Manchester City face being docked a mind-boggling 100 points if found guilty of breaching Premier League rules, according to one expert.
The defending champions are facing 115 charges covering failure to give ‘a true and fair view of the club’s financial position’, a failure to ‘include full details’ of player and manager remuneration, breaches of national and continental financial fair play regulations and a failure to ‘cooperate with, and assist, the Premier League in its investigations’.
One of the biggest trials in football history begins on Monday at an undisclosed location with proceedings taking place over the next 10 weeks with a verdict expected in early 2025.
The charges relate to alleged breaches over a nine-year period beginning in 2009.
If charges are proven, football finance expert Kieran Maguire is expecting the Premier League to come down hard on City, who have won the last four Premier League titles and eight of the last 13 in total.
Maguire suggests a 100 point deduction – which would effectively confirm relegation from the Premier League – is a very real prospect.
‘They’d have to be looking at a very significant points deduction if all he 115 charges are proven,’ he told talkSPORT.
‘Then you would imagine the points deduction would be somewhere in the region of 60 to 100 points on the basis that they’d want the club to have have suffered enough to be on heading out of the division.’
Maguire added: ‘Whilst the hearing will finish in eight weeks, if you’ve got all of that evidence to present to the commission, they’re probably going to take three to four months because they’ve got to rule on each of those 115 charges separately.
‘If they are guilty of all of them then it’s got to be so severe that any club that thinks about going down that route again will realise that it would be a very detrimental thing for that club’s future.’
The Premier League has the ability to carry out a number of sanctions against clubs found guilty to have broken their rules with fines, point deductions and even expulsion possibilities.
City have strongly denied all allegations