Six wins from six, top of the league, 3-0 at Anfield. In any other October that is a title defence taking shape. Miguel Delaney, the Independent’s chief football writer, watched it and came away with a far grimmer reading: this might be a season that does not count, and the Premier League “can’t go on like this, at least in any kind of proper sense”.
His column, “The Man City mess is unsustainable for the Premier League”, published on Monday, opens with a senior football figure describing the mood as “sitting in purgatory”. It is the sharpest thing written about the weekend, and its closing paragraphs carry the line City should fear most.
Bananas at one end, “going down” at the other
Delaney’s eye for the scene does a lot of the work. Enzo Maresca “sat there beaming”. City were full of what he calls “righteous jubilation”. And all of it was played out “to the soundtrack of Liverpool fans singing ‘going down'”. The Independent’s own picture desk caught City supporters waving inflatable bananas at the home end before kick off. Nobody in that away end was behaving like a club in purgatory.
“Up. Down. All so unclear, not least how to feel about it,” Delaney writes. Nine words, and they cover the whole problem. Anfield proved his point on Sunday. Liverpool went down to ten after Ryan Gravenberch’s red card and lost 3-0, and the home end’s answer was a chorus of “going down”. When the home crowd’s main comeback to a heavy defeat is that the winners might not be in the league next year, the table has stopped settling arguments.
Rival executives reach for the rule book
The meat of the column is reporting, not mood. Delaney says executives at other clubs were messaging each other during the game about whether the league should suspend City now, or whether 15 clubs should push for a vote. One called it “a farce that will lead to protest, damage to the integrity and reputation of the competition, and possibly even violence”. Others went digging until they reached Rule B6, under which 15 clubs could, in theory, vote to expel City.
He is careful here, and deserves credit for it. The expulsion route, he writes, has “virtually no chance”: owners disagree, several have business ties with Abu Dhabi, and City would go to the High Court and win. His point is that people are angry enough to say it out loud at all. “It’s clearly that urgent,” one executive told him.
We would go a step further. Delaney quotes executives who are angry about a vote they accept will fail, and they said all of it to the Independent’s chief football writer the morning after a Super Sunday showpiece. Talk of B6 is pressure, aimed at the league’s board and at whoever eventually decides City’s punishment. That is our read, not Delaney’s claim, but it explains why a vote nobody expects to win is being discussed at all.
Owners worried about the brand they built
There is a quieter worry in the piece too. Delaney counts around four Premier League ownerships looking to sell, with Everton the most public, and says buyers were already getting cagey before the verdict. “Franchise value”, for want of a better phrase, “is currently plummeting”, he writes.
He calls that a “grim irony”, and he is being polite. His own explanation is that the Premier League’s “neoliberal view to ownership” is what “left it in this situation in the first place”. City’s case bears him out. The commission found “sham” contracts with commercial partners in a “disguised funding scheme” that inflated revenue by £830m between 2009/10 and 2017/18, according to Sky Sports’ summary of the judgment, which City dispute. Owners now fretting that this has dented the resale value sound a lot like a landlord complaining about tenants he chose. We have little sympathy.
The forecast City should fear
Here is where the column earns its headline. Clubs voting City out is fantasy. But Delaney points out that the Premier League board can ask for suspension when it makes its case on sanctions, and that the independent commission can grant it. Then comes the kicker: “there is an increasing feeling the panel might feel compelled for sanctions of that severity, due to the will to protect the competition.”
That is the gruesome bit. A points deduction can be swallowed. Everton were docked eight points in 2023/24, six on appeal for one breach and two more for a second, and still finished 15th. City are already six from six. A suspension decided by the same process City are fighting would wipe out the whole campaign, and Delaney reports that people inside the game now think it is a live option. That is the forecast in his column, and it is about as bleak as they come for a side top of the table.
City, for their part, remain adamant they will be cleared on appeal, and Delaney describes an anger inside the club that they are “currently acting on”. On Sunday that anger produced a 3-0 at Anfield. In front of a panel it buys nothing. He also slips in the sentence City’s supporters will least want to read: this all comes from “an investigation into the words the club’s own staff wrote. No one else.” Whatever City say about agendas and cartels, that is where the case lives.
Our verdict: he is right, and the cure is speed
Delaney’s diagnosis is correct. A league whose whole purpose is “putting on football matches that mean something” cannot spend a season staging matches that might be annulled in the spring. Where we would push harder is on the fix. Boardroom votes and leaked threats only add to the chaos he describes. The one thing that helps is a timetable everyone can see and the league actually keeping to it. City lodged their appeal on 1 October, and under the new, faster rules Sky Sports reports a decision should land around the third week of January. Every week of slippage past that is another weekend like Anfield.
Jamie Carragher made the same demand for a resolution “as soon as possible” on Sky; we look at why his warning cuts deepest in Neville and Carragher on the Manchester City stain. And Gary Neville wants off City games altogether until the appeal is heard; we think he should stay in the chair.
Sources: The Independent, Sky Sports, Premier League.
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