Pep Guardiola has told Manchester City that his future does not hinge on the club’s FFP fate.
Italian champions Juventus looked at the possibility of snatching Guardiola away from the Premier League champions, in the belief that the Catalan would walk away if City were hit by a Champions League ban for financial irregularities. Premier League.
But the Turin giants are now ready to appoint Chelsea boss Maurizio Sarri instead having agreed a compensation package with the London club once they were told Guardiola is going nowhere.
City bosses have assured their manager that they have met all of UEFA’s requirements. And Guardiola’s response was to tell them that he had every intention of honouring the final two years of his contract anyway.
Guardiola has just landed a unique Treble of Premier League, FA Cup and League Cup in his third season in Manchester. But despite retaining the title — the first club to do so in a decade — and the League Cup, City were eliminated from the Champions League at the quarter-final stage for a second year running.
The 48-year-old is desperate to deliver the club owner’s dream of winning the Champions League but is yet to even make the semi-finals — something predecessor Manuel Pellegrini managed in his final season before being replaced by the former Barcelona and Bayern Munich boss.
The threatened ban from European competition for the 2020-21 season would force them to wait at least another year to tick that final box.
City have appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, claiming that UEFA’s decision to send the case to their disciplinary body after a two-month investigation is spurious.
The club believe they have offered indisputable evidence to UEFA that allegations made in a German magazine that they had artificially inflated sponsorship deals to beat financial restrictions are false.
