Rangers fans are very keen to hear Manchester City’s fate | OneFootball

The Manchester City topic is one that Ibrox Noise has generally veered away from until a verdict had been reached. Rangers fans, of course, have an emotional investment in this story given what happened to our club back in 2012. We are very sure that the Sevconians and moon howlers will be all over this article like a rash. But them’s the breaks. Nevertheless, we will tackle this topic head on and look at the Manchester City football rules situation.

We are not even going to look just yet at the accusations that are starting to circle regarding Celtic in this matter. For now, we will simply take a look at the Rangers angle.

Manchester City football rules and Rangers

Rangers’ fate in 2012 was decreed by, essentially, Craig Whyte and a law break. He violated HMRC rules and tax requirements and ended up putting Rangers into administration as a result of his own borderline deliberate criminal acts. Those, of course, involved violating HMRC requirements regarding PAYE, National Insurance and VAT.

Rangers, as a club, did absolutely nothing wrong, but the owner took matters into his own hands and broke the law which put Rangers in a lot of trouble. Put simply, Rangers did not break any football rules whatsoever and yet the football authorities still punished the club nevertheless. The whole thing was a lynch mob.

Rangers EBTs and football rules

Meanwhile, Manchester City are going through something quite different. They have broken football rules involving FFP, payment levels, sham payments, contractual violations and other such things which an independent tribunal has found them guilty of based on hard evidence.

We do not have any sympathy for Manchester City. Their fans obviously will be going through a tough time right now, having had years of undeserved success, and there is the problem. Rangers used EBTs, which were a very grey area of paying players. They were not exactly illegal, nor were they entirely legal. They were a manipulative system designed to allow Rangers to pay players a bit more than perhaps might otherwise have been expected. However, this was entirely on the books and entirely above board. It just was not exactly endorsed.

Manchester City financial violations and rules

That said, what Manchester City did was quite different. They literally broke football rules outright to cheat. There is nothing more, put simply, than that. Manchester City lied about their finances, their payments, their sponsors and their wage structure. They hid revenue in other ways to inflate the numbers and try to allow themselves to spend more than they were permitted. They broke no laws, but violated football governance to win unlawfully.

Manchester City had the cash, but the rules dictated that they could not use it. They still decided to do so by manipulating the figures around it to pay out more than they should have been able to. This was not anything to do with anything any Sevconians might imply regarding Rangers. This was outright football cheating and violating the direct rules of the football authorities and, of course, the Premier League in order to have things that they should not have had for those numbers. The Manchester City football rules case is therefore quite different from what happened at Ibrox.

Manchester City punishment now key in football

Put simply, there is nothing more to it than that and Manchester City’s case is open and shut. The question is: how will they be punished?

Rangers fans are very intrigued by this whole story, as is the whole of Scottish football and indeed the wider football world, because City have been a colossus in the sport for such a long time. We will be very, very interested to see the outcome of this one.