Major disaster looms for Man City: 'Players could all tear up their contracts'

Manchester City players could conceivably get out of their contracts if the club are definitively found guilty of breaching the Premier League's Financial Rules, sports lawyer Paul Gilroy says in The Overlap, Gary Neville's podcast.

The bombshell dropped in England last Friday. The Athletic revealed that an independent commission found Manchester City guilty of no fewer than 114 breaches of the Premier League's Financial Rules.

The punishment facing the Manchester club is not yet known. But according to The Athletic journalist David Ornstein, who broke the story and is also at the table, it will be severe.

"If you hear the tone of the commission, that punishment will be very severe. Everything is on the table: fines, relegation, points deductions, a transfer ban. Really everything. I don't know either, but it seems very unlikely to me that they will be playing in the Premier League next season," he speculates.

Gilroy says Manchester City's players could terminate their contracts if the club are also found guilty on appeal.

He stated that a player can argue that the club have breached the 'implied term of trust and confidence': the employer have behaved in such a way that trust in the employment relationship has been destroyed.

British law gives the employee the right to terminate the contract and leave in the event of such a breach.