Strip Manchester City of all eight Premier League titles and relegate them. That's the demand doing the rounds, and half of it is right. The other half would let the only people who actually deserve to be ruined walk out the door untouched.
An independent commission has reportedly found against City on 114 of the 115 financial charges the Premier League brought back in February 2023. That's a reported finding of guilt. The sanction and the appeal are still to come. No punishment has been set, the full written decision hasn't been published, and City are expected to fight it. Everything about stripping titles and relegation is an argument about a sentence nobody has handed down yet. Argue it anyway, because it matters.
Relegation is the wrong weapon. It lands on a squad that didn't sign the accounts and a crowd that didn't cook the books. The people who deserve to be dismantled are the owners. If a club is found to have misled the league for the better part of a decade about revenue, related-party deals and what it was really paying people, the answer is to force the ownership to sell and ban the executives responsible from ever running an English club again. That's the punishment that actually fits. Relegating the club hits a season-ticket holder in Gorton and a left-back who was a child when the alleged breaches began.
On the titles: take the ones that sit inside the cheating window. The charges as reported cover the seasons from 2009/10 to 2017/18. City won the league in 2011-12, 2013-14 and 2017-18 inside that span. That 2017-18 side reached a record 100 points while Jose Mourinho's Manchester United came home as runners-up. Those trophies were won in the years the league says the books were false. Remove them from the record.
Demanding all eight titles feels satisfying. But the four consecutive titles from 2020-21 to 2023-24 fall outside the window the charges cover as currently reported. Going for all of them makes the case easier to caricature as a witch hunt, and this case is far too strong to hand City that gift.
Think about who was standing underneath while all this went on. Leicester finished fifth in 2019-20 and fifth again in 2020-21, shut out of the Champions League both times. That's real money and real prestige gone, while a club the league now says broke its financial rules kept spending. Multiply that across every side that finished just behind. Lost seasons, lost revenue, lost places in Europe for clubs that played it straight.
The cynicism around this is earned. The likeliest ending is that this grinds through appeal after appeal until it's quietly settled with a fine a state-backed owner can pay out of loose change and a points deduction that looks tough on paper but costs nothing that actually hurts. If that's how it lands, the message to every other owner is simple: break the rules for a decade, lawyer up, wait it out.
Guardiola is already gone. He stepped down in the summer of 2026 as the most successful manager in the club's history and walked straight into a Global Ambassador role with City Football Group. Enzo Maresca inherited the squad and now the fallout. None of this is his to answer for.
Strip the titles won while the rules were being broken. Leave the people who had nothing to do with it out of it. Ban the men who built the whole thing on numbers the league says were fiction, for good. Anything softer, and the Premier League has told the world its rulebook is just a polite request.
