City Watch: Blues found guilty of almost all charges

Well so much for a quiet international break…

I think most City fans were expecting the next couple of weeks to be fairly uneventful, with the players away on international duty and attention gradually turning towards the trip to Anfield. 

Instead, we have been hit with the biggest news surrounding the club in years, and probably the biggest story of Premier League history so far.

The news was leaked on Friday before being officially confirmed on Tuesday, meaning we’ve had a few days to digest what has happened, but I don’t think many of us have quite got our heads around it yet.

After more than three years since Manchester City were charged by the Premier League, the verdict is finally in, and the club has been found guilty of all of the charges brought against it.

What makes it particularly surprising, at least from my perspective, is just how confident the club had appeared throughout the entire process. 

City have consistently maintained their innocence, and the messaging from the club over the past few years has suggested that they were confident the evidence would ultimately vindicate them. 

Khaldoon Al Mubarak and Ferran Soriano, though his was internal to staff and leaked, have both spoken publicly about the case with a level of confidence that made it feel as though the club genuinely believed a positive verdict was coming.

Instead, we have ended up with a verdict that goes completely against that expectation. 

The club has been found guilty of every single charge relating to the nine year period examined by the Premier League, and the findings are obviously going to raise a huge number of questions about what happened during that time. 

One of the most significant findings concerns City’s sponsorship revenue, with the commission finding that sponsorship payments were inflated by almost £900 million over the period and that money from the club’s owner was presented as sponsorship revenue.

The Premier League’s report is also pretty damning in its language, with the word “sham” reportedly appearing eight times across the 40 page document. 

That’s not exactly the sort of wording that City fans will be comfortable reading, particularly when the club has spent years insisting that the charges were fundamentally wrong.

City have already made it very clear that they reject the findings and intend to appeal the verdict. 

Khaldoon and Soriano have both released statements maintaining that the club is not guilty and that they believe the appeal will ultimately prove that. 

Until that appeal has been dealt with, there is still a significant part of this process left to play out.

And, perhaps most importantly for City fans, we don’t yet know what punishment the club will actually receive which is probably the biggest question hanging over the Etihad right now.

There has been no shortage of speculation over the past few years about what could happen if City were eventually found guilty, and the potential range of punishments is enormous. 

A financial penalty is one possibility, while points deductions, transfer restrictions, competition bans and even the possibility of relegation have all been discussed at various points. 

There has also been plenty of talk about the most extreme sanctions imaginable, although at this stage I genuinely don’t know what to expect.

It would be pointless for me to sit here and predict exactly what punishment City are going to receive when we don’t even know what the Premier League will ask for, let alone what will ultimately be imposed.

There is also a difference between being found guilty and knowing what the final consequences will be. 

The appeal could change the verdict, change individual findings or potentially change the eventual sanctions, so there is still a lot of uncertainty surrounding what happens next.

That is probably why, despite how significant Tuesday’s announcement is, I don’t actually have a huge amount to say about it from an opinion point of view yet.

I’m surprised by the scale of the verdict given how confident the club has been throughout the process, and being found guilty of every charge is obviously far more serious than the outcome many supporters had anticipated.

For more than three years we’ve been hearing about the Premier League’s charges, the evidence, the tribunal and the eventual verdict. 

Now that verdict has finally arrived, but somehow it feels like we’re still a long way from the end of the story.

If there is one thing we have learnt over the past three years, it’s that this story isn’t going to be resolved overnight.

We’ve gone from talking about how City would cope with Anfield and PSG to discussing the potential consequences of the biggest legal battle in the club’s history. 

For now, all we can really do is wait for the appeal and see what comes next.