Friday’s utterly spectacular soccer news dump — Manchester City has been banned from the Champions League for the next two years and fined $32.5 million for circumventing UEFA’s “financial fair play” rules and attempting to cover it up — has no shortage of ramifications for the English Premier League club.
Yet perhaps what’s most fascinating about the severity of the penalty, besides the fact that it was actually levied at all, is that it puts City in a position where the best-case scenario is to become soccer’s version of the Houston Astros.