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Former Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard has said Manchester City should be stripped off the trophies won during the nine-year period in which they broke the Premier League’s financial rules.
Football has been left reeling from the decisive verdict handed down into charges of financial cheating levelled at City from 2009 to 2018, during which time they won the Premier League three times.
An independent commission found City guilty of every charge related to breaking the league’s financial regulations, although they continue to deny them and have appealed the ruling. City’s punishment has yet to be revealed.
Gerrard, who left Liverpool in 2015, was captain of the Reds side who finished runners-up to City in the top flight in the 2013/14 season.
Asked about what suitable sanctions would be, Gerrard told The Overlap: “In terms of how I feel, I potentially could be affected if you like. I wouldn’t want individual players to give stuff back, that wouldn’t be right.
“But the club, they have to be stripped.
“There needs to be an example set, historically whether that’s a star [asterisk] throughout all the years of their achievements, because then it doesn’t matter whether the titles are stripped or not, as soon as that star is there, then everyone knows that [success] happened because of what we all know happened.”
There has been some discussion of City being relegated or taking a huge points deduction, but Gerrard said he felt it would be unfair on other clubs in the Championship if City were demoted to the second tier, as they would be likely to immediately come straight back up.
He added: “I think it’s more moving forward in the Premier League, to punish them over a period of time, multi-year punishment, that would be my opinion. I’m not saying that’s the right opinion but that’s just how I feel.
“I think it needs to be a transfer ban, a points [deduction] over a period of time and make them suffer like they’ve made everyone suffer over the nine, ten years that they’ve done it.”
He urged the Premier League to be “strong” in its decision-making but stressed that it was “not personal” for him or an attack on the “outstanding” players who wore the City shirt during that time.
He continued: “I’m not someone who’s going to sit here and say I would accept a Premier League medal or I want one that they’ve got. It wouldn’t feel the same, it wouldn’t be the same.
“I think I’ve come to terms that I’ve never won the Premier League, that I was short in that department in terms of winning it.”
Several City players and fans have argued that any retrospective punishment would not take away the memories of successful campaigns, but Gerrard’s rebuttal was: “What about the memories they’ve taken away from, not just possibly me and the team that I played in, but over that period of nine or 10 years?
“The City ex-players, current players and the City owners, everyone connected with City, have got to think about the memories that they potentially have stolen from everyone else.”
