Stan Collymore does not want Manchester City docked a few points. He wants them gone. The former Liverpool striker has called for a full Man City expulsion, arguing that if their appeal against 114 Premier League financial charges fails, the club should be cast out of the top flight entirely and forced to climb back up from the National League.
The comments followed a Premier League decision published on Tuesday that found City guilty on the majority of their financial charges.
Richard Masters, the Premier League’s chief executive, said City had systematically broken the rules for almost a decade. For Collymore, who still holds a special place among Liverpool supporters, that finding demanded the harshest response available.
Collymore wants City expulsion from the Premier League
Collymore’s anger is not really about Manchester City as a brand. It is about what he believes the club did, and how long they got away with it. Setting out exactly how severe he thinks the punishment should be, he said:
“I would exclude them from the Premier League for a period.” He went further still: “I would expel them from the EFL, which means they would have to start from the lowest National League. They would have to get promoted all the way back again.”
It means years spent grinding through four divisions, starting at the bottom of the English football pyramid, with no shortcuts back. Collymore laid out his thinking at length in the original interview with the Liverpool Echo.
Collymore moved to Liverpool for a British record fee from Nottingham Forest in 1995, and he made 81 appearances for the club between 1995 and 1997. Liverpool’s own response to the case has already been covered in our Klopp reaction piece.
City fount guilty of sham financial matters
The scale of the findings explains why Collymore reached for such a drastic punishment. The Premier League’s decision showed that City had artificially inflated their commercial revenue by £830m between 2009 and 2018. The description of systematic rule-breaking across almost a decade made clear this was not treated as a one-off breach.
The redacted version of the decision referred to “sham” contracts set up at the Etihad to get around financial rules. City confirmed on Friday that they have appealed, so the case is far from settled. Even so, the published verdict alone was enough to convince Collymore that a Man City expulsion is the only outcome that fits what was found.
Collymore doesn’t want City back after a year
Collymore does not think a straightforward relegation to the Championship would deter anyone.
“If the EFL decides to keep them and just put them in the Championship, then I would want the Premier League to expel them from the Premier League in five years,” he said.
His reasoning is simple that City would likely bounce straight back up within a year or two, so a season or two in the Championship would barely register as punishment at all.
He also wants financial restitution attached to any sanction. Collymore said City should hand back revenue earned through sponsorships, Premier League prize money and television money. He said he would work out a specific sum to be paid to the clubs that lost points, dropped into the Championship or missed out on titles because of City’s conduct.
For him, the punishment should prove that the name on the shirt does not matter, only what the club has actually done. He was careful to add he would say the same about Aston Villa, Liverpool, Manchester United, Rochdale, Sheffield United or Bromley.
Title must be stripped from Manchester City
Collymore took that principle further on trophies. If a club he had played for were found guilty, he would strip every title won across the relevant years.
He said a club could not keep winning without whatever advantage the breaches provided. He would not hand those trophies to other clubs. Instead, he would mark those seasons with an asterisk, explaining why no genuine champion was recorded.
What any of this means in practice for City’s current squad is harder to pin down. Liverpool fans already have one eye on the next meeting between the clubs, previewed in our Man City preview, while others have started wondering what a relegated City might mean for the transfer market, a scenario raised in our relegation-watch piece.
Collymore’s version of justice, built from the lowest tier of the National League upwards, remains the most severe anyone connected to Liverpool has put into words since Tuesday’s verdict.
