Manchester City have now published an official response to the damning Premier League guilty verdicts announced on late Tuesday afternoon.
The Premier League yesterday released an official statement at last regarding the club and the charges of breaking financial rules.
This followed intense media reporting and claims that the club had been found guilty on all but one of the 115 charges in total that they faced.
Tuesday afternoon seeing the Premier League reveal that Manchester City have been found guilty by the independent commission of breaking ALL charges related to breaches of the Premier League financial rules between 2009/10 and 2017/18.
They also found that Manchester City were guilty of all charges, except one, that related to non-cooperation with the Premier League investigation.
The Premier League published a redacted version of the independent commission’s report, which said the charges “concerned well over 100 alleged individual breaches of Premier League Rules across four broad charge categories.” They also say that the sham commercial deals were part of a “disguised funding scheme” to the tune of £830.69m.
Manchester City have responded to the Premier League statement with a statement of their own: “Manchester City FC is both disappointed and surprised by the opinion of the Premier League Commission, that has been published today. The Club is innocent of the accusations made by the Premier League and a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence exists in support of all of its positions, relating to this case. The Club will therefore be relentless, and where necessary proactive, in any and all appropriate regulatory and legal forums.”
All very predictable and fits in with what has happened all along.
The only option for Manchester City has been and still is, to deny everything, simply hoping somehow this will all go away.
Which it won’t.
Manchester City going on to say: “The Premier League process remains ongoing, with significant elements uncompleted. Manchester City FC will now pursue the appeal avenues open to it, on the basis that the opinion contains clear material errors, of law, principle and fact, and is unsafe. The Club has diligently respected due process for eight years on the basis that the Premier League Board and Executive would behave as an independent, impartial and fair-minded regulator, free from partisan influence. The Club is obviously restricted in what it can say further until all future proceedings are complete.”
The release of the damning confidential internal Manchester City documents into the public domain by a hacker was the thing that opened all of this up and no matter how long Man City continue to attempt to prolong it, all the rest of us are thinking is exactly how bad/good will the punishments be once this reaches its inevitable conclusion after the appeal process.