No-one wants a court battle mate. It's cheap words on here to say sue the bastards, but we (fans) aren't the ones paying the legal fees which could run into 10's of millions in extremis. And apart from that, it's not a very edifying prospect for City, UEFA or football in general to have a bitter court battle played out in public. It's also an enormous drain on Exec's time and resources trying to fight a legal battle and run a business at the same time. No-one wants it.
Much better all around to settle,
The problem is, we will not want to accept anything ridiculous (obviously) and certainly nothing that will materially hurt us financially or in the competition going forward. And neither will we want to accept anything that leaves us open to the same mess happening again next year and the year after that.
On the other hand, UEFA have Gill and Rummenigge et al bending their ear all the time and need to appease them in some way.
I suspect the upshot of all of this will be a last minute compromise with VERY much reduced penalties that enable UEFA to save face, and us to walk away largely unscathed. UEFA will probably say that a further review of our accounts, and more detailed explanantions from City have satisfied them that we are close to compliance and on track to comply. £10m fine and squad reduction suspended pending some future criterion that we can easily meet. Something like that. We'd almost certainly accept that given the fact we'd easily piss that away on legal fees with no guarantee of winning.
