The road not taken! City held secret settlement talks with the Premier League
Manchester City's financial scandal has taken another twist. According to Bloomberg, the club held early-stage settlement talks with the Premier League over the financial breach charges, a previously unreported attempt to mitigate the massive sanctions looming over the champions.
Details: The settlement discussions were held before the independent commission delivered its seismic verdict late last month, finding that City artificially inflated their financial results by more than £900 million through sham commercial deals bankrolled by Abu Dhabi, and covering up to 114 of the 115 charges brought. According to people familiar with the matter, the talks quickly broke down because the club consistently proclaimed its innocence. The proposed settlement would have focused on a sizeable financial payment rather than the most feared punishments: relegation or the stripping of titles. Given the scale of the Premier League's case, any deal would likely only have reduced the size of the sanction rather than resolved the case entirely. Representatives of both the club and the league declined to comment. City are appealing the commission's verdict, describing the ruling as containing clear material errors of law, principle and fact, and Premier League rules state that an appeal verdict must be published by early February.
The revelation raises the tantalising question of what might have been. A cash settlement, even a record-breaking one, would have spared the Premier League years of legal warfare and spared City the nightmare scenario of points deductions or expulsion, and would have avoided the verdict that has now shaken the club's reputation to its foundations. Yet it would also have infuriated rival clubs: Arsenal, Liverpool and others who lost out on titles during City's era of dominance were always likely to oppose any deal they saw as a whitewash, and the Premier League would have struggled to sell it to its other 19 members. In the end, the club's insistence on its innocence made any middle ground impossible. City now pin their hopes on the appeal, and manager Enzo Maresca said on Friday that the owners are convinced they will win it, adding that he '100 per cent completely trusts' the hierarchy.
It's worth noting that settlement talks are a familiar feature of Premier League discipline, though they have never been used for a case of this magnitude. Even if the appeal fails, any renewed negotiation would now come from a far weaker position for City, with the verdict already public and the league under intense pressure to apply the harshest possible punishment.
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Miguel Solomons
Dailysports's expert
