How Manchester City could repeat Uefa victory and hit back at Premier League

Manchester City have a puncher’s chance of successfully contesting the ruling that they were guilty of all charges relating to flagrant breaches of the Premier League’s financial rules, but should their argument fall flat, the 10-time English champions can expect to be clobbered with swingeing penalties.

Those are the views of Luca Ferrari and Daniel Gore, specialists in sports and litigation law, respectively, after City were found guilty by a three-person independent commission of 80 charges of financial wrongdoing between 2009 and 2018, and another 34 of failing to cooperate with the subsequent five-year investigation.

Preparing to face Liverpool on Sunday in their first match since the verdict became public, the club were said to have employed “sham” contracts to inflate revenue and reduce costs to the overall tune of more than £900 million (about US$1.2 billion) over the period in question.

Citing the precedent of Everton being docked six points in 2023-24 for a single £20m rules infringement, Gore said: “If you extrapolate that to £900 million, they could be looking at hundreds of points [270].”