conglomerate called City Football Group.

The charges include creating “sham” sponsorship contracts and obstructing the league’s investigation.

The Premier League has a spending limit where teams can spend up to a certain percentage of their revenue on players (the current rate is 85%). Manchester City wanted to use the wealth of their new owners to spend more but couldn’t pass the revenue limit. They were a mid-size club, so their revenue wouldn’t be high enough to increase spending.

So, their owners funneled their own money into fake sponsorships, which would be shown as revenue (sponsor deals are part of a team’s revenue), so they could spend more on players and stay within their legal threshold. Artificially manipulating the sponsorship income is fraud, and it is estimated that the fake sponsorships amounted to about $1.2 billion.

This allowed them to spend historic amounts on player wages (the term for overall pay per week, as footballers aren’t salaried) and transfers, giving them the spending power of a global giant overnight.

They spent more than $1 billion on signings, and a mind-numbing sum of nearly $2.6 billion on player wages.

A violation of that scale is unprecedented in world football. To put it into perspective, the next largest financial charge was against Everton for not making profit and operating in a $165 million loss over three years. This amounted to a 6-point deduction as a punishment (the point system is standard for European Football, where one point is given for ties and three for wins), with two more points deducted points for a later charge.

That means the largest scale comparison for this is for two charges, and City faces a whopping 115 charges. If the punishment was proportional — using the ratio of four points for every charge — City should be docked 460 points, which mathematically guarantees relegation into the 2nd division.

That 460-point deduction is far-fetched, as current estimates say 40-to-100-point deductions are likely. A 74-point-or-more deduction would make survival in the Premier League impossible.

Other punishments are also possible, such as transfer bans, fines or expulsion. All options are currently on the table for Manchester City’s punishment. A transfer ban is when clubs aren’t allowed to sign any new players for a period of time. Fans and pundits alike doubt this will be used by itself, as it would be a lenient sentence.

Fines would include forcing City to pay sums back to the league and its clubs. This is likely, and I would think it would supplement expulsion. Expulsion would mean City is kicked out of the league, having to re-register as a club in an amateur league.

I believe the punishment should be expulsion. The league needs to set a precedent for what happens to cheaters because that’s what they are. I don’t see how even the most defensive Man City fan can look at the charges and feel that they are innocent.

Of course, Man City is appealing the decision made by the independent commission to present all charges. The United Arab Emirates government has expressed a plan to pull out of billions of major investments in the United Kingdom if Man City were denied their appeal.

The Premier League listening to this kind of blackmailing threat would completely discredit the league — sending a message that cheating on this scale won’t result in the massive punishment that the club would rightfully deserve.

It would prove that money wins over justice, and I believe it would outrage clubs to the point of dissolution of the league. And, if City gets away from serious punishment, the court of public opinion will always convict them as cheaters. They would have taken three league titles, three league cups and an FA Cup from a rightful, rule-following owner.

The unfairness of their conduct is glaringly obvious, especially the alleged unfairness to the other mid-table teams. If you gave Everton, Aston Villa or Newcastle more than one billion dollars to spend over 10 years, I could only imagine how much of a global power they would be.

Man City’s owners aren’t geniuses. They aren’t footballing legends. Their club and its meteoric rise will no longer be an underdog story — it’s an embarrassing stain on the state of modern football that may prove that crime does pay.

Finn Hoerl can be reached at hoerlf@duq.edu