Cancel the season - this Premier League farce can't be allowed to continue

Analysis

Paul Macdonald | Brand Owner

This can’t go on for much longer.

We’ve only had Manchester City back in action for one week since their confirmed guilt in the Premier League case against them, one that not only undermines how they got here, but what they’re still able to do now, in plain sight of every wronged team, fan and player in the world.

It’s an untenable situation and the punishment has to be delivered as soon as possible, because this charade, dancing around a City comeback when they have been so emphatically defeated the first time around, needs to be resolved irrespective of the appeal. In November 2023, when Everton were handed a 10-point deduction for a singular PSR violation, the measure was delivered immediately and was only reduced to six on appeal - three months later.

The size of the crimes and therefore the unfeasibly large punishment - which should range from points deductions, transfer ban, expulsion from the league, a massive fine, and probably all of the above - has perversely worked in their favour as this charade of a season is allowed to continue.

It’s absolutely impossible to watch the Premier League in general now, notwithstanding City, because every match is a caveat. This match matters, until it doesn’t. Those three points could be crucial at the end of the season, until they’re not. That defeat could be damaging, until it isn’t. Every team is operating in some undefined limbo at the hands of a nation state not remotely concerned about burning down 150 years of English football to protect the bogus progressiveness of their brutal, authoritarian regime (Man Utd fans would argue that undefined limbo sums up their existence post-Fergie, but that’s for another time).

Each Premier League weekend is its own mini-asterisk, a pending result that will come at some undefined point in future, and we are all supposed to just carry on with things until a decision is reached. This is a global league viewed by over 1 Billion people, and it is being dragged into the gutter with every single match that passes without finality in the verdict.

And it’s not often that I will find time to show some sympathy with Sky TV, but they are on the front line of navigating the unnavigable. The black cloud hanging over events was covered at length beforehand, some with more clarity than others. Jamie Carragher said it best pre-match: “People are talking about respecting the process. We have respected the process. What this will do is just keep dragging the game through the gutter. Not just Manchester City - we all want to move on from it. It will ruin the game. Manchester City are top of the league and if they win today we’ll all say - what does it mean?”

A winning start ✅ https://t.co/wNLG19jXuy

— Manchester City (@ManCity) October 11, 2026

It doesn’t mean anything. It is a game that happened, won after Liverpool went down to 10 men and City exercised the depth of their squad to bring on £240m of players in the second half to win comfortably, in a macabre showcase of the exact type of inflated financial strength they have manipulated in order to get here.

If there wasn’t so much money at stake - and it’s always about money - another sport in this position could consider the nuclear option and cancel the competition, but as it is at the moment, it is no competition. It is a meandering entity fulfilling fixtures because they have to. Sky spend £1.5 billion a season to host more matches than ever before, games that now are glorified friendlies, particularly City matches, until everything comes out in the wash.

I would be surprised if someone at Sky and by extension TNT hasn’t raised the prospect of withholding payments until the outcome is derived. This is a material threat to their audience, to their ad revenue, and subscription base.

The Liverpool match will no doubt have been one of their most-viewed matches in years for the perverse spectacle, but the outcome, City fans defiant and chanting the owners’ name, Erling Haaland treating the result as some triumph over adversity, will have made the average fan question what the point of it is - and that is a real problem for Sky.

People wouldn’t sit down at Blackjack in a rigged casino, and this league, until we get a verdict, is starting to feel very much like that.