A key part of City’s defence will be that the Independent Commission relied too heavily on the emails obtained through the Football Leaks files.
“If City can demonstrate the Commission fundamentally misunderstood the emails, failed to consider their proper context or reached conclusions inconsistent with other contemporaneous documents, that could amount to a material factual error,” Severin added.
“City’s difficulty is that the Commission heard extensive witness and documentary evidence but nevertheless made serious findings of sham arrangements and disguised owner funding.”
Kieran Maguire, professor of football finance at the University of Liverpool, told BBC Sport the commission found “the documents were retrofitted to fit the crime”.
“The Commission must have concluded that the evidence and the credibility of the witnesses put up by Manchester City were poor,” Maguire said.
“However, from a legal point of view, this is an area they could attack if Manchester City‘s team can prove that the commission itself was a flawed construct in the sense that the members were Premier League picks rather than Manchester City‘s, and therefore the deck was stacked against the club to begin with.
“But that seems remote.”
Severin added that the retired senior judges and leading barristers, who sat on the Commission, have “spent their careers interpreting complicated facts, dealing with witnesses and applying relevant weight to evidence”.
While adding that it would be “impossible to assess reliably” the chances of City winning their appeal, Severin added that “doing so will not be easy”.
But Maguire believes that while it will be difficult for City to be successful, “there is a route”.
Maguire said: “Given the lawyers that have been recruited by Manchester City, they may go down what’s been described to me as a mess and noise approach.
“That means trying to discredit everything to do with the process of the Commission rather than necessarily the evidence that was presented.
“I’ve seen the documents that Abu Dhabi presented to the New York case. I’m not a lawyer, but from an accounting point of view, they can be seen in more than one way.”
Even though Premier League regulations state an appeal must be heard within 12 weeks, or by Christmas Eve, Severin added that “given the scale and complexity of the proceedings, a final outcome may not be known for some time”.
