The story of the biggest financial scandal in English soccer history has become a familiar saga, yet its capacity to shock remains entirely undiminished.
Recent reports revealed that Manchester City had been found guilty by an independent commission of 114 of the 115 charges leveled against the club in 2023 for extensive breaches of its cost-control rules. Those leaks meant that when the Premier League’s official confirmation eventually arrived, it came as no surprise to the wider football world.
However, the sheer scale of City’s deception and the severity of the language used in the league’s statement were unprecedented. The independent investigation determined that City worked to "artificially inflate the club’s revenues, and reduce its costs, by more than UK£900 million" between the 2009/10 and 2017/18 seasons—a period in which the club secured three of its eight Premier League titles.
Club leadership was found to have generated "sham" contracts to disguise direct investment from owner Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG), the vehicle created by Sheikh Mansour to buy the club in 2008, framing it instead as standard sponsorship income. Investigators established that City used a purpose-built entity to misrepresent the value of players’ image rights while hiding payments to players and staff within related-party mechanisms to make overall salary costs appear lower on paper.
City were convicted on every charge of financial misconduct, including the filing of misstated accounts to soccer authorities, and are now understood to have breached Premier League and Uefa spending limits "by a very significant amount" throughout the period in question. Furthermore, the club was found guilty on all but one count of failing to cooperate fully with the investigation.
The disciplinary process has been extraordinarily extensive. Last year’s four-week hearing yielded 7,000 pages of transcripts from witness testimony, while supporting documents totaled 750 pages. Premier League chief executive Richard Masters described the disciplinary case as the most significant in the organization’s history.
Yet, this verdict does not mean the eight-year saga has reached its conclusion. Possible repercussions are multiplying rapidly, with rival clubs exploring independent civil action, City’s owners doubling down on their claims of absolute innocence, and lead commercial partner Etihad reportedly threatening legal action against the Premier League. A process that has already shaken English soccer to its core could yet face numerous dates in court and acquire a significant geopolitical dimension before it finally reaches an end.
An inevitable appeal
In a terse official response to what they characterized as the "opinion of the Premier League Commission," Manchester City announced they will pursue an appeal "on the basis that the opinion contains clear material errors, of law, principle and fact, and is unsafe."
That statement encapsulates a strident attitude toward the ongoing proceedings. Chief executive Ferran Soriano, who declined to comment when approached by Sky News at a European Club Association meeting in Copenhagen, subsequently distributed a three-minute video message to City staff dismissing the Premier League’s findings as little more than a conspiracy theory.
The club continues to cite what it describes as "irrefutable evidence" of its innocence, which was nonetheless insufficient to persuade the independent commission. That stance will likely undergird any formal appeal, though City’s legal team is expected to probe aggressively for procedural vulnerabilities.
A similar legal approach proved successful in 2020, when the club successfully overturned a two-year ban from European competition at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) by arguing that Uefa had relied on "time-barred" evidence that was subsequently deemed inadmissible. However, Premier League clubs have since collectively agreed not to take domestic disputes to CAS, and the scope of an expedited appeals process is not designed to function as a complete rerun of the original trial.
According to reports from The Times, City are also expected to argue that their disputed sponsorship deals were funded directly by the Abu Dhabi government rather than the club’s owner—who is a member of the emirate’s ruling family and serves as the vice president and deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
The league typically aims to work through appeals hearings within 12 weeks, delivering a final verdict within an additional 30 days to limit further on-field disruption. Should City exhaust their sporting appeals at this stage, they may ultimately take their fight into the UK’s public court system.
A buffet of unprecedented sanctions
With the guilty verdicts delivered, a separate independent commission will now convene to recommend appropriate punishments, while the league prepares its own formal submissions regarding sanctions.
The unsparing tone of the Premier League’s communications strongly indicates it will push for a severe response. A record financial fine is a near certainty, with no regulatory ceiling on the amount that can be demanded.
Expulsion from the league remains a theoretical possibility, though such a measure would rely on the explicit support of 15 member clubs alongside crucial cooperation from the English Football League (EFL) to mitigate any unfair disruption across the lower professional tiers.
The strictest disciplinary measure firmly within the Premier League’s direct control is a points deduction, a penalty already utilized for other financial indiscretions. Breaches of squad cost ratio (SCR) spending rules carry a fixed tariff of points penalties, while Everton and Nottingham Forest received similar punishments under the earlier Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR) regime.
In City’s case, such a penalty could be engineered to guarantee long-term sporting consequences. According to insights from sources at rival clubs reported by The Athletic, two primary approaches have been suggested.
Because the Premier League cannot directly relegate clubs, a single unprecedented points deduction of 60 points or more would achieve the exact same sporting effect within a single campaign. Alternatively, repeated annual penalties of approximately 25 points would effectively lock City out of European qualification for several seasons. Coupled with a long-term transfer ban, such a penalty structure would prevent the club from operating as a dominant domestic force for a prolonged period.
Retrospective punishments represent another possibility, driven by a vocal public clamour for City to be stripped of their historical titles. However, BBC Sport reported that there is "little appetite from within the Premier League" for that prospect. There is virtually no domestic precedent for stripping titles in British professional soccer, although Juventus and Marseille have faced similar retrospective penalties in other European jurisdictions.
A chain of lawsuits
Regardless of whether City are ultimately stripped of their titles, rival clubs are actively seeking compensation for being denied the fair opportunity to win them.
Four clubs—Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United, and Tottenham Hotspur—have reportedly reserved their rights to pursue independent civil legal action over lost revenues stemming from prize money and missed qualification for the lucrative Uefa Champions League. Beyond direct financial losses, these clubs will point to the attendant reputational and commercial benefits that those sporting achievements would have carried.
The legal boundaries of these arguments will undoubtedly be heavily contested. City’s initial flurry of heavy transfer spending predated strict financial fair play enforcement, and no public allegations have been made regarding their conduct in the seasons immediately following the initial investigative reports published by Der Spiegel in 2018.
Nevertheless, rival clubs will feel deeply emboldened by Burnley’s recent success in a legal claim against Everton. The Lancashire club was awarded £35 million after successfully arguing that Everton’s breach of spending limits directly contributed to Burnley’s relegation at the end of the 2021/22 season.
It is entirely conceivable that complaints could extend far beyond direct on-field results to encompass broader market distortion. City’s spending habits set the absolute ceiling of the modern transfer market for player salaries and transfer fees, a factor rival executives contend fundamentally warped their own recruitment and spending strategies.
Additionally, other clubs and their respective commercial partners could argue that City’s publicly declared sponsorship income—which consistently exceeded that of domestic rivals and traditional continental giants—distorted perceptions of fair commercial value across the entire division. The independent commission ultimately found that just £119.25 million of the £830.69 million in commercial revenues reported by City during the investigated period actually originated from genuine external commercial partners, with the remainder injected directly by the club’s ownership.
For the wider football industry, these revelations raise profound questions regarding the true efficacy of the multi-club ownership model and the real-world distortion caused by sovereign wealth investment in domestic sport.
The political dimension
Unlike major North American sports leagues such as the NBA and NFL, which possess explicit mechanisms allowing them to compel franchise sales in extreme circumstances, the Premier League has no direct regulatory power to expel club owners.
Under the newly established Independent Football Regulator, its chairman, David Kogan, noted that the body would exercise executive disqualification and ownership divestment powers "where appropriate," though he declined to comment directly on City’s ongoing case. However, the involvement of a sovereign state actor as Manchester City’s de facto owner introduces an extraordinary political dimension and structural fragility to the proceedings.
The UAE is the UK’s largest Gulf trading partner, maintaining a bilateral economic relationship worth approximately £30 billion alongside deep strategic and military alliances. Much of Abu Dhabi’s heavy infrastructure investment across the UK has historically centered on Manchester, where urban regeneration projects linked to City’s Etihad Campus have generated thousands of local jobs and substantial economic activity.
The extreme sensitivity surrounding these ties was underscored by British politician Andy Burnham, who served as the mayor of Greater Manchester for nine years until June. Speaking to the BBC, Burnham stated he would be "really concerned to lose [the owners]," praising them as foundational partners in the building of modern Manchester and the transformation of the football club into a global powerhouse.
Burnham’s initial remarks contrasted sharply with the decisive UK government interventions that forced Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich to sell Chelsea in 2022 under the weight of state-backed sanctions following the invasion of Ukraine. Responding to the ensuing political debate, Downing Street subsequently clarified its stance, with a Number 10 spokesperson describing the guilty verdict as "serious" and stressing that "there can’t be any suggestion that anyone is above the rules" and that "those responsible should face the appropriate consequences."
While City’s leadership reportedly made no formal contingency plans for an upheld guilty verdict, further legal repercussions appear unavoidable. Setting aside impending civil litigation, tax expert Dan Neidle of Tax Policy Associates has calculated that City’s complex remuneration workaround involving former manager Roberto Mancini should have generated approximately £12 million in unpaid UK employment taxes.
If those taxes remain unpaid, Neidle suggests it could indicate that City knowingly filed false accounting returns to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), potentially opening the door to a criminal investigation. Although club chairman Khaldoon Al-Mubarak has not been personally accused of impropriety, financial reports indicate he was granted diplomatic immunity in 2020, adding further layers of legal complexity to the situation.
A troubled legacy
Whatever the eventual course of legal and regulatory events, the practical and reputational fallout for Manchester City is only beginning to unfold.
Should the verdict withstand the upcoming appeal process and result in severe sporting penalties, the club’s star-studded squad may not take long to fracture. Non-Abu Dhabi-based sponsors, currently maintaining cautious silence while the legal team mounts its appeal, will be forced to reevaluate their commercial associations under intense scrutiny.
Conversely, if City manage to successfully overturn the ruling—particularly on a technicality—working relationships with rival clubs, football authorities, and even internal personnel will still take considerable time to mend.
The "Sham City" label adopted by opposition supporters across the country will likely outlast this entire episode, and there is no guarantee of a unified response from the club’s own fanbase. David Bernstein, who served as Manchester City chairman around the turn of the century when the club secured celebrated back-to-back promotions back to the top flight, pulled no punches in his assessment.
"I can’t think of a penalty strong enough for this, really," Bernstein told Talksport, adding his view that the current board of directors should resign. "I mean, this is absolutely terrible."
Neither contrite rehabilitation nor a face-saving exit strategy is currently visible through the club’s defiant public posture. Yet, without full and unambiguous vindication, one of those paths will inevitably have to be pursued, casting a long shadow over the wider City Football Group, which now wholly or partially owns 12 clubs worldwide.
More broadly, this landmark case has reignited intense debates regarding player spending restrictions, rules originally introduced to manage European football’s systemic debt crisis in the late 2000s. While critics argue that such regulations merely entrench the historical financial advantages enjoyed by established elite clubs, the financial landscape of the Premier League has evolved dramatically over the past decade.
Driven by sustained, exponential growth in domestic and international media rights, every single top-flight English club now possesses resources capable of outcompeting traditional continental giants in the transfer market. This financial parity has rewarded smart, data-driven recruitment and empowered a new class of upwardly mobile clubs led by Brighton, Bournemouth, and Brentford, alongside serial Uefa Champions League qualifiers Aston Villa.
With Premier League transfer outlay hitting unprecedented heights—such as £3.6 billion during a single summer window—the traditional headroom required to build a sovereign-backed project on the scale of Manchester City’s historical rise has narrowed significantly. Furthermore, the motivations of modern football investors have evolved, with many prioritizing sustainable asset value growth over the aggressive projection of wealth through unchecked transfer spending. For those owners, the commercial stability provided by robust cost controls remains highly attractive.
Inevitably, this high-profile case has also revived impassioned calls for stricter regulatory oversight regarding state ownership of professional football clubs, a path complicated by existing precedents such as Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) maintaining a controlling interest in Newcastle United.
For now, those broader governance questions sit alongside an ongoing sporting crisis. This remains the epicenter of a seismic shock to the domestic game, presenting enduring challenges to the commercial value and competitive integrity of the Premier League product. One way or another, Manchester City’s protracted battle with the rulemakers will decisively define a generation of English soccer.
