Man City FFP: Lord Pannick ‘will argue’ for measly £20m fine after Chelsea precedent set | OneFootball

Manchester City “will argue” that they shouldn’t receive a points deduction but a measly £20m fine as we wait for the verdict of their legal case with the Premier League on the back of Chelsea’s sanction earlier this month.

An independent commission hearing to examine 115 charges laid by the Premier League against Man City started in September 2024 and ended in December.

The Premier League opened an investigation into Man City way back in 2018 and after a number of legal delays, charges were finally laid in February 2023 and the club were referred to an independent commission.

The charges against the Citizens relate to the requirement to accurately report financial information, including around the value of sponsorship deals, the submission of details of manager and player pay information and to a club’s responsibility as a Premier League member to adhere to UEFA’s financial regulations and to the league’s own profitability and sustainability rules (PSR).

They are also accused of failing to co-operate with the league’s investigation. In all, there are charges relating to every season between 2009-10 and 2022-23.

Possible sanctions range from a fine to a hefty points deduction, while City could also be retrospectively stripped of titles, but former club captain Richard Dunne believes any punishment should be delayed until the end of the season despite hitting out at the verdict taking so long.

When asked if any imminent rulings will be delayed, Dunne told : “It’s been ridiculous already, the amount of time that it’s dragged on. They’ve come to a conclusion a long time ago, so why it’s taken so long to get around to giving out their results of what they found is stupid.

“I mean, it just undermines the whole Premier League if they start coming out now at this stage of the season and you’ve got the opportunity of a real interesting title race over the next couple of months. So, they’re ruining their own competition if they come out and start making decisions now. It’s something that’s best left until the summer and they can work out what they’re going to do going forward rather than retrospectively.”

Chelsea were recently hit with a £10m fine and one-year transfer ban suspended for two years relating to secret payments made to agents worth £47.5m between 2011 and 2018, when Roman Abramovich was owner, and breaches of rules around registering youth players.

And former Man City financial adviser Stefan Borson had explained what the Chelsea verdict could mean for the Citizens and what Lord Pannick KC – City’s lead barrister in the case – ‘will argue’ on the back of the Blues’ sanction.

“Remember the way City’s situation is going to work,” said Borson.

“You have a decision on liability, then we’re going to have a period where it’s digested, and then we’re going to have a sanction hearing depending on what they do with the appeals.

“But let’s just say that they wait for the appeals until all of it’s done, and then they appeal everything. Of course, we don’t know if City are going to be found liable, and City deny it.

“So, what would happen in the sanction hearing is when the parties pitch in what they think the sanctions should be, City are going to be saying, ‘Well, hang on a minute. The precedent that you should be using and pointing to is not Everton and Nottingham Forest’. I mean, obviously this depends on what the consequential impact is of City.

“Let’s say City breach and that therefore also means that they end up breaching PSR, then of course City can be squarely in the Everton and Nottingham Forest realms of sanction, so it’s going to be very hard for City to say, ‘Well, we should be treated differently from the PSR breach’,” Borson added.

“But in the way that those have been calculated, the situation now is pretty set for a PSR breach.

“But if it’s not, if what ends up happening is City are found, let’s say in the words of the Chelsea case, to have obviously and deliberately breached and to have concealed it with deception, which is the conclusion of the Chelsea situation, in that scenario, City will say, ‘Well, the Chelsea situation has established authority for that to be a financial penalty only.

“Yes, we might not have the same level of cooperation, but it says in the Chelsea sanction that absent of the cooperation and the early admission, they would have had double the fine. So fine, we’ll take a £20m fine for those elements’. That’s what City will argue.”