Ex-Man City star insists the one essential FFP punishment is in fact ‘irrelevant’

There is no perfect punishment for Manchester City. Everyone is in agreement – assuming their doomed appeal comes to nothing – that they should be sanctioned, but whether it be expulsion, a points deduction, a big fine or a transfer ban, there’s always going to be ramifications for an innocent party.

The players and manager, first of all, who we assume have done nothing wrong. Any punishment is going to negatively affect their careers.

A fine to match the £900m ‘sham’ sponsorship figure makes sense, but then how should that be redistributed? Should it be portioned out according to the damages suffered by Premier League teams as a result of their cheating? What about the teams who were relegated thanks to Man City? Should it trickle all the way down the football pyramid?

A string of transfer bans seems reasonable, but then what happens when all of their players leave in the very first transfer window and they can’t field a squad without sending skilful 14-year-olds out to get battered by League Two brutes?

Relegation from the Premier League created a problem for the EFL, as that is effectively one promotion place gone for next season. How do you square a punishment on City that then turns into a punishment on 24 other clubs?

Retrospective punishment in the form of City being stripped of their titles comes with its own problems, but former Manchester City defender Danny Mills has missed the point entirely as he rails against what he believes to be an “irrelevant” sanction.

He told GOAL: “This is then the problem. You assume after that [2018], financially they were OK. But that was only brought about because they had a much bigger base to start with.

“Where do you draw the line of how this benefited you post-2018, 2019, as opposed to before it? Because if you didn’t have this base, you wouldn’t have been able to attract these players. You wouldn’t have been able to do this with your stadium. You wouldn’t have had to do X, Y, Z. It’s even more complicated.

“There is no perfect solution in all this. I think a line has to be drawn and say, ‘right, OK, up to this point, these rules were broken, therefore, this is the sanction that’s going to be put in place because we can’t do it retrospectively because it’s pointless’.

“You can take titles away, irrelevant. You can take medals and trophies away from players, irrelevant. They’ve had those moments, they’ve had those days out, they’ve had those bonuses. You’ve had all the upside of that for a number of years.

“If you want to come and take my Carling Cup medal away [won with Middlesbrough in 2004], come and take it. I still won the Carling Cup. You can buy my medal off me. You didn’t win it, I did. So as a player, it’s kind of irrelevant if you want to take those titles away. It doesn’t make any difference.

“If it was this season or last season, it’s slightly different, but you’re looking at almost 10 years ago. It doesn’t matter, in effect. It would be like going back now and saying, ‘well, 1966, the ball didn’t cross the line, therefore, England didn’t win the World Cup’. Sadly, it’s only, I think, Sir Geoff Hurst that’s still alive now. 50-odd years, it’s kind of irrelevant.

“So retrospective punishments are incredibly difficult. It’s how you sanction and sentence the club going forward. And again, that’s going to be incredibly complicated.”

We can only draw the line at 2018. Yes, City probably wouldn’t have won major trophies after that, including the treble in 2023, had they not cheated over that nine-year period; Pep Guardiola almost certainly wouldn’t have been their manager, for one.

But there’s simply no way the commission can call for trophies and medals to be stripped outside the period under investigation. The backlash from City – not unreasonably – would be unbearable.

However, while the players may feel that having their medals binned is “irrelevant”, this isn’t about them. It’s the club that needs to suffer the consequences and be made an example of.

We’re not advocating for the nine trophies they won in those nine years to be reallocated. The team that finished second in the Premier League in those title-winning years wasn’t necessarily the second best team. Other challengers may have focused on other trophies when it became clear they had little chance of catching City, for example. It’s all far too messy.

But there needs to be blanks where Manchester City’s name currently resides in the list of trophy winners, not least so that in 20, 50, 100 years time, when your kids or grandkids ask why no team won the Premier League in 2013/14, you can explain to them that a football club cheated their way to the title and therefore didn’t deserve it.

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