Man City's staggering rule-breaking has left the Premier League with only one option

After the most hard-hitting language possible, thePremier League's independent commission has set up the most hard-hitting sanctions. There is surely little choice but to expelManchester Cityfrom the competition.

The conclusions are so profoundly damning that it even raises the question of whether opposition clubs could or would want to play with them. Worse, the new Independent Football Regulator has an even bigger decision than to whether to expel.

The question will be now whether toexercise their statutory power to force a sale. The new body made considerable noise about their ability to remove "rogue owners" around the difficulties of Sheffield Wednesday and Morecambe.

The word "sham" was used eight times over 40 pages, in reference to sponsorship, image rights and other arrangements thatinflated revenue and reduced costs by more than £900m. One conclusion was "that certain of those factual witnesses had given evidence at the hearing that they knew to be untrue and so had been dishonest".

The Premier League itself went on to say "the club filed mis-stated accounts and concealed the true state of its finances from its auditors and football regulators", with City accused of being "significantly in breach of both the Premier League's and UEFA 's spending limits". Although the decision doesn't use the words, the details mirror UEFA's previous description of "a sophisticated, thoughtful and fundamental attempt to circumvent or violate" the rules.

The actual words used were still far more damning than even some of City's most vocal critics - as well as sources that worked on previous cases - expected. Consequently, it now looks worse than what had been one of football's biggest corruption scandals, Italy's Calciopoli.

This isn't about interpretation of phone calls. It is hard figures on pages.

It amounts to the biggest scandal in club football history - a complete revisionism of the most dominant champions the Premier League has ever seen, the blackening of the name of a club, while also going to geopolitical levels. The observations on the course of the proceedings detail that both parties relied on evidence from experts in the fields of "Abu Dhabi politics and governance".

Even the Premier League statement accompanying the decision, seemed to betray an attitude that they were finally fed up with this. The Premier League appears fed up with the case(PA Archive) Executives at rival clubs had strong suspicions that City were "cheating" long before the football leaks of 2018.