- Mar 10, 2005
- 40,319
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In an ideal world, yes of course City should be dealt with immediately.I don't understand why there are charges being leveled against clubs and punishment dished out when City are still on the table. Any punishment they will be handed won't affect this season, or any of the seasons in which the offenses occurred, but Everton and Forest are expected to swallow this and potentially lose millions when relegated, while City continue to operate as if nothing is going on. And now that they know that they can overwhelm the system and that no punishment is coming their way until these cases are ALL investigated, they can continue to pile on knowing that it just buys them more time.
It's a joke, it really is. If I was responsible for a club who were under the microscope right now, surely the lawyers have a case to demand fair treatment compared to other teams and a stay of several years between offense committed and punishment being meted out, to give them a chance to put in place the necessary measures to limit the impact.
City are fucking cheats to a degree that has broken the process, that should warrant an even stronger, immediate response, not leave them alone until every minute, complicated detail has been poured over, appealed, poured over again, disputed and fought in court...
In the long run I suspect that the City brass are hoping that the punishment will be retrospective, that losing titles that they've already celebrated and benefited from financially - no impact at all. Even if they are told they need to pay back the winnings difference from first place to wherever they ended up, that's not even going to dent them.
But the reason Everton and now Forest can be charged and punished quickly is because their finances have gone over the limit in very obvious ways. The clubs are only arguing a) how much the punishment should be, and b) technical matters. Like Forest are now not arguing that they went over FFP limits, but that the only reason they did so was because it was more profitable to sell Johnson to us late in the window than selling him to Brentford earlier would've been.
They are also thus arguing that having June 30th as a cutoff date is nonsensical because of the way the transfer window works, and that is an argument I sort of agree with, but that doesn't change the fact that they know they were over the FFP limits as the rules currently are.
But City's books and FFP filings don't show anything wrong. The whole City case is about cheating and obfuscation in order to make the books look correct and within the limits. We can all agree that it looks like they have cooked the books from an outside point of view, but for an investigation to actually prove that takes a long time. And if they rush it in any way, you can bet anything City will take them to CAS and get any ban or deduction overturned on procedural grounds.
For City to be punished and, crucially, for that punishment to stick, the job has to be done extremely thoroughly. And we can all be annoyed that it is taking so long, but I'd rather they took their time and got it right than rushed it and fucked it.