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Man City Verdict - What should happen next?

Tifo Football by The Athletic

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Manchester City have been found guilty on almost all of the charges relating to breaches of the Premier League’s financial regulations. Today’s episode of the Tifo podcast is hosted by Joe Devine and attended by Colin Millar, Kaya Kaynak and Thom Harris to discuss, and is produced by Benji Brooks!

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00:00 - A Very Chaotic Intro

05:41 - Breaking down the Charges

14:45 - On or off-field Crisis?

30:00 - A Quick Break

30:04 - Rondo

36:29 - How does Thom feel?

51:00 - Crime and Punishment

01:02:56 - Another Quick Break

01:03:08 - Anthony Gordinho

01:04:32 - Spain v England Reactions

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20 Comments

@mrfog9791 2 days ago

Joe has missed the point when trying to separate the "board" and the team. If they dont cheat then Mancini doesnt go to city, half the players they bought dont go to the club and then Pep doesnt go to City. The whole success of City is built on cheating so they dont deserve any of it.

@savethetowels 2 days ago

My biggest problem with the sponsor is that it throws off the "I'm Joe Devine" cadence.

@procsorted 2 days ago

Where else to begin but Manchester City 1 - 114 Justice

@nomoreheroes93 2 days ago

Joe Devine Intro Rating: a fine intro, 115/10

@bobp4 2 days ago

My question is whether the HMRC are going to investigate if Man City are found guilty of (allegedly) paying their manager under an offshore tax free contract for work actually performed in the UK. If that is the case it is tax evasion which is tax fraud. It therefore becomes (if true) a criminal case and not just a breach of PL rules.

@killerbean2 2 days ago

Saying "Man City didn’t benefit that much" misses the point. If you rob a bank and lose the money, you still committed bank robbery. Plus, CAS didn't clear Man City on merit—the UEFA ban was overturned because charges were time-barred by a 5-year statute of limitations, and City was fined €10M just for obstructing the investigation. Getting off on a technicality isn't an acquittal.

@jjdriessen 2 days ago

I disagree with the sympathy for players who chose to sign a contract with a club that they knew was under investigation for cheating. Elliot Anderson knew this when he signed; whilst it doesn't make him complicit in the cheating, it says a lot about him as a person. If he suffers the consequences of his actions, so be it. He chose a payday and the risks that came with it.

@zambianguy8251 2 days ago

Really loved Colin Millar insisting in the titles being stripped because i genuinely don’t think people understand the magnitude of the cheating and the scandal we are dealing with. There has to be deference to the point where clubs in the future shouldn’t even contemplate it

@arkadye 2 days ago

I'm much less sympathetic to the "don't punish the fans" attitude. This clearly means "don't impose a [harsh] sporting sanction". But plenty of teams have had points deductions. I've watched my team (Leicester City) miss out on Champions League football because of Man City's rule breaking, cripple ourselves in the transfer market to try to keep in line with the rules (we could have had Ademola Lookman for a bargain!) get relegated as a result, and not only not recover, but have the rules follow us down a division to relegate us again. We'd have stayed in The Championship last season without it.

If fans of the other clubs can suffer, both watching their teams get season-altering points deductions, and missing out on prizes on opportunities they might otherwise have won, Man City fans cannot be mollycoddled.

@Davidbaratunk 2 days ago

The punishment needs to be bigger than the benefits of their cheating, or else it is just the cost of business. And City have won everything. And as Man City are a soft power project by a foreign actor, the punishment needs to be big enough to prove the EPL's 'sovereignty'.

@Aadi-du9ut 2 days ago

'Why punish the whole club when this stuff happened at the executive level'?

'The whole club' won stuff on the back of this financial doping. This while others operated under constraints, to the point where it affected these clubs for seasons.

Just relegation would actually be mercy!

@yamanoorzad1526 2 days ago

Separating the players/coaches and the executive doesn't make sense.

We win together and we lose together
When Haaland scores they'll say 'we win together' when he misses and they lose they'll say 'we lose together'
how many times did Pep say this after a title win - something along the lines of 'this title belongs to all of us'

Why can't it apply to cheating
When the board/executives cheats they're 'cheating together'

@aadyamaya 2 days ago

Joe and (understandably) Thom are being extremely soft about this whole thing. The financial doping that City participated in, has, without a shadow of a doubt, affected their on-pitch performance by way of what they were able to offer players and managers, the 'perfect' backroom staff that they were able to create. Spending more in and of itself does not guarantee success, but what they were able to spend it on was totally intertwined with its illicit pumping in of money. It has had myriad impacts on other clubs: relegated clubs, clubs that missed out on the UCL, clubs that lost to City in finals. Of course, the actual effect in total reality cannot be neatly extricated from it (butterfly effect and all that) but it isn't really far-fetched for those clubs to sue for those damages/losses. If City were so aggrieved by those rules, perhaps they should've collaborated with other sympathetic club-owners (Newcastle, Villa, maybe Everton, etc) to have the rulebook itself amended. You can't just operate outside of those rules and then claim you only did it to heroically overcome some sort of 'cartel' that has won about 3 league titles between them in the last 10 yrs. United barely spent money this season, in part because of crippling debt which every single United fan has been against, protesting almost every home game against the owners that enacted it. You can say what you want about United but it's not like we illicitly pumped in revenue through an INEOS subsidiary company to circumvent these rules.

@ankushrai7366 1 day ago (edited)

Best Rondo would have been list of players signed by Man City between the violation period

@old_man_fran 2 days ago

Of course players and people involved would say "it was real and we won everything on the field through our hard work"
Yes but would you have been there if Man City hadn't thrown a boatload of cash your way, that they wouldn't have otherwise?
Yes Guardiolanis still one of the best managers ever, but would he have gone there? And would he have won as much if he couldn't have every player he pointed at (I'm exaggerating but u get my point).
Would they have won the same with other players? Maybe forced to play 2 academy players instead of the highly expensive proven CB and Striker they got from other team?
There is a high correlation between wages and sporting success, more so since the Bosman rulling. And while correlation is not causation, I think we can argue that a lot of City's success was made possible by the illegal inflated spending.
So The Athletic team minimising the sporting punishments and arguing for higher punishment for owners, I think there should be enough punishment to go round...

@srinaths478 2 days ago

Kaya just gets paid twice once from the athletic and once from the British library.

@jfc850 2 days ago

So early that they were still recording the intro when I got here

@_jacobean_ 2 days ago

I disagree entirely with the point about titles being stripped is meaningless. If anything it should be the unquestionable first punishment. Manchester City won league titles by circumnavigating the rules of the league they consented to, unlike the other 19 clubs. And did so knowingly. By refusing to operate within the sporting contract of the league they have therefore rendered their achievements null. It shouldn't be re-distributed after the fact but these titles should be considered vacated as they were won by a club acting outside of the league structure.

@haroldbishop22 2 days ago

Well Joe Hart thinks they are innocent so that's that then.

@ashyd1115 2 days ago (edited)

I disagree there are similarities to Lance Armstrong, City have been financially doping for years to gain an unfair advantage over their fellow competitors. Pep's "Legacy" has also been tainted everything he achieved was built on the back of years of cheating. The PL needs to throw the book at City and relegate them to the base of the football pyramid.