The crazy Premier League table if you strip away Man City’s results since 2008: Liverpool 2nd, Man Utd 3rd…

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Manchester City’s dominance of English football since their 2008 takeover has transformed and defined the Premier League over the past 18 years. But what would the table look like if they simply weren’t there?

It’s a question worth asking after an independent commission found City guilty of serious breaches of the Premier League’s financial rules over a nine-season period.

The findings cover 2009-10 to 2017-18, with the Commission concluding that City artificially inflated revenues and reduced costs by more than £900million.

Premier League chief executive Richard Masters described it as “the most significant” disciplinary case in the competition’s history, stating that City “systematically broke Premier League Rules for nearly a decade”.

Our table begins in 2008-09, the season of City’s transformative Abu Dhabi takeover, and removes the club and every Premier League result involving them from the equation.

Only Arsenal, Chelsea, Everton, Liverpool and Manchester United have been ever-present in the top flight throughout that period.

The Gunners come out on top with 1,290 points, just three ahead of Liverpool. Manchester United sit third on 1,250, with Chelsea fourth and Tottenham completing the top five.

We’ve already seen points deductions handed to Everton and Nottingham Forest for PSR breaches, while Chelsea accepted fines totalling £10.75million and transfer restrictions over separate historical breaches.

But there is no meaningful precedent for something of this scale. This is the biggest scandal in English football history, involving proven breaches across almost a decade and sums running into hundreds of millions.

City have lodged an appeal against the commission’s findings, and no sanction has yet been decided. That appeal will be heard privately by a separate Appeal Board.

And even that might not draw a line under things, with further legal avenues potentially available after the Premier League process. This saga remains a long way from over.

Here’s the full Premier League table if you strip away all of Manchester City’s results since their takeover in 2008:

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