Former Liverpool and England striker Stan Collymore believes Manchester City should lose every trophy won since 2009, not just those from the nine seasons at the centre of their financial rules case. He argues that the success built afterwards was only possible because of what came before it.
An independent commission found City guilty of almost all of the 115 charges on 29 September, ruling the club used “sham” commercial contracts to disguise more than £830m in funding between 2009 and 2018. City have lodged a formal appeal on 1 October, and a separate hearing will determine any sanction.
Speaking exclusively to Canada Sports Betting, Collymore set out the punishment he believes would actually deter clubs from doing the same thing again, including expulsion from the league system entirely rather than a points deduction. He also gave his unflinching verdict on Pep Guardiola’s managerial legacy, and explained why he thinks the Premier League’s financial rules exist to protect the status of a handful of clubs rather than to create a fair competition.
Every trophy since 2009 should be vacated?
Collymore’s starting principle is that he would apply exactly the same standard to a club he played for or supports, and he does not stop at the period directly covered by the charges.
“First of all, if any of the clubs I played for was found guilty of what Manchester City has been found guilty of — of course still waiting for the appeal, but for now — I would take all trophies of those clubs, including my own, both for that period and the period after, as one leads to the other.”
The logic, he says, is that a decade of financial breaches does not simply stop affecting a club the moment the rule-breaking ends.
“Pending appeal, they could be proved to have cheated from 2009 to 2018 and built a club that is then super successful afterwards, so you would need to take the trophies they won after 2018 away from them again.”
Reallocating the titles to the clubs that finished behind City is not the answer either, in his view. The honest approach is a historical asterisk.
“You can’t win in the following years without what happened in the years they allegedly cheated. That’s just common sense. I would not give those titles to other clubs. I think you would have to give the years an asterisk, saying that no titles were won because of the Manchester City case, and then people would be able to search up the reason behind it in a history book one day.”
Expulsion, not relegation, is the only real punishment
A single relegation does not go far enough for Collymore, who argues the club needs to be removed from the English football pyramid altogether and made to climb back up through every division.
“I would exclude them from the Premier League for a period. 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.”
“I would say that they would have to expel them, because if you just put them in the Championship they are back in a year or two — they will be back and that’s not a punishment. 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 5 years.”
He is clear-eyed about what a prolonged spell outside the top flight would do to the current squad, with a five-year Championship exile enough, in his view, to break it up entirely.
“That obviously means that if they won the Championship five years in a row, they would still stay in the Championship. That would have a big financial consequence, and no players like Haaland, Anderson, Enzo and others would stay there for five years.”
The financial side needs repaying too
Sporting punishment is only half of it, Collymore says. The money the breaches generated has to be accounted for separately, even if he is less certain exactly how that figure should be calculated.
“That would be a fitting football punishment. From a financial point of view, I am not sure, but I think it should be about giving back from the moment it started happening, and here I am talking about all sponsorship revenue, Premier League prize money, television money, etc.”
“I would come up with a figure that would be given to all the other teams that have lost points, that have got into the Championship, lost the titles and so on. Then you would send a massive message, saying: ‘It doesn’t matter the name of the club, it matters what that club has done.'”
He repeats that the principle has to apply regardless of allegiance, and warns what happens if the league settles for something weaker.
“And I repeat. If it was the club I supported or a club I played for, I would be saying the exact same thing. I would be saying the same thing if it was Aston Villa. We have to remember how bad the alternative would be, which would just be a slap on the wrist.”
“Then other clubs will just do the same things moving forward. You know, if it is just about one relegation and then getting promoted again, it is worth doing the next ten years. If we get our supporters going to Wembley and winning Champions League titles, everything would be worth it, because we know that one day in ten years, if we get caught — because don’t forget this was only due to hacked emails — there will be no punishment, so let’s just do it, you know.”
The key thing for Collymore here is ensuring potential repeat offenders are scared off by the severity of what their punishment could be versus what they stand to gain from potential financial doping.
“The punishment has to fit the crime, regardless of it being done by Manchester City, Aston Villa, Liverpool, Man United, Rochdale, Sheffield United, Bromley or whatever. So be it. I don’t care about the name of the club.”
Has Guardiola’s legacy been tarnished?
Pep Guardiola built his reputation at Barcelona before taking charge at Bayern Munich and then City, and Collymore’s assessment rests on what he was handed at each of those three clubs rather than what he won with them.
“Pep Guardiola is what I always thought he was. A very good coach but not a genius. If we go back to his time at Barcelona, he was given Barcelona’s best ever team. Yes, he had to continue the work, but he was given all the ingredients.”
“He then goes to Germany’s biggest and most successful club. Then he goes to Manchester City — a club that had more money than every other club on the planet, so for me he is a very good coach, but do I think he is one of the best managers that ever lived? No. In that equation a manager has to take over something that is not working, bring in people who can help him make it average, then good and then great.”
The comparison he reaches for is a manager who took an unfashionable club to the pinnacle of European football from nothing.
“Just like Sir Alex Ferguson did, or a Brian Clough who took Nottingham Forest from the second tier to win the league and then win back-to-back European Cups. Pep Guardiola has not done that, and we have to keep that in mind debating the best managers of all time.”
“I do think he is a good manager, but do I think he is a genius? No, I don’t.”
The financial rules protect the status quo, not competition
Collymore sees the Premier League’s current regulations as a reaction to what City were already doing rather than a genuine levelling mechanism, and he does not think they have made the league any fairer.
“I think all the rules were possibly brought in because people could see what was coming with the Manchester City situation, or the spending getting out of control.”
He takes issue with the idea that football clubs should be treated like any other business free to spend as its owners choose, and draws the comparison out to its logical end.
What football has lost, in his view, is the competitive uncertainty that made the league worth watching in the first place, and he looks back to his own childhood for the contrast.
“The Premier League is supposed to be a competition. When I was a kid growing up, Liverpool won the league most of the seasons, but the gap between Liverpool and the other clubs wasn’t that big. Other clubs could win it, just like Aston Villa did.”
“Every fan, when I was a child, felt that they could put up a fight against any team in the league.”
He ends with the diagnosis at its most blunt: a sport reduced to predictable outcomes stops being worth anyone’s time.
“It’s not like that anymore, and eventually you make all sorts of competition impossible. We need a competition. That’s what football needs. You don’t tune in to just watch the big clubs win everything without competition. Who cares about who won the Bundesliga or La Liga? That’s just my opinion.”
