I wouldn’t want the title, they won that fair & square to be honest, we gave it our best that season & the disappointment of loosing by 1 point has taken us to the level we have this season.
I would want it. You couldn't run a parade through the streets granted, but it would mean equalling that title record and killing off that chant, rather earlier than anticipated.
They didn't win it fair and square tbh, which is sort of the point about the whole thing. If athletes from Olympics years ago are found to have cheated, they are stripped of their medals, and officially their results are not recognised and therefore they won nothing.
Having said that, I don't think it will happen tbh, but there must be zero tolerance for cheats in football, on or off the pitch.
But it's thrown the top 4 into question. They will appeal it but the ruling interferes with the Premier League competition. City deserve all they get but the ruling should've been left to the end of the season.
As a certain tennis player once said, "you cannot be serious".
For arguments sake, we finish 5th in May and think we're in Europe. We've had enough experience of it to know what it's like in recent years. Then we hear in June that someone else above us have been banned, and because we finished 5th we will play in the European Cup, subject to appeal. Apart from being forced to wait around for something we have no control over and can do nothing about, how are we supposed to draw up transfer budgets and sign new players, if we don't know what competition we are going to play in Europe? While those who finished below us are in an even worse position, they don't know if they will be in Europe or not or even what round of Europe they will enter in, waiting around like zombies for the appeal to be heard and the decision to be made. It would be completely ludicrous, and you would be one of the many on here complaining why it took so long. In that case, time would not be on our side. The qualifiers start at the end of June.
Of course the decision has to be made before the end of the season, so the appeals process can end by then. Atm, they're still in Europe until such time as CAS rule otherwise, and so we have to prepare for the likelihood that CAS will not uphold the UEFA sanction. I can't see the full original sanction upheld, they usually don't unless the case is waterproof.
But if it is upheld, it's Pandoras Box opened. The whole point of the club set up is to lay their blood money all over the European Cup. All the mercenaries will flee the nest, up to and including the head man. None of them have the bottle to wait 3 years to play in Europe. They'll just pis off somewhere else. And even if they get through UEFA, they still have the FA to deal with. Just what a dull, ordinary, colourless, soulless cash cow franchise for a tyrannical offshore regime deserve.
If they are banned, you may as well hand us the league title for those coming years also, because nobody else is capable of living with our team. The next team down finished 25 points behind us last year, and are already 25 points behind us this year. It took us 2 years to close that gap, it's going to take the rest much longer than that.