“At this stage, the narrative changes. No longer should it be a debate about whether the Premier League would dare to drum Manchester City out of England’s top division. Now the question takes another form: how can you justify anything else? Attitudes can only harden now that the first official judgment has been published, subject to an appeal, and the sheer scale of deception is increasingly, and jarringly, clear. Nobody ever thought it would be pretty. We knew, City being City, that the numbers would be eye-watering. We knew there would be mountains of paperwork, legal arguments, redactions and recriminations. Even so, it was still quite something to read the initial 40 pages of findingsissued by the independent commission and learn more, in detail, about how the club manipulated, doctored and abused the system to ensure English football was lopsided in their favour. We knew it was going to be bad. But this bad? No. It is on a different scale to anything the Premier League has seen before. …”
NYT/ATH (Video)