What happens next?
Manchester City have been found guilty of the vast majority of the 134 disciplinary charges brought against them by the Premier League.
In keeping with the history of this explosive case which has been conducted exclusively in private and with every party sworn to secrecy, there is a lot we don’t know. We do not even have an official confirmation that the three-person judicial panel has reached a verdict on the case. All of football is acting as if they have, however, and that reports of a big win for the Premier League are correct.
If these assumptions are correct, and neither party have formally denied them at least, then the immediate thing to watch out for is news of an appeal. Under Premier League rules, City would have 14 days from the announcement of the verdict to submit an appeal and the process that follows should be completed in less than 12 weeks from then. Once the appeal has been heard – which should happen in one block of no more than five days – and a verdict reached, the appeal panel are also expected to publish written reasons behind their decisions. We should also see the written reasons from the original judicial panel too, but the unique scale of this case has meant that normal procedures have not always been followed, and the date of publication for these reasons remains unknown.
If City do appeal, what happens?
The club would be submitting an appeal based solely on the decision and not any resulting punishment, which is yet to be determined. In hoping to make the case that the judicial panel were wrong in their observations, City would be allowed to submit new evidence, providing it had not been previously available to them, and make new oral presentations. Once the hearing is concluded, a verdict would be expected in 30 days.
If an appeal fails, what then?
According to Premier League rule W.97, “the decision of an Appeal Board shall be final”, but even this is subject to one final route, that of arbitration. This would again mean appearing in front of another panel of eminent legal figures, but the criteria for any hearing would be a lot stricter and successful arbitration only possible in the main if the judicial panel or appeal board was found to have abused the legal process. City have recently been through the arbitration process with the Premier League over its rules related to associated party transactions and, after an initial verdict challenged two applications of the rules but otherwise found them to be sound, City and the Premier League reached a settlement which stopped the case from going to court.
When and how would City be punished?
If City managed to overturn the verdict, there would of course be no sanction. If City’s appeals failed, there are a number of measures available to the panel. They start at fines and end at complete expulsion from the league, with a variety of sporting sanctions including point deductions falling in-between. Given the magnitude of the verdict, City can expect to receive a punishment at the sharper end of the scale should their appeal not prove successful.
Could relegation be the end of it?
It seems unlikely. Premier League clubs and those who have been relegated from the division are understood to have been assessing any potential financial losses they may have incurred during the period City were winning and, appeal pending, breaking the rules. A wave of lawsuits is likely to follow, with Manchester United, for example, having finished second behind City in 2017-18 and potentially denied a record-breaking 21st league title in the process. It is possible that clubs who were relegated could argue that they were sent down because of points denied them by a City side subsequently found to have cheated. Premier League clubs reportedly lost their appetite for legal action after an estimated £50m cost to the competition last season, but if the verdict against City revealed this week is ultimately upheld, a new wave of lawsuits will surely follow.
