Manchester City Face the Consequences – So Why Was Sevco Allowed to Keep Its Titles?

The latest developments involving Manchester City have brought back an uncomfortable question for Scottish football.

What happens to sporting achievements when a club is found to have broken the rules?

Manchester City have reportedly been found guilty of 114 of the 115 financial charges brought against them by the Premier League. The sanctions have not yet been decided, and City are expected to appeal, so the process is not finished.

But already, the conversation has moved towards sporting consequences and whether titles won during a period of rule-breaking should be affected.

And as a Celtic supporter, you can’t help but look back at Sevco.

Because this isn’t really about Manchester City.

It is about sporting fairness and accountability.

For years, Celtic supporters have had to live with the fact that titles won during Mordor’s “controversial” financial period remain firmly in the record books.

There were investigations. There were legal battles. There were findings and subsequent developments that raised further questions.

And yet, ultimately, the trophies remained.

The titles stayed. And Scottish football moved on.

That’s what has always been difficult to accept.

I’m not saying Manchester City’s case is identical. It isn’t. Different country, different regulations, different charges and a completely different legal process.

But surely the basic principle should be universal:

If rules exist to protect sporting competition, there must be meaningful accountability when those rules are broken.

Otherwise, what are the rules actually protecting?

Supporters asking whether the rules had been applied fairly.

And when you put that alongside everything that happened with the titles, it creates a much bigger frustration.

If Manchester City eventually faces a sporting sanction that affects their historical titles.

It would establish a very clear principle in my eye that: financial and regulatory breaches should have sporting consequences.

Because titles aren’t just pieces of silverware.

They represent seasons of competition.

They represent players, supporters, managers and clubs competing under a supposedly equal set of rules.

If one club has breached those rules in a way that materially affects that competition, then surely there has to be a mechanism for determining whether the sporting outcome remains legitimate.

And that is why the Manchester City situation matters.

Because it gives us an opportunity to ask a very simple question about Scottish football:

Do sporting rules actually mean anything if there is no meaningful consequence when they are broken?

And perhaps that’s the point.

Scotland’s Blue-Tinted Referees

Then there is the elephant in the room.

I’m not saying referees are sitting in a room plotting how to hand sevco the league.

But when you’re looking at title races, the margins matter. A penalty here, a red card there, a foul that isn’t given, an opponent punished for something that goes unpunished at the other end — these moments can give a team an extra chance to stay in a game or pick up points they might otherwise have lost.

As Celtic supporters, we’ve seen enough controversial decisions over the years to understand why the suspicion exists.

It isn’t necessarily about one referee or one decision. It’s about the cumulative effect of marginal calls and the feeling that sevco have sometimes been allowed to survive situations where another team might not have been afforded the same luxury.

That becomes particularly important when we’re talking about titles.

You can spend an entire season debating whether a club deserved to win the league, but if refereeing decisions repeatedly give one of the challengers another opportunity to stay in the race, then surely those decisions deserve to be examined alongside everything else.

The point isn’t that Celtic should be given decisions to compensate.

Because a title shouldn’t just be about who had the best squad, the biggest budget or the best manager. It should also be about whether every club was competing under the same conditions.

And if Scottish football wants supporters to believe that is the case, then perhaps it needs to do a better job. It needs to demonstrate that the same mistakes, the same scrutiny and the same consequences apply regardless of the colour of the shirt.