Man City face severe penalties after being found guilty by the Premier League (Credits: Harvey Todd/Every Second Media/S) Football is an angry place just now. Consider that the Premier League’s ruling on Manchester City’s financial activities covers nine seasons – a period ending in 2018 – and you can perhaps imagine why. The judgment finally released this Tuesday says City cheated and continued to cheat, in what now looks a fairly high-handed way. They secretively used money from the club’s Abu Dhabi owners to bypass the financial restrictions that their competitors were under – and in doing so, they built a team good enough to produce an unprecedented 100-point season. For some people, the intricacies of football accounting are riveting enough to make this fascinating. The majority rely on others to explain where City have gone wrong and how it benefited them. Less football on the telly? Read about it instead Our exclusive football newsletter cuts through the noise to deliver analysis and gossip straight to your inbox every week. Sign up now for free. Still more have already reached saturation point: the seasons are complete, City were the best team, nothing can change that, so why should I care? Lawyers for other Premier League and EFL clubs are already tooling up to answer that question. If, the theory goes, the presence of Manchester City in the Champions League (due to unfair advantages gained by fraud) deprived other teams of such rewards, they will seek redress. The scope of that is wild. Manchester City allegations timeline November 2018: German newspaper Der Spiegel publish claims Manchester City have breached FFP rules March 2019: UEFA launch investigation into the claims May 2019: Manchester City launch an appeal against the investigation November 2019: The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) rules the appeal as inadmissible February 2020: Manchester City are handed a two-year ban from European competition and a €30m fine by UEFA July 2020: The ban is overturned after the club appeal to CAS April 2022: Der Spiegel report the Premier League has been investigating Manchester City for three years February 2023: The Premier League charges the club with 115 breaches of its financial rules September 2024: Start of a 10-week hearing between the Premier League and Manchester City September 2026: Reports emerge that Manchester City have been found guilty on all but one of the 115 financial rules the club are accused of breaking If a club has missed out on a place that produces a minimum £50m in Champions League prize money, they have been unable to invest that figure in their team. Or let’s say your side got relegated by a single place. That’s an even bigger financial loss: generally experts estimate the cost of Premier League relegation around £100m. And so on. Clearly when calculating damages it’s in the clubs’ interests to estimate as provocatively as possible. But these two examples show how rivals might reasonably itemise huge figures given the scope of City’s alleged breaches. Perhaps the financial concerns of football clubs doesn’t get your heart racing. You may take the broader view and say teams with the most money have always used it to be the best – why are City suddenly so different? It’s unfair that rules came in that prevented them doing what teams have always done. Nottingham Forest signed Trevor Francis in 1979 with a transfer fee of one million pounds that was nearly double the previous highest fee. He scored the winner in the European Cup final a few months later. Was that win bought? Or what about free-spending 1990s side Blackburn Rovers? Or Manchester United, the league’s biggest spenders in their era of dominance. Man City won three Premier League titles during the period in question (Photo: Getty) Perhaps they shouldn’t have been able to do it, but the rules City have allegedly broken are those they agreed to with their fellow Premier League clubs, and they are necessary. A great example of what happ