• Commission: club broke rules over nine-season period
• City will appeal against verdict before Friday deadline”

It is of course difficult to see quite what the basis of the Manc appeal will be other than “you don’t understand how we work” or “you are biased against clubs run by foreigners,” or “you can’t do that to us,” and none is likely to get them very far.

For as the Guardian says these verdicts come “with the club found to have boosted their income by a staggering amount of more than £900m.

And to highlight the key point further, the Guardian adds the  “independent commission had found City guilty of arranging “sham ­contracts” with commercial partners to artificially inflate revenues and reduce costs, and of filing inaccurate accounts to hide the true state of their finances, which if accurately reported would have led to significant breaches of Premier League and Uefa spending limits.”

Indeed in a case as huge and vital as this with ramifications across all football, it is unlikely that the authorities would have made wholesale mistakes.   The appeal will therefore be designed for their own country’s population and the Manc supporters, and their own dignity as they leave football and go and find something else to corrupt.

So what happens to the Mancs?  Apart from losing all those titles and trophies they will also lose their sponsors, which raises the question with a brand this tainted will anyone else want to take them on, as well as the question, “can they avid liquidation?”   Some corporation might want to “rescue” ManC in the hope of getting a local sympathy vote but the club is in such a shambles now, having relied on fake sponsorship for so long (at least according to the inspectors’ report), it seems hard to imagine that they would be able to keep any of their star players.  Certainly not on those salaries.

Thus if the current sponsors pull out on the grounds that the League is biased against them, the club won’t have enough money to pay anyone and will have to go bust.

But there is another point in this which is that the club has accused the League of criminal actions, through acting via a “Premier League conspiracy theory”.   That could lead the Premier League to sue ManC for defamation.  The club is not leaving itself any way out of this.

Meanwhile we know that the Everton profitability penalty was based on six points for the initial breach, plus a point for every £5m the club overspent.  Here we see overspending by more than £900m which seems to work out at a total of 186 points deduction.  So at 80 point a season that has them relegated to League One or League Two depending on how the sums are worked.  The match against AFC Wimbledon might be worth watching.

But the club is also found guilty of deliberately misleading the League (and everyone else it seems) through a complex scheme of misleading information the purpose of which the paper reports the commission saying, “was found to have been to artificially inflate the club’s revenues, and reduce its costs, by more than £900m during the affected period, to appear to comply with financial rules.”

So it seems the club will appeal, although it might still wriggle out of doing that by saying that the commission that investigated them was so obviously biased that there is no point in appealing since the appeals panel is hardly likely to be balanced in its judgement.

At that point we can imagine they would put the club up for sale.   But this in turn will raise another issue – can the club legitimately keep these players who have been tainted via the various falsehoods that Manc are found guilty of.   Quite possibly not, in the same way that thieves are not allowed to keep the profits of their thievery.

So that would leave ManC without players, and what the owners could then do is simply shut the club down, or invite it to play in another league – although this would not be authorised by Uefa and that could cause some problems.  Maybe they will set up a whole league of their own made up of other disaffected clubs.

But the most likely outcome at the moment would seem to be that the owners will simply walk away.  After all the investments they have made into in the club are nothing given their wealth.  That would leave the club free to be picked up by another owner – but what would happen to the players?   They would still be contracted to ManC, and this raises another point.

The club is a separate financial entity, and without the sponsors it won’t have the money to pay its players.  Presumably someone else could buy the club and sells the players to make it viable.  But would the banks (already implicated in the whole fiasco) support them?  It seems unlikely that any bank would want to be seen to be actively supporting this club no matter what went before.  

There are ramifications still to come.