Frank Lampard would not take a side.

Two weeks after Manchester City were found guilty of 114 of 115 financial breach charges spanning 2009 to 2018, the Coventry City boss was asked at his pre-match press conference whether the club should now lose titles. The reporter was asking a man who has three Premier League winner’s medals of his own, all from his years at Chelsea.

“I don’t have an opinion on it right now,” Lampard said at the press conference, as reported by Sports Mole on Thursday.

He offered a thought on silverware in general.

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“I have titles, and I don’t have them hanging on my wall at home but I have them in my head.”

Then came the line that drew the backlash.

“Most players that have played and competed against the best players have worked very hard to win. So I think it would be very hard to take someone’s title away as a player individually, as I think they should be in your head as opposed to in this beautiful glass cabinet or whatever.”

Supporters online pushed back quickly, arguing the trophies in question had been won in seasons the Premier League has now ruled were built on broken financial rules.

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‘I played for Man City a long time ago now’

Lampard spent the 2014/15 season on loan at Manchester City from New York City FC. Chelsea won the Premier League title that year. City finished second.

He pulled personal distance around the whole situation.

“We’ve all seen the news, it’s obviously big news, Man City are appealing. What can you say when an appeal is going on? I’m not inside the story, I’m outside it completely,” he said, according to AOL’s coverage of the press conference.

“I played for Man City a long time ago now, for one year.”

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Manchester City have confirmed they will appeal. The independent commission has yet to decide sanctions.

Points, fines or trophies gone

The sanctions menu is wide. Points deductions, financial penalties, relegation and the loss of titles are all theoretically available to the commission, according to Al Jazeera’s summary of the verdict, which reported that eight of City’s recent league titles plus their 2023 Champions League trophy could be at risk.

Analysts tracking the case view title-stripping as the extreme end of the range rather than the probable outcome. Writing for Football365, the panel noted that retrospective points deductions, applied to past seasons, are the mechanism that could in theory produce the loss of a trophy, with The Athletic’s David Ornstein pointing to “any points deduction” raising “the prospect of City being stripped of titles.”

The Daily Mail’s Mike Keegan, cited in the same piece, framed it the same way: deductions applied to previous seasons would raise the chance that titles are forfeited.

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Lampard’s own appearance in all this is more peripheral than the question put to him suggested. The three league titles he actually won were lifted in Chelsea blue, in 2004/05, 2005/06 and 2009/10, long before City’s charge period began. His single season at the Etihad produced no league trophy for him to lose.

Coventry City face Newcastle United on Monday.

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