The Premier League played their part in Man City mess and still have questions to answer

· Mirror

The Premier League are getting plenty of credit for their devastating Manchester City statement - but why were they allowed to get away with it for so long?

The Premier League is getting plenty of plaudits for the brutal takedown of Manchester City. Understandably so.

But the Premier League is always at pains to stress the independent commission is exactly that. Independent.

If I were allowed, I would give the three members of the commission the public accolades they deserve. It was obviously a monumentally difficult case but there has clearly been no compromise.

The commission laid bare cheating on a quite remarkable scale. Across the nine seasons from 2009/10 to 2017/18, City claimed commercial income of £949.94 million when only £119.25 million had come from sponsors.

It really is staggering. Just because the rules were lousy, it does not mean a club had a licence to treat them with impunity.

There are 7,000 pages to the verdict but the sins are quite simple. City created sham commercial agreements to falsify their revenue so they could spend more on players without breaching the Premier League’s financial regulations.

In fact, the sins are so basic and of such magnitude that they beg some simple questions.

How did City get away with it for so long? How come the Premier League did not smell a rat? Did the Premier League - and other executives - simply turn a blind eye?

In 2009/10, City’s recorded sponsorship income was £27million. In 2012/13, City claimed their sponsorship income was £121.75million.

It is hard to believe no-one in the Premier League’s headquarters - where there is supposedly a compliance unit - considered this jump in sponsorship income to be odd.

And it kept rising, until in 2017/18 it stood at £145.73million, only £11million of which was actually paid by sponsors. The rest was owners’ money.

Yet there was no sign of any Premier League investigation. As we all know, the investigation was only prompted by the Portuguese hacker Rui Pinto and his Football Leaks website, which published internal emails from City detailing schemes by the club to cover up true sources of income in a bid to comply with financial fair play regulations.

Look, City are the culprits in the worst example of systemic cheating in the history of British sport. The punishment has to be draconian. But the Premier League has played its part in a mess so damaging that it is hard to know where to start.

Somehow, City’s cheating on an industrial scale went unnoticed for those nine seasons. The abnormal length of the investigation meant another eight full seasons passed.

And now this. So, essentially, almost two decades of the Premier League has been - to use the stand-out word of the organisation’s statement on the City verdict - a sham.

You cannot separate the nine seasons that were investigated from the eight seasons that followed.

As much as the players will protest, the team that will run out at Anfield on Sunday week cannot be separated from the ones that have won titles over the past two decades.

It is some mess. And it is, of course, City’s fault. Spectacularly and grimly so. But the Premier League has little to be proud of either.

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