By Tony Attwood

In relation to the events on 25th  September, The Daily Mail has posted the headline

“Forget the appeal, the mud attached to Manchester City’s name will now stick forever. To the rest of football, they are CHEATS,”  And although it is a great rarity for me, I have to admit I would agree on this occasioin with the Mail.

They remind us that the breaches of competition rules took place between the 2009- 10 and 2022- 23 seasons, during which they were English champions seven times. There is no telling if their 2023/24 title also involved matches where games were fixed in their favour, but it would seem fairly unlikely that, having set up such a network of cheating, the club would voluntarily suddenly stop.   They might do, but it would seem odd to stop something that was so successful.

And indeed, if you have ever been witness to a criminal trial (as a juror, for example) you will probably have learned to look for the most likely explanation..

So now we can start thinking about the logical extension, which is to say, “What can be done about all this?”    And first of those might be what else was influenced by the cheating between 2009 and 2023 and that probably means removing titles.

There are two ways the titles can be removed.  Either by the League simply saying “this is done” or by the deduction of points in each season in which they are judged to have cheated.   I think quite a few of us would like to see ManC deducted, say 20 points a season for each of the next ten seasons, as a way of warning other clubs not to try the same trick.

If it is firmly established that in 2015/16 and 2022/23 the Mancs engaged in practices that broke the rules, then in those two seasons, it can be argued also that Arsenal would have won the league without the Mancy cheating.  That would mean that Arsenal have been cheated out of two league titles, for which some sort of compensation must be paid, as well as the record books being changed to show two more league titles for Arsenal.  Even if we don’t get the latter, the former ought to be done without delay.

Other clubs will, of course, have been cheated out of places in the Champions League and each will have a valid case to bring against Manc given that those clubs did not get to play in a competition they would have been entitled to play in if ManC had not cheated.

ManC will appeal, of course, and the appeal could take a long time, but even without that, this result is a vindication of all that we and others have said about the way Manc have conducted business.

But it is also a reminder to the League of the need to make their processes work more rapidly and more stringently.   It should never have taken this long to bring the Mancs to book.  Clubs should realise that outright cheating of the type the Mancs engaged in will be followed up and will result in serious punishment.  Personally, I would go for relegation to League Two, but I suspect the committees that look into such things don’t feel up to that.  But of course there is still much more to come after that, and I will turn to that in the next piece.

But here is the main point – the punishment should in these cases exceed the crime.   If the punishment fits the crime, then it suggests to criminal clubs like ManC that it is always worth having a bash at beating the rules because if they lose out, they will just be back where they started.

Football, our game, the game of the people, has been corrupted beyond measure and we have each of us had part of ourselves removed as a result of the way that Manchester City and their paymasters in the Middle East have behaved.   This sort of behaviour might well be the norm elsewhere, but we need to show the world that it is not to be accepted here.  It has not been part of the League in the past, and it is not now.

If we do not dish out major punishments to Manchester City and their paymasters immediately, this will be an open invitation to clubs from across the region to join in and buy their way to league titles and anything else they see as available.

As it is, for years to come there will be a doubt hanging over the Premier League table with the suspicion that whoever has won the League, or come to that, the FA Cup, has cheated.   It is going to take years to win back the belief that everything in English football is ok, and for that alone, those involved in the recently exposed cheating should be punished as severely as possible…