'He has to respect it' - Pep Guardiola slams UEFA president over Man City charges comment

Pep Guardiola hit out at UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin and said as a lawyer he should know better than to cast guilt on Manchester City before they have faced a Premier League trial over alleged financial breaches.

Ceferin this week claimed that UEFA had been right all along to find City guilty of breaking their own financial rules and issuing a two-year ban from European football in 2020, even through the outcome was eventually overturned at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).

The Blues were sanctioned by UEFA's Club Financial Control Body in February 2020 after they had been accused of falsely inflating sponsorship revenues between 2012 and 2016. City were also hit with a €30million fine but they appealed to CAS and the verdict was quashed.

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But with City now facing a fight with the Premier League having been charged with breaking 115 financial rules, Ceferin has claimed the European governing body had been right all along to throw the club out of Europe. That is a claim that has gone down badly with Guardiola, who told Ceferin his interference went against his own legal background.

"As a lawyer that he is, the president of Uefa, he should wait and after do whatever he wants," he said. "The sentence from UEFA he has to respect it and he has to wait. He has a lot of jobs to do at Uefa, to be involved in the case with lawyers, he should respect the procedure and understand we have the right to defend ourselves."

Ceferin mentioned his own legal background in discussing the City case this week and claimed he still believes the decision of UEFA's indepent body was the correct one,