Manchester City are banned from the Champions League.

Manchester City are banned from the Champions League.

The cliches are unavoidable. Yes, the chickens have come home to roost and what goes around does indeed come around. They should have seen it coming but didn't so perhaps they deserved what was coming to them. This is a roundabout way of saying that a Premier League football club have been punished accordingly for breaking the rules. They should have been warned properly but chose not to heed the advice and guidance so they will now have to suffer in silence. This might seem a tad unfair but the harsh truth is that they simply wouldn't be told and anyway they should have known anyway.

Last Friday Manchester City were banned from taking any further part from participating in the Champions League as from next season and the season following that one. Their crime was that they didn't obey the clearly explained rules and regulations which were stated quite categorically over and over again. Sadly though City thought, somewhat arrogantly it has to be said that they were above such petty bureaucracy and thought they could get away with it because they were Manchester City and they were Premier League champions of England.

Now under the auspices of the Financial Fair Play committee, City fans will have to get used to the fact that prestigious and glamorous Champions League encounters against Barcelona, Bayern Munich, AC Milan, Inter Milan and Borussia Dortmund may be a thing of the past. Here we have a classic example of a famous English football club spending far too much money without thinking about the disastrous consequences. City were a team playing above their means and naivety doesn't even come remotely close to describing their foolhardiness and hubris.

We know for a fact that City earned the ludicrously extortionate sum of £100 million in last year's Champions League before bowing out to the losing finalists Spurs. We also know that their wage bill, currently at £135 million, is somehow staggeringly beyond belief and the mere pittance of their profit was £10 million. We have also been informed that their commercial and sponsorship income totalled a criminally shocking £229 million. So why do we express our surprise when the powers that be at UEFA rap City's  collective knuckles and make them stay behind at school, writing a thousand lines on protocol and how not to behave because sanctions will be imposed if you don't listen to us?

For ages now, football's well documented greed and financial gluttony have been widely spread all over the national newspapers back pages. We have read in chapter and verse about the latest multi million pound transfer involving players who could only have dreamt about such ridiculous riches 40 or 50 years ago. They say it's all about market forces and wildly inflated valuations but when the likes of John Terry, in his playing days at Chelsea, was stuffing over £150,000 week into his well endowed trousers pocket and Wayne Rooney demanded much the same at Manchester United you had to question football's sanity.

But here we are deep into the second half of the Premier League season and the Greed is Good League, once coined by the hugely distinguished and immensely knowledgeable Sunday Times football writer Brian Glanville, is once again well and truly alive and flourishing. Football, it would seem, is its own worst enemy, a sport that once prided itself on its proud working class values now disfigured, defaced, debased and demeaned by wondrously wealthy Arab owners who quite obviously think that money does indeed grow on trees.

Admittedly the Sheikh Mansour family did their utmost to salvage an ailing football club who were firmly marooned in the old Third Division and playing at a Maine Road ground that once witnessed the outlandish gifts of Rodney Marsh, Colin Bell and Francis Lee. But then the glory days disappeared and shortly City would have to overcome Gillingham in their quest to re-capture top flight status. They did win that day and the rest, as they say, is history.

Now though your thoughts go back to the late Peter Swales, accountant and top bigwig at Manchester City who often presided over all the high profile transfers at City. What on earth would Swales have made of all these crazy financial indiscretions, these fraudulent tactics, these shifty, nudge nudge wink wink strategies, these noses in trough antics, rampant capitalism at its ugliest? City are now facing their very own come uppance, a dose of their own medicine and perhaps football needs that sharp prod in the back when it tries to fool all of the people all the time.

City of course without necessarily being in a state of crisis, must now face a future which once looked paved with gold but has now faded into a sorry looking predicament. If they fail to overturn this ban from the Court of Arbitration panel which will be appealed then the rumour factory may have to work overtime. Will Pep Guardiola, their vastly talented manager, walk out on City and will City have the spare change to keep the likes of Kevin De Bruyne and Raheem Sterling? Or will City simply fall apart like a deck of cards?

The Premier League is now certainly beyond their reach and on Wednesday they welcome relegation candidates West Ham to the Etihad Stadium. It seems safe to assume that City will have far too much firepower in attack for West Ham but what of this season's Champions League? There is a school of thought that believes that maybe they are so heartbroken about the latest developments that the Champions League may, quite ironically, be the last thing on their minds at the moment.

Naturally City will be busting a gut to win this season's Champions League for the first time in their history but the cynics would have us believe that their minds are far too pre-occupied with weightier matters.  This is not the time for sober reflection and regret but City, you feel sure, may be wondering where exactly they may be going. Will they be deducted points retrospectively for their careless transgressions or will they be given a reprieve and the benefit of the doubt?

It is at times like this when you think back to that famous last match of the season when the Manchester City which boasted Denis Law condemned their neighbours United to relegation to the old Second Division. The tables have been turned and although City are still in temporary charge of proceedings at football's top table the back heel that once sent United toppling into the old Second Division must feel as if it's kicking City back from whence they came. Oh to be a fly on the wall at Manchester City's next Annual General Meeting. Watch this space.