I don’t know what the reason is for all the focus on united and ten hag at the moment. United fans can feel they underperform as that’s the joy of being a fan and all fans have rose tinted glasses when it comes to their own club.
But, united are performing exactly where they should for the squad and injuries they have. Ten hag is doing as well as expected with that squad of players. He was never a world class manager to begin with. He had a good squad at Ajax with the champions league run, nothing more.
LFC were diabolical at points over the past 35 years and we never had this much focus and scrutiny. It’s like everyone expects that united should title challenging but they haven’t done that in the past 10 years other than brief over performances and teams around them rebuilding.
The way football is nowadays, I suspect there aren’t that many clubs fully and truly above board. Every single club will have performed some ‘interesting’ accounting over the past 10-15 years with all of the TV money.
For city, retroactive punishment will create a logistical nightmare. If there is any on field punishment for city, such as a points deduction, we have to expect that it would be added to the following season so they start in the negative. Anything else really just causes an absolute mess for the years preceding and a PR nightmare.
I suspect it will be a hefty fine though. And by hefty, I mean a few million but that’s nothing to city.