Phillip Lahm has questioned Pep Guardiola’s legacy at Manchester City after the club were found guilty of breaching 114 Premier League rules.

City were found guilty of breaching 114 Premier League rules by an independent commission last month, as the panel found them to have used ‘sham’ sponsorship deals to boost they earnings by around £900m between 2009 and 2018.

The club have now appealed that verdict as they insist upon their innocence and claim they have ‘irrefutable evidence’ to prove it, in the form of documents showing that the sponsorship funds came from the Abu Dhabi government rather from their owners.

The initial three-man commission has already seen this evidence and ‘concluded it was an explanation that the club had concocted well after the event in an attempt to conceal the realities of the Disguised Funding Scheme’, but City hope an all-new panel will rule in their favour.

Possible punishments include fines, transfer bans, points deductions, Premier League expulsion and titles being stripped, while the owners could also be removed by the Independent Football Regulator, as Chair David Kogan confirmed on the Rest if Football podcast earlier this week.

Kogan said: “We have the power to ask an owner to step away from a club if we believe that they run a club in a way that is neither fit, fair or done with propriety.”

On whether they could refuse, Kogan said: “No, no, no. We’ve got absolute power to do so.”

Guardiola returned to the Etihad for their Champions League clash with PSG last week in a show of unity having left the club in the summer.

But Lahm – whom Guardiola once described as “the most intelligent player I ever worked with in their time together at Bayern Munich – has questioned the legendary manager’s legacy if the guilty verdict stands after the appeal.

He wrote in his column for The Guardian: ‘As a player and a columnist, I never had an issue with Manchester City – precisely because, for many years, the club avoided buying the most obvious superstars. Guardiola said it himself: the most valuable of the valuable do not go to a club such as City, who aren’t even the biggest football brand in their own home town.

‘Many became world stars in Manchester. Kevin De Bruyne had been discarded by Chelsea, Rodri’s true class was overlooked in Madrid for a long time, Gündogan’s career was on the brink after injuries, and most recently Gianluigi Donnarumma was no longer wanted in Paris.

‘In Germany, City signed players from Hamburg, Frankfurt and Wolfsburg. Erling Haaland in 2022 was the first player they targeted who was also pursued by Bayern Munich. City did not operate like Paris Saint‑Germain did in the era before Luis Enrique.

‘From the outside, City fundamentally did not do much differently from the other 10 or so top European clubs. But what are achievements on the pitch worth if they are accompanied by rule-breaking?’