Man City FFP saga to drag on for ‘another couple of years’ with imminent verdict & punishments for Premier League giants considered ‘unrealistic’

The Premier League giants have seen at least 115 charges hanging over the Etihad Stadium since February 2023. An independent hearing into supposed monetary mismanagement has been completed, but no ruling has been delivered.

City boss Pep Guardiola had previously suggested that an outcome would be revealed in the spring of 2025, but that is no longer the case. According to The i Paper, the process could still “run for many more months”.

There has been talk of City being stung with points deductions, transfer embargoes or even expulsion from the English top-flight. Those in Manchester, along with a number of rivals with vested interests in their fate, are seemingly no closer to knowing what the future holds.

Maxime van den Dijssel, a sports and litigation lawyer at Brandsmiths and an expert in arbitration, has told The i Paper: “There is such a big media frenzy around it that people have almost forgotten that this is what happens quite regularly in arbitration.

“Arbitrators won’t necessarily pay attention to the frenzy around it [the case]. They’ll have a lot of material to get through, the stakes are very high and they need to cover all bases. They won’t want to leave any room for either side to argue there is procedural unfairness.

“They will take that little bit longer to render a decision. It doesn’t necessarily indicate it’s going one way or another, it’s more a matter of them doing their job as carefully as possible.

“It does lead us into a position where we might not have a decision until leading into next season and then, subject to appeals, there’s going to be a lot of uncertainty about their placement in the league, how it impacts other clubs in the competition, so there is a lot we still don’t know.

“I’m not surprised it’s taking this long. It’s common for things to take this long. They have to all effectively sit in a room and decide and go through it, and when there’s that much material, it makes sense that it would take this long.”

Another legal expert has claimed that the lengthy Financial Fair Play saga could still have “another couple of years to run”, while City’s stance has always been that they have done nothing wrong - with there still a “sense of bullishness at the Etihad” as they plan for the next transfer window.