Paul Lambert, the former Celtic and Scotland midfielder, has pointed to Rangers’ liquidation in 2012 as a potential template for how Manchester City could be dealt with, after reports emerged that the Premier League champions have been found guilty of all but one of the 115 charges brought against them for breaching the league’s financial rules.
Speaking to Boyle Sports in the wake of the bombshell report, first carried by The Athletic, Lambert said the scale of the punishment facing City was genuinely difficult to predict, but drew a direct line back to Scottish football’s own precedent for dealing with a dominant club found to have broken the rules. “It’s really difficult as to what the ban is going to be set at, I think,” Lambert said. “The authorities must work out whether it is going to be a massive financial hit, or deduction with points or relegation to the bottom league, as with what happened to Rangers. But whatever happens, I think it’s going to snowball to a lot of clubs.
The comparison Lambert draws is a serious one, and it is worth being precise about what happened at Ibrox in 2012, because the two situations are not identical. Rangers went into administration that February over unpaid tax liabilities, a financial collapse rather than a disciplinary finding over sporting integrity rules. When a takeover consortium failed to agree a company voluntary arrangement with creditors, the original company was liquidated, and what emerged was a new legal entity that had to apply for readmission to Scottish football from scratch. The football authorities’ decision was not, technically, to relegate “Rangers” as a punishment for cheating; it was that the new company inherited none of the old club’s league status, and the SPL voted to deny the new entity’s application to rejoin the top flight, sending it into the third tier of Scottish football instead to rebuild.
City’s situation, by contrast, centres on alleged breaches of the Premier League’s Profitability and Sustainability Rules and related financial reporting requirements — charges the club continues to dispute and is expected to appeal. The Premier League’s investigation, which began in 2018, covers accusations that City failed to report accurate financial information across nine seasons between 2009-10 and 2017-18, failed to disclose the full details of manager pay and player remuneration across multiple seasons, and failed to co-operate fully with the investigation between 2018 and 2023. City have always denied wrongdoing, and their statement in response to the latest reports reiterated that position, saying the club “has diligently respected due process for eight years on the basis that the Premier League board and executive would behave as an independent, impartial and fair-minded regulator, free from partisan influence.”
So while Lambert’s framing — “relegation to the bottom league, as with what happened to Rangers” — captures the eventual outcome for the Ibrox club, the mechanism was different: financial collapse followed by re-entry at the bottom, rather than a top-flight club being relegated wholesale as a sanction while remaining otherwise intact. That distinction matters, because it is part of why the debate around Rangers’ 2012 saga remains so contested in Scottish football to this day, more than a decade on
Lambert’s comments land in the middle of a wider resurgence of exactly that argument, triggered by the City news. Reaction across Scottish football media in the days since the report broke has repeatedly reached for the Rangers comparison, though not always with the same conclusion Lambert draws.
On talkSPORT, pundit Shebahn Aherne used the moment to revisit the raw emotion that accompanied Rangers’ liquidation from the Celtic side of the divide, recalling being in Glasgow at the time. “Up the road in Glasgow, Celtic fans will say that Rangers died. That’s exactly what they say,” she said. “Some Celtic fans won’t even call it an Old Firm. They’ll say that the Old Firm is away, because Rangers died. That’s the vitriolic hate. There was a party when Rangers died. Rangers fans stood by their club and watched them go back up the leagues fair and square, and look at them now.” Turning to City, she argued for consistency: “So I look at Manchester City, and I say, ‘get them gone if they’re guilty.’ They have to go, and fair and square, work your way back up to winning a Premier League title.”
From a different angle entirely, some Celtic-aligned commentary has argued the Rangers precedent actually proves the opposite point — that Scottish football’s authorities let Rangers off lightly by not stripping the club’s pre-liquidation trophies, and that England’s FA should not repeat what one such piece called the Scottish game’s failure to properly account for “industrial cheating.” That framing argues City’s titles, if the charges are upheld, should be formally redistributed to clubs that finished behind them, a step Scottish football never fully took with Rangers’ historical honours
The range of reactions illustrates why Lambert’s intervention matters: he is not simply invoking Rangers as a cautionary tale from a neutral position, but doing so as a former Celtic player commenting on the club that has, for over a decade, been the other side of Scottish football’s most bitter ongoing argument about sporting integrity and punishment.
The scale of what City are facing should not be understated. According to the reports, the Premier League has found the club guilty of 114 of the 115 charges originally brought in February 2023, spanning alleged breaches across a nine-season period. The possible sanctions being discussed range from a heavy points deduction through relegation and the stripping of past honours to substantial fines, with expulsion from the top flight described as the “nuclear” option at the extreme end of the scale. City, who have denied the charges from the outset and are expected to appeal, remain top of the Premier League after five games of the new season, a detail that only sharpens the sense of an unresolved case hanging over a club currently performing at the top of the English game.
Lambert’s wider point — that whatever sanction is eventually applied “is going to snowball to a lot of clubs” — reflects a broader unease in English football that the case has implications well beyond City itself, given how central Financial Fair Play compliance has become to competitive balance in the Premier League era.
## Why the Rangers Comparison Persists
Whatever the technical differences between the two cases, the instinct to reach for Rangers’ 2012 collapse whenever a dominant club faces serious sporting sanctions says something about how deeply that episode is embedded in the collective memory of British football. It remains, for many, the most visible example of what happens when a major club’s financial position and a governing body’s disciplinary process collide, and pundits on both sides of the Old Firm divide continue to invoke it, for very different rhetorical purposes, whenever a comparable situation arises elsewhere in the game.
For Lambert, the comparison is offered as a genuine attempt to game out where the City case might end up, drawing on the one significant precedent British football actually has for a major, previously all-conquering club being forced down through the leagues. Whether the Premier League ultimately reaches for anything close to that outcome — or opts for points deductions and fines instead, as many expect given the differences in how the two cases arose — remains to be seen. But the fact that Rangers’ downfall is still the reference point reached for first, by both pundits and journalists, more than thirteen years on, underlines just how significant a moment it remains in British football’s collective memory.
