"The punishment should be severe, not only to set an example, but because the rules were broken." Javier Tebas has been saying Manchester City are cheating for years. Now that an independent panel has effectively confirmed it, the LaLiga president wants blood — or at least something close to it.
An independent panel found City guilty of 114 of the 115 alleged breaches of Premier League financial rules, covering conduct stretching back to 2009. More than a decade of non-compliance. City have always denied wrongdoing, but the verdict doesn't leave much room for that position now.
Tebas has been on this since 2017
What gives Tebas's intervention some weight is the timeline. He raised concerns about City at Soccerex back in 2017. Neither City nor the Premier League appreciated it at the time. He's spent years arguing this wasn't just an English football problem — that financial doping distorts competition across the whole continent. The findings vindicate that argument in the most direct way possible.
"As many clubs are saying, titles were lost that shouldn't have been lost to other clubs," he said. That's the part that stings the most. It's not an abstract regulatory failure. Clubs finished second. Players didn't get medals. Seasons were defined by outcomes that were potentially fraudulent.
Tebas also took aim at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which overturned UEFA's two-year Champions League ban in 2020 — a ban imposed after City were found to have overstated sponsorship revenue between 2012 and 2016. "In my opinion, the decisions by the Court of Arbitration for Sport should be reviewed," he said. "Now it has been shown that UEFA was right."
What comes next — and what it means for the table
Sanctions could range from fines to points deductions to, at the extreme end, relegation. Premier League clubs are already seeking legal advice about compensation, which tells you how seriously the rest of the division is taking this. If points deductions go back retroactively, the title picture from multiple seasons could shift. That's not a hypothetical — it's a live legal question.
PFA chief executive Maheta Molango pointed to the human cost of the uncertainty: "There are human beings behind all those stories, and people trying to achieve certain things in their careers." He's right, though his concern cuts both ways — City's players and staff have spent years under a cloud, but so have the players at clubs who may have been robbed of titles, European spots, and the prize money that comes with them.
"The consequence needs to be immediate," Molango said. Given that this case has already taken years to conclude, that ship has sailed. What remains is whether the punishment, when it finally lands, is proportionate to 15 years of alleged rule-breaking — or whether it ends up being a fine that a club of City's resources can absorb without flinching.
