Manchester City Financial Fair Play Controversy

Jules, I'm gonna just take your pulse and get the pulse.

What's the mood right now with this news around English football?

I mean, it's been an absolute earthquake, as you can imagine, a, a proper

bombshell. Not that we didn't know this

was coming at some point.

We've been waiting long enough for this verdict to finally fall, whether

City would have been innocent or declared guilty, as

we've just seen, um, the news being confirmed today that

was kind of leaked or

briefed on Friday last week, and now we've got it.

We've waited eight, eight years for this investigation to

finally come to an end,

and for the, this commission of, of three independent judges to

decide whether City were guilty or not of all the, the,

the charges or 114 of the 115 that we've mentioned before.

I heard Kieran talking to you about it as well, and it's something that,

one, I think the Premier League might struggle

to come back from, because I think

this tarnish a lot of the things that has happened in the Premier League in

the

recent years, obviously. And secondly, for Manchester City, I'm not sure

really how you can come back from it.

Jules, i- if City lose this appeals

process, I'm gonna ask you, what are some of the potential just

consequences of this? Because this is becoming very serious

and becoming very real

in real time.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for now, we, we only all guessing a bit

what the sanctions could be, right?

Because we've never been in this situation before.

Certainly not in English football. We've seen in other countries.

In Italy, for example, probably the most recent of examples,

what happened with

Juventus at the time and the sanction that they faced, and they were given

against them. But for, for an English club, this is, this

is really new

at this level. We've had Everton and Nottingham Forest obviously breaching

the,

the, uh, P- PSR rules if you want, so the English financial fair play rules,

but that was very different to this. This is another magnitude.

This is another planet, another dimension really.

So right now, we are all a bit guessing.

It could go from a heavy fine and maybe a transfer ban to

being expelled from the Premier League, to being relegated, to being docked points

for next season. Some people say maybe the next three

or four,

even five seasons, that at the start of every year, City

are docked 20

points and start the season with minus 20, for example.

There's a potential of stripping, uh, stripping them of the titles

that they won in

that period of '09 to '18, so three Premier League titles,

three League Cups, one FA Cup, one Community Shield.

So there's really a, a long range of sanction possible.

But right now, nobody really knows because we've never

been here before.

Jules, after the international break, Manchester City play away at a very

difficult

place to play in recent history for them, Anfield, against Liverpool.

What sort of atmosphere could we see at Anfield against

Manchester City?

I, I think this is gonna rumble on, obviously.

I m- as you can imagine, we're gonna talk about this between now

and the

restart of the Premier League. We're already looking at how Manchester

City

players seems to react to it or respond to

it from wherever they are with the, with the national team.

So we saw Magh and Nico O'Reilly making mistakes and not being really good with

England the other night against Spain, didn't we?

And a lot of people here in England were saying, "Well, maybe that's the

effect of those, those sanction and the verdict." But we also

saw Erling Haaland scoring goals, missed his chances as well,

but we saw Ryan

Cherki being really good with France.

So it depends a bit, but there's no doubt that in terms of

if you're a City player, a City fan, or Enzo Maresca, that

this would have hurt you quite hard, really.

That would have, that would have hit you hard,

hurt you as well, because you don't

know what the future holds now. For all those players, by the way,

at Manchester

City, who don't have any clause in their

contract in case of

relegation, obviously because City would never get

relegated, now what

happens if they get relegated? What happens to Erling Haaland?

What happen to Ryan Cherki and all the other stars there?

Where's your future without European competition, potentially?

What if you get docked 40 points in the next few weeks?

So all of that has to play on the player's mind, for sure.