“Are Leicester City about to be nuked? A top finance expert has just revealed the ONE detail that could DOUBLE their punishment and send them spiraling.”

Football finance expert warns Leicester City of increased points deduction risk
Leicester City will discover before the end of the season if their appeal against a six-point deduction has been successful

Football finance expert Stefan Borson has played down the prospect of the Premier League successfully appealing Leicester City’s points deduction – but believes the Foxes are risking a harsher penalty with their own appeal.

City are currently sitting in the relegation zone after what was already a challenging campaign on the pitch was earlier this month thrown into turmoil off it when they were hit with a six-point deduction for breaching financial regulations over a three-year period up to 2024.

Their immediate response spoke of their ‘disappointment’ and their belief the sanction is ‘disproportionate’. Since then it has been confirmed they are set to appeal the penalty.

The Premier League have also appealed believing City should be docked a further point for what they believe was late submission of the relevant accounts.

Borson doesn’t think that will gain traction but admits the appeal panel could rule the original punishment has been ‘too lenient’

Borson told Football Insider : “They obviously think that they have at least a chance of saying that the original independent commission got the law wrong in respect of one of their arguments that would have knocked the whole case out, i.e. it would have said zero points.

“I don’t think that they’ve got much hope at all of arguing the scale of the breach. That can only go one way because it can only end up with 37 months rather than 36, so that looks like it’s pretty much fixed at £20m. It means the actual scale of the breach is fixed.

“They can try and argue that the upper limit should have been £105m and not £83m, but I think it’s very unlikely they’re going to win that argument. Then they’re left with some of the competition arguments, which would all probably knock the whole thing out.

“I don’t think they’re fighting for one or two points. I think this is an attempt to knock the whole thing out again in the way that they did with 2023, so they get zero deduction. They effectively don’t get punished at all. That’s their intention.

“That sounds fine, and you sort of go, ‘Well, why wouldn’t you bother?’. But the slight problem here is I think they do have a risk of an increased penalty, which I don’t necessarily think that a lot of the other cases had.

“They had a theoretical risk that the panel could look at it again and increase it from six to seven or eight. But I actually don’t think it was very likely. I think there’s a real chance that a second independent commission could say that it had been too lenient.

“That said, I don’t think it’s going to come because of the Premier League’s appeal, which is that the delay of the information should have been punished by a points deduction.”