Javier Tebas has opened a second front against Manchester City. The La Liga president is not only demanding the toughest possible sanction from the Premier League after the club’s guilty verdict on 114 of 115 financial charges. He also wants the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) to reconsider its 2020 ruling that spared City a two-year ban from European competition.

For Tebas, the length of the case is the crux. Speaking in comments carried this week by Yahoo Sports, he was blunt.

“To have been breaking the rules for more than 10 years, however minor the breaches may have been, is very serious.”

“So there has to be a severe punishment for breaking the rules, not just to set an example, but because the rules were broken.”

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What the commission found

The independent Premier League commission handed down its ruling on Friday. City were found guilty on 114 of the 115 charges brought against them in February 2023, covering the seasons from 2009/10 to 2017/18. The commission has not publicly detailed which single charge the club was cleared of.

The guilty findings break down into 54 counts of failing to provide accurate financial information, 14 counts of failing to provide accurate remuneration details, seven counts of breaching profit and sustainability rules, five counts of breaching UEFA regulations and the remaining counts covering non-cooperation. The commission found that City had misstated sponsorship income and disguised payments during a period in which the club won multiple Premier League titles under Abu Dhabi ownership.

Tebas wants Lausanne to reopen its file

Tebas’s harder-edged demand is aimed at CAS. In 2020 the Lausanne court overturned a two-year ban that UEFA had imposed on City for breaching Financial Fair Play. The ruling ended the sanction and cleared City to remain in the Champions League.

“In my opinion, the decisions of the CAS should be reviewed, because they lifted the sanction that UEFA had imposed on them,” Tebas said.

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“The sanctions were also lifted in a very questionable way. And now it has been shown that UEFA was right about the sanctions it had imposed on Manchester City.”

He has been circling this file for close to a decade. In a piece for Goal, he set out the timeline in his own words.

“In September 2017, during the Soccerex conference in Manchester, I publicly denounced something that had been troubling me for some time: the so-called financial manipulation in European football.”

Of the 2020 CAS decision, he wrote that he “never agreed with that strange ruling”.

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City respond with appeal

Manchester City rejected the commission’s findings and have said they will appeal, describing the ruling as containing “clear material errors, of law, principle and fact” and pledging to be “relentless” in fighting it, according to CBS Sports. The club has until Friday, 2 October, to formally lodge its appeal.

Tebas framed the case as a moment European football cannot walk past.

“What has happened is very important, and hopefully it will be a before-and-after moment, not just in the Premier League but in European football as well, because the Manchester effect was an effect across all of Europe.”

Sanctions available to the commission range from fines and points deductions to a transfer ban, relegation or, at the extreme end, expulsion from the Premier League. None will be decided while City’s appeal is live, and the process is expected to run for months.

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