I honestly don't see how they can't be found guilty. They have never once denied any of the emails of theirs that blatantly show them cooking up the commercial activities (and these are just the original Der Spiegel piece, there are scores of other stuff they have been accused of by the PL), their defence thus far has been to say "the emails were obtained illegally".
If the PL want to sell a fantastic product and therefore continue to sell worldwide and continue to grow the money they take then City would actually be a threat to that. City are just too dominant, this makes for a shit contest (to have the same team win every single year, it's not competitive, yet it's sold as competitive). It's honestly in their interest to penalise the fuck out of them. Demote them, take away their titles, fine them and then distribute that money to the rest of the league.
But there just isn't anything that predates this where clubs have ever been appropriately penalised for their crimes. Arguably the ban on English clubs following Heysel Stadium was appropriate, those fans from the other Clubs other than Liverpool would argue otherwise with some justification, but the penalty was severe and completely appropriate when taking into account that nearly 50 people were killed. And was the begging of getting hooliganism out of football (another debate entirely but the way this was actually done was largely wrong IMO).
But yeah, I've zero confidence that they will end up with a big fine but one that still shows that it was worth every penny because they still benefited from doing it.
One fundamental thing that I don't understand is why would they bother to cook the books the way they did. Why not just do what Abramovich did and just pump their money in under a loan?
