Graham Wright

Five games, five wins, top of the league. Manchester City, a fortnight after an independent commission found they systematically broke the Premier League's financial rules for nine straight seasons. So what exactly are we all watching? Not asking for the season to be scrapped. That's daft, and it punishes nineteen clubs who've done nowt wrong. But I'd like somebody at the Premier League to explain why the table at the top of every sports page is one they already know is wrong. Because here's where we actually are. The commission has ruled. City lodged their appeal on October 1st. No sanction has been announced. Nobody knows when it will be. Sky are reporting that Premier League clubs themselves don't expect City to even BE in this league next season if the appeal fails. And in the meantime, the league just carries on. Points are awarded. Positions are published. Clubs are planning January windows around a table that might be fiction. Think about who that actually hurts. Not City, they're fine, they're top. It's the club that goes down in May by two points and later finds out the table was never real. It's the club that sacks a manager in February over a league position that gets rewritten. It's the staff at a relegated club losing their jobs over a season nobody can stand behind. Real money, real people, decided by a table the league itself can't vouch for. And the bit that genuinely sticks in the throat. Everton got docked ten points, mid season, reduced to six. Forest got four. Both for single PSR breaches. Both punished DURING the season it mattered, so the table stayed honest. Eighty charges over nine seasons, plus thirty five for refusing to cooperate with the investigation into it, and somehow that one has to wait. Carragher's right. Do it this season. Whatever it is, apply it now, to this table, the way it was applied to Everton and Forest. Because every week this drags on, the Premier League is asking us to treat a standings table as real while quietly knowing it might not be. Due process matters and the appeal has to be heard, I'm not arguing with that. But there's a difference between due process and letting a club sit top of a competition for an entire season while the punishment for breaking that competition's rules sits in a drawer. The league's credibility isn't damaged by what City did ten years ago. It's damaged by what the league is choosing to do about it now. Nine seasons. Then three years of charges. Then a verdict. And still, somehow, nothing. Who's season is this, exactly? 🖤🖤 #PremierLeague #MCFC