The one club you’d expect to have been involved, were not
Nine Premier League clubs wrote to the Court of Arbitration for Sport to ask for Manchester City’s European ban to be upheld, it has been revealed.
CAS’s full report on the case concluded with City’s two-year ban being lifted and the club being handed a €10 million fine, after showing the club “did not disguise equity funding as sponsorship contributions but did fail to cooperate with the UEFA authorities.”
But CAS’s initial decision to ban City from European competition for two years was very popular among their Premier League rivals. The full report discloses that Arsenal, Burnley, Chelsea, Leicester, Liverpool, Man Utd, Newcastle, Spurs and Wolves all wrote to CAS in March asking that ‘a stay of execution’ from the Champions League ban be withheld.
Notably, Sheffield United, who were fifth at the time and would have taken Manchester City’s place in the Champions League had they finished there, did not have any correspondence with CAS.
CAS’s ruling, which Pep Guardiola celebrated with his backroom staff in his living room, allows the manager one more crack at the elusive trophy – should he fail to win it this August – which he has not won since his time at Barcelona. After next season, he will all but certainly move on from Manchester, where he will have stayed longer than either of his two previous clubs.
