Manchester City helped send Aston Villa into a spiral they were lucky to escape

There are so many different ways of looking at the Manchester City verdict that it is difficult to know where to begin, particularly when we still don't know what the punishment will be and City have made it clear that they intend to appeal. But as an Aston Villa supporter, inevitably you start looking at it through the prism of your own football club and asking what that period actually meant for Villa.

That is where it becomes particularly uncomfortable, because when you go back to the beginning of Manchester City's rise, Villa were one of the clubs trying to occupy exactly the space they wanted to move into.

There was a period before Unai Emery, before the Championship and before years of Villa largely being nowhere near the top end of the Premier League, when Martin O'Neill had built a genuinely good side. Villa were pushing for Champions League qualification and daring to believe that they could break into that established group at the top of English football.

Manchester City were trying to do exactly the same thing.

The difference was that City suddenly had resources Villa simply couldn't compete with, and what happened next had enormous consequences. They didn't just become another rival for those Champions League places; they started taking some of Villa's best players.

Gabby Agbonlahor made the point on talkSPORT Breakfast this week that City took Gareth Barry in 2009, James Milner in 2010 and later Fabian Delph. Those weren't peripheral players Villa could easily replace. Barry and Milner in particular were fundamental parts of a team that had got itself to the point where Champions League qualification felt achievable rather than fanciful.

Milner had just produced an unbelievable season in the middle of the pitch and was named PFA Young Player of the Year. Barry had been one of the outstanding midfielders in the Premier League for years. Villa had a young, predominantly English core with players such as Agbonlahor and Ashley Young around them and, importantly, an owner in Randy Lerner who at that stage appeared completely invested in trying to take the club forwards.

Villa  finished sixth in three consecutive seasons under O'Neill and for a while there was a genuine feeling that the breakthrough was coming. Tottenham eventually made that jump into the Champions League, while City were beginning the transformation which would eventually take them beyond everybody.

The significance of what has now been found by the independent commission is that this isn't simply supporters looking back 15 years later and complaining that another club had more money. The commission found City guilty of serious breaches of the Premier League's financial rules, including arrangements it described as "sham" contracts which artificially inflated revenues and reduced costs by more than £900million across the affected period. City strongly deny wrongdoing and are appealing the decision, so the process is not yet finished, but those findings inevitably make you revisit what was happening on the pitch at the same time.

From a Villa perspective, you cannot rewrite history and say that Manchester City are responsible for everything that happened afterwards. Villa made plenty of bad decisions themselves and the decline that eventually ended in relegation was years in the making. But I do think you can say that City's emergence helped start a chain of events that fundamentally changed the direction Villa were travelling in.

That was the point I made on talkSPORT. Once the heart of that O'Neill team started being ripped out, Lerner seemed to reach the conclusion that he simply couldn't compete with what was happening around him. City could identify a player such as Barry, offer the transfer fee and wages required and take him. Villa would rebuild, get close again, and then Milner would go the following summer.

At some point the ambition disappeared with them.

Villa went from a club trying to break into the Champions League to one gradually retreating from the top end of the Premier League. O'Neill left, the level of investment changed and the managerial appointments that followed told their own story. Gérard Houllier came and went, Alex McLeish crossed the city and then Paul Lambert presided over a period where survival increasingly became the objective rather than Europe.

It became a completely different football club.

That is why I think the wider conversation around Manchester City has to go beyond who finished second in the seasons when they won the Premier League. Naturally Liverpool and Manchester United supporters will look at titles they might otherwise have won, but there are consequences throughout an entire league when one club gains an advantage.

League positions are worth money. Champions League qualification is worth enormous money and, more importantly, can alter the trajectory of a club. Players move because one team can offer something another cannot. Owners reassess what they are prepared to invest. Managers leave. Supporters stop looking upwards and start worrying about what is happening beneath them.

For Villa, once that decline began, they became increasingly vulnerable to being picked apart whenever they produced another outstanding player. Delph eventually went to City. Christian Benteke went to Liverpool. The club had moved from trying to build something around its best players to almost waiting for somebody to take them.

Eventually Villa circled the drain for long enough that they went down.

The frightening thing looking back is that there was absolutely no guarantee they were coming back. Villa spent three seasons in the Championship and there were moments during that period when the financial situation was extremely serious. There is another version of the club's history where Villa don't recover in the way they eventually did and instead spend considerably longer outside the Premier League.

That is probably why I feel fortunate when I look at where Villa are now. They did come back, they eventually found owners capable of restoring the ambition that had disappeared and, most importantly, they found Unai Emery. Villa have spent the last few years becoming a serious football club again, qualifying for Europe consistently, returning to the Champions League and winning the Europa League.

None of that changes what happened before it.

Equally, I don't think stripping trophies and retrospectively handing them to somebody else necessarily repairs the damage. You cannot recreate those seasons. You cannot give supporters back the experience they might have had, and you certainly cannot know exactly how the history of clubs such as Villa would have unfolded had circumstances been different.

That is why whatever punishment eventually comes has to be about the future rather than pretending the past can somehow be corrected.

City have been found guilty by the independent commission, City dispute those findings and intend to appeal, and the sanction process is still to come. Possible punishments available include fines, points deductions and other sporting sanctions, but at this stage nobody should pretend to know exactly where it will end.

What we can do now is look back at the period covered by the findings and properly consider what it meant for everybody else.

For Aston Villa, Manchester City's emergence coincided almost perfectly with the moment the club was trying to make its own breakthrough. Villa had a talented young team, an ambitious owner and three consecutive sixth-place finishes, but instead of taking the next step, they lost key players, their owner lost the appetite to compete at that level and the club entered a decline which ultimately ended in relegation.

Manchester City didn't make every bad decision Aston Villa subsequently made and they aren't responsible for every miserable Saturday that followed.

But they were part of the reason the direction of travel changed so dramatically.

Villa are fortunate enough to have eventually found their way back to glory but it took them the best part of a decade to do it.