As Pellegrini said yesterday, most of this news is still pure speculation and is surely subject to ongoing dialogue between City and UEFA and certainly subject to appeal with the sanction being suspended for that period. I seriously doubt UEFA will want to proceed to the courts but they will make it clear to City that the sanctions are simply to make FFP stick. Having read the reported terms of the deal in which we can pay over 3 years and with it being completely written off for FFP calculation purposes, it's hardly worth worrying about. A reduced squad size for next year will make things difficult but the club is now approaching the break even point and with the extra commercial input we will receive from the new television deals we should be able to comply no problem in the future.
The fine amounts to £16.6M a year for 3 years, that's not far off the equivalent of Yaya's or Sergio's wage for the year, it's bog all really. As for the squad restriction, we can make do with it. I'm sure we will be buying 1 or 2 English players like Barkley or Shaw who will be able to make up the squad. It will just take a bit more diligence next year on our part. If you look at the team that played against Barcelona and the team that played most other games, a squad restriction down to 18 wouldn't do us any harm.
Lets face it, the worst sanction for us would be a transfer ban, or a limitation on wages which does not seem to be on the table, that would cause us far more problems than a fine.
As mentioned on the blogs I have seen, City chose to exceed the FFP limit by buying certain players and more so this summer. We even could of sacked Mancini 3 weeks later and avoided the FFP cut off point which would of added £16M to the calculation. We surely chose to do this because we knew that any sanction would not really be serious enough to be of any bother.
