Neville spoke out on the huge sanctions that could await City (Picture: Shutterstock Editorial)
Gary Neville believes the only fitting punishment for Manchester City is for their owners to be removed from the club.
City have been found guilty of all charges relating to serious breaches of Premier League financial rules by an independent commission. The commission found the club arranged ‘sham’ contracts and ‘disguised schemes’ to inflate club revenue by £830million, covering a period from the 2009-10 season to 2017-18.
City are expected to appeal and have until Friday 2 October to do so. A number of punishments are said to be on the table, ranging from huge fines, points deductions, expulsion from the Premier League or the retrospective stripping of titles.
Neville however believes the only punishment befitting of the crime is to expel City’s current ownership from the Premier League, fearing the charges will have ‘chilling’ ramifications for English football.
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‘Manchester City will recover as a football club because Manchester City have been there longer than these owners, they’ll be there long after them, and it’s got an immense history,’ Neville said on the latest episode of Stick To Football.
‘Points deductions, fines, transfer bans, removing the titles – not giving them to others, just removing the titles – it’s significant punishments. The only punishment that would be fair would be have huge consequences – the biggest consequence – would be removing the owners.
‘That is the only consequence if I was Manchester City that I would be worried about. And as a fan of Manchester City, if you wanted to keep the investment that you’ve currently got, that would be the one I’d be most concerned about.
City won three league titles during the period in question (Picture: Tom Jenkins/Getty Images)
‘However, if you’re in football and you’re thinking about consequence, what can be more serious than industrial-level financial doping that we’ve seen and they’ve been found guilty of? I’m not celebrating.
‘This is chilling to listen to this. It’s chilling. The Italian game has suffered immeasurably over the last 25 years, maybe from after [Calciopoli]. You know, we’ve played Juventus, we’ve alluded to this before, we felt at the time that this wasn’t right.
City are expected to appeal this week (Picture: PA)
‘And I’m not saying that’s going to happen to the Premier League. But we always think we’ve got this enormous integrity, the Premier League, that we are the league that sets the standard and it’s other leagues that have got corruption, fraud, doping scandals, match fixing, referee scandals.
‘This has now come into our country, this has now come into our league. This is the greatest export that we have in our country in the world.
‘If you go around the world and talk about Liverpool, Manchester, Arsenal – people talk about the Premier League more than anything when you tell them where you’re from in the world. And at the moment, we’re being dragged through the mud.’
Neville’s comments came after Prime Minister Andy Burnham expressed concern about potentially losing City’s owners following their guilty verdict, praising City Football Group’s investment in Manchester.
‘I would be really concerned to lose them,’ Burnham, former mayor of Greater Manchester, said when asked by the BBC if he was worried about them selling the club.
‘They’ve been such a huge partner in the building of modern Manchester. Obviously, the building of Manchester City into the global force that it is.’
In a further development on Wednesday, City’s main sponsor Etihad Airways released a statement saying it was assessing its legal options following an independent commission’s ruling.
