How to save the Premier League: Man City scandal must persuade elite to share more, not less originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
Liverpool vs. Manchester City on Sunday is one of the most anticipated games in Premier League history. It is likely to be one of the most watched. For all the worthy concern for "the product" this week, crisis and scandal sell in bucketloads.
The spectacle of City's players emerging into an Anfield bearpit for their first match since that brutal Premier League verdict dropped will make the footballing world stop. "We don't even really know what this means" will not prevent people from watching. Emotions from rage to morbid curiosity will capture eyeballs across the globe.
The independent panel's ruling that City are guilty of all charges related to serious financial breaches of competition rules between 2009/10 and 2017/18 is now in a holding pattern until the appeal section of the process runs its course. That should be concluded before the end of January at the latest, although a sanction – imaginations are running wild in this regard – could arrive first.
Once the vitriol, thrown into focus by international break tedium, and the spectacle of Anfield have dissipated, the wholly unsatisfactory weirdness of the whole situation is likely to bite. The hope is that wider conversations about the future wellbeing of the league can have room to breathe and become a little more level-headed.
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If Manchester City's guilt is upheld after appeal, there should be appropriately severe punishment for the 10-time English champions, perhaps one that means they can no longer be called that. But any notion that banishing the big bad wolf would solve all of the Premier League's ills is about as logical as trying to build a robust house out of straw.
City were proven to have benefited to the tune of $1billion (£900million) from "disguised funding schemes" and "sham agreements" during the period in question. They are the only club to have broken into and remained within what was once called the "big four" of Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool at the top of the division during this time. No one lese managing this aside from a club that flouted rules to such an extent does not scream of a system working well.
People have taken various jumping-off points when discussing the game's ills these past weeks. But whatever you think of Financial Fair Play (FFP) or Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR), things were not fine before that. Things were not fine before the Abu Dhabi United Group bought Manchester City in 2008 either.
UEFA's FFP system succeeded in the aim of stopping clubs such as Leeds and Portsmouth from driving themselves close to the wall by spending beyond their means in pursuit of success. The Premier League has become the richest and most prosperous domestic competition in Europe. On their own terms, these endeavours have unquestionably succeeded.
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But most sporting regulation, even the bits that ostensibly work well, come with unintended consequences. And talk of preserving "fair competition" around the City case sticks in the craw. As does the notion that punishment for a club founded in 1894 – 77 years before Abu Dhabi gained independence from the UK – should be so existentially draconian that it "acts as a deterrent".
Changes in the Premier League and UEFA rulebooks since City's 2008 buyout make a similar situation unlikely. More to the point, weakening or removing the link between turnover and spending power would completely deter sham sponsorship agreements because it would remove the incentive to cheat in that manner. This is not to excuse City's actions.
The Premier League is more competitive than any of Europe's other major divisions from top to bottom, something the equalising effects of PSR have enhanced. It is also flush with cash, building year on year from Richard Scudamore's chairmanship at the start of the century. Those days of all are welcome, the days of plenty where the Abramoviches and Mansours were welcomed with open arms.
We're now at a pivot point. And, if competitive balance really is the rallying cry, then a Premier League rolling in cash has a unique opportunity.
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The free marketeers of the 1992 breakaway and all club owners and chief executives ever since have shivered at the mere suggestion of a cap on spending or wages. But if not now, then when? Flushed with global television money, English clubs are continental heavyweights in financial terms. In the Deloitte 2026 Football Money League, 15 of the top 30 clubs were from England, including West Ham and Wolves, despite getting relegated from the Premier League.
There is enough cash around for it to be capped and/or distributed far more equitably. So much of the concern over the past couple of weeks has been around how high City were able to climb and the means by which they reached and stayed at the summit. But there is never enough conversation around what the floor is for the elite when they bottom out and how consequence-free their spells of incompetence are compared to everyone else.
Consider Arsenal's "banter" era, when blood vessels were liberally burst on AFTV, as a managerial great was hounded out and they finished eighth a couple of times. Manchester United were also unable to land outside of the top half despite varying shades of shambles until Ruben Amorim's absurdist social experiment landed in the Old Trafford dugout. If the likes of Bournemouth, Brentford or Brighton had been mismanaged to the extent United have been since 2013, they'd have been relegated at least once. Similarly, it was a good job Liverpool were Liverpool during the dog days or the Hicks-Gillett era or when they appointed Roy Hodgson, or the Championship might have beckoned.
Those three B teams (maybe we'll call them the B Cartel, just to be on trend) are repeatedly praised as the best-run clubs in the Premier League. So why should Bournemouth have to accept losing three of their starting back four to Paris Saint-Germain, Real Madrid and Liverpool in summer 2025, their star forward to Manchester City in January 2026, and their manager joining Liverpool despite guiding them to a sixth-place finish in the face of all those departures?
You've probably never considered this, but it shouldn't be beyond the realm of reasonable thought that a club like Bournemouth could recruit brilliantly, keep all those players, and have a go at winning the league. A Vitality Stadium dynasty! The same goes for Brentford and Brighton, whose best players frequently go elsewhere for big money to be less good.
And it's not just those hipsters' favourites (sorry, I can't use B Cartel with a straight face; it's rubbish). Aston Villa, 1982 European Cup winners, are held up as an example of the Premier League being in good competitive health, after going from Championship to Champions League within six years. The upshot of this was them having to sell the nucleus of their Europa League-winning team this year, including their best player going to Chelsea – a team who never enter the "best run club" conversation but typically finish around the Champions League unless their boardroom folly really gets out of hand.
In November 2025, Premier League clubs voted against the introduction of so-called "anchoring", a very moderate spending cap that would have limited the spending power of all clubs to five times the amount received in central income by the bottom club. Once rules are redrawn in the aftermath of the City scandal – either the book being thrown or any sort of reversal on appeal – this should be a bare minimum.
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Critics of a spending cap will point to the dreaded talent drain. But where are all these players going to earn more than they will at a Premier League club? Real Madrid and Barcelona can't buy everyone. Remember when all of the great and the good were going to flee to the Chinese Super League or the Saudi Pro League – how did that work out? The Premier League's power and wealth should encourage stronger and more equitable regulation, not discourage it.
And if the days of topping all the spending charts taper off, would that be such a dreadful thing? Plenty have benefitted from the Premier League being "The Best League In The World", but fans, in many respects, haven't. The majority of them are paying more than ever for a "product" where their team might do well enough to finish sixth once in a while before the transfer food chain takes over.
The Manchester City crisis creates an opportunity for the Premier League to be bolder than settling back into the status quo.