The Premier League has made one hell of a mess. Manchester City have been found guilty of all but one of the 115 charges against them, according to The Athletic, and nobody knows what the punishment will be. They are by far the best team in the country. Nobody comes close. Unless the sanctions land this season, Manchester City will win the league.

Then, with all of that hanging over the fixture, the league sent a referee from Greater Manchester to take charge of Liverpool against Manchester City. Every one of those decisions chips away at the integrity of the competition, and Sunday at Anfield showed how little was left.

Start with the case, because everything else sits on top of it. The verdict was reported by The Athletic's David Ornstein, who wrote that sanctions had not yet been decided and that City were expected to appeal. Of the 115 charges, 80 concern breaches between 2009 and 2018, and the other 35 relate to failing to cooperate with the league's investigation. The independent hearing that produced the verdict began more than two years ago. This is a terrible stain on the Premier League, and it is nowhere near finished.

City lodged their appeal on 1 October. Under the league's fast-track rules, the appeal hearing should conclude within 12 weeks, which would take it to Christmas Eve, with the decision potentially following up to 30 days later. But City are expected to argue that those rules should not apply because they were charged in February 2023, before the rules existed. That could delay proceedings further. And even if the finding of guilt survives the appeal, the punishment still has to be determined.

How long is this going to go on for? We could end up with City winning the league this season while a case runs in the background over whether they should be in the league at all. Everybody is guessing at the punishment. Some say 20 to 30 points across several seasons, plus fines. Nobody knows, and that uncertainty is becoming part of the competition itself.

The league has shown it can move faster than this when it wants to. Everton were docked ten points in November 2023, and that was cut to six on appeal by February 2024, all inside one season. Nottingham Forest were docked four points in March 2024, weeks after being charged.

Of course, those were much simpler cases. City's allegations cover years of financial reporting and failures to cooperate with an investigation. Nobody should pretend that deciding 115 charges is the same as deciding one season's profitability and sustainability breach.

But City were charged in February 2023. More than three and a half years later, the punishment is still a guess. At some point, the complexity of the case stops being an adequate answer to what this uncertainty is doing to English football.

That is the backdrop against which Chris Kavanagh was appointed to referee Sunday's game at Anfield.

Kavanagh is from Greater Manchester. I didn't know that until after the game, when he'd sent Ryan Gravenberch off. But it shouldn't be happening in the first place. Nobody from Liverpool should be refereeing a game against Manchester City, and nobody from Manchester should either. I couldn't care what team he supports, and I'd say the same if it were the other way round. It doesn't look right, no matter what way you slice it.

Then the decisions put the appointment under a magnifying glass.

Gravenberch had been the standout player for an hour when he was sent off for a second yellow, for a challenge on Jérémy Doku with the game at 0-0. His first booking came shortly after the restart for a foul on Elliot Anderson, which Jamie Carragher called a "nothing challenge". Carragher's complaint on Sky was sharper than that: he said Kavanagh "only gives it when he thinks Anderson is hurt."

Earlier, when Gravenberch had beaten Anderson in midfield and was breaking forward, Anderson put his arms around him and pulled him back. That is the most blatant booking in the Premier League: holding a man back after he's beaten you. Kavanagh didn't give it. If you're booking Gravenberch, you've got to book Anderson.

The second yellow is less clear-cut. Gravenberch was silly to go to ground against a player like Doku while on a yellow, and the contact was minimal. But the cost was immediate. Erling Haaland scored two minutes and 37 seconds after Gravenberch went off, Doku made it two within six minutes, and Rayan Cherki added a third with 12 to play.

I am not saying Kavanagh deliberately favoured Manchester City. I have no evidence of that, and I wouldn't make that accusation.

But that is precisely why the appointment was so unnecessary.

After three weeks in which every headline was about City's financial charges, the Premier League put a referee from Greater Manchester in charge of one of the biggest fixtures in English football. Then came a controversial sending-off that changed the game.

The league created a situation in which perfectly legitimate questions about refereeing decisions became tangled up with questions about the competition's integrity. It could have avoided the whole thing by picking someone from neither city.

The strongest case against me runs like this. Where a referee lives is not evidence of bias, and the pool of top officials is small and heavy with the north-west. Sunday was the fourth time Kavanagh had refereed this fixture, including City's 3-0 win at the Etihad in November 2025, and nobody made a fuss. ESPN's VAR review called the second yellow the correct call.

That is a reasonable argument. Referees cannot be judged guilty of bias because of where they come from, and a controversial decision is not evidence of corruption.

But the answer is that nobody made a fuss before because there wasn't a guilty verdict on 114 charges hanging over the fixture. The appointment was always wrong; the verdict is what made everyone notice, and a league paying attention to its own credibility would have seen that coming.

Even ESPN's review accepts Gravenberch can feel aggrieved about the first yellow, and without the first, there is no second.

Look at what people have been talking about since Sunday. Not the tactics or Haaland's goal. Why a Manchester referee got Liverpool against City.

And it's a perfectly legitimate question.

You can disagree about the sending-off. You can believe Kavanagh got both bookings right. That still doesn't explain why the Premier League couldn't appoint somebody from outside Greater Manchester to referee this particular fixture.

It is not about proving bias. It is about avoiding entirely unnecessary questions over impartiality, especially when confidence in the competition is already being tested.

The Premier League has lost control of its own competition. A club found guilty on 114 charges could lift the trophy in May unless its punishment arrives this season, and the league's answer to a fixture carrying all of that was a referee from Greater Manchester.

Sunday showed how little of the league's integrity was left to damage.