Manchester City have reportedly been found guilty of all but one of more than 100 charges brought by the Premier League, with reports of a verdict emerging in September 2026 and no immediate details of any sanctions. The outcome, if confirmed, lands more than three and a half years after the charges were first published and closes a loop that runs all the way back to the club’s change of ownership in 2008.
On transfer deadline day in September 2008, the Abu Dhabi United Group, led by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, agreed a £200m takeover of Manchester City, buying 90% of the club from Thaksin Shinawatra. The new owners made an immediate impact, signing Robinho from Real Madrid for £32.5m before the window closed. Vincent Kompany and Pablo Zabaleta had arrived before the takeover, and Mark Hughes added Nigel de Jong (£16m) and Craig Bellamy (£14.5m) in January 2009 — but City finished only 10th, and the following summer brought Gareth Barry (£12m), Joleon Lescott (£22m) and Emmanuel Adebayor (£25m). Carlos Tevez’s £25.5m move from Manchester United, complete with a provocative poster, led Sir Alex Ferguson to dub City “noisy neighbours”.
Hughes was sacked in December 2009 and replaced by Roberto Mancini, with City missing out on the top four after a home defeat by Tottenham. The next summer brought Yaya Touré, David Silva and Mario Balotelli at £24m each, plus James Milner in a deal worth £18m. In August 2010 Sheikh Mansour attended his first — and still only — City home game, a 3-0 win over Liverpool. With Edin Dzeko added for £27m in January 2011, Mancini steered City to third place and a first Champions League campaign, before Touré’s winner stunned United in the FA Cup semi-final and he struck again in the final against Stoke. The victory ended a 35-year wait for a major trophy and brought an infamous Old Trafford banner down.
Uefa introduced financial fair play for the 2011-12 season, and City offered an early test of the new system by announcing a 10-year sponsorship deal with Etihad Airways in July 2011, renaming their home ground the Etihad Stadium. On the pitch, club-record signing Sergio Agüero (£38m) and Samir Nasri (£24m) arrived, City thrashed United 6-1 at Old Trafford, and Tevez went awol after a row with Mancini. United pulled eight points clear, but Tevez returned and a 1-0 win over Ferguson’s side put City back on top. On the final day they trailed QPR 2-1 at home in stoppage time; Dzeko nodded in an equaliser before Agüero scored in the 94th minute to win the title.
Mancini’s second season began with deadline-day signings Jack Rodwell, Javi García and Scott Sinclair for a combined £35m, ended with United reclaiming the title and defeat by Wigan in the FA Cup final — and cost Mancini his job one year and a day after he won the league. Manuel Pellegrini arrived from Málaga, Tevez left, and Fernandinho’s £30m signing signalled a new approach. In 2013 City invested $100m alongside the New York Yankees to launch New York City FC and created the City Football Group, while the Premier League brought in profit and sustainability rules for 2013-14. Pellegrini won the title in 2014 and reached the Champions League knockouts for the first time, losing to Barcelona, and also lifted the League Cup with a 3-1 final win over Sunderland. Days after the title, City reluctantly accepted a conditional €60m (£49m) Uefa fine after recording combined losses of over £150m across 2011-12 and 2012-13, and were restricted to a 21-man European squad and £49m net spend for the following season, with the chance to recoup two-thirds of the penalty.
The 2014-15 season passed without a trophy, with big-money buys Eliaquim Mangala (£41m) and Wilfried Bony (£25m) flopping, but Pellegrini extended his deal to June 2017 and was backed with Raheem Sterling (£44m) and Kevin De Bruyne (£55m). In December 2015 the City Football Group announced a £265m deal with Chinese investors CMC for a 13% stake, by which stage Melbourne City, Yokohama F Marinos and the club’s affiliate women’s team were part of the group. Pellegrini confirmed in February 2016 that he would leave at the end of the season, and it was quickly revealed that Pep Guardiola would replace him. Pellegrini signed off with a Champions League semi-final defeat by Real Madrid and a League Cup final win over Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool.
Guardiola’s first season, after the additions of John Stones (£47.5m), Leroy Sané (£37m) and Ilkay Gündogan (£20m), ended with City third and a last-16 exit to Monaco. A summer of Kyle Walker (£45m), Bernardo Silva (£43m), Ederson (£35m) and Benjamin Mendy (£49.3m), plus a club-record £57m for Aymeric Laporte in January, transformed the team: City won the title with 100 points, a new top-flight record, along with the League Cup, before Liverpool knocked them out of Europe at the quarter-final stage. In November 2018 Der Spiegel published emails obtained by Rui Pinto’s Football Leaks website alleging that City’s owners had broken Uefa’s FFP regulations, claiming Sheikh Mansour was mostly funding Etihad’s £67.5m sponsorship deal and that Mancini had received extra payments through a second contract. Uefa launched an investigation, while City denounced the emails as “out-of-context materials purportedly hacked or stolen” and alleged an “organised attempt to damage the club’s reputation”.
A domestic treble followed in 2019, with Riyad Mahrez arriving from Leicester for a club-record £60m, a League Cup retained and Watford beaten 6-0 in the FA Cup final. Uefa’s investigation continued, the court of arbitration for sport rejected City’s first appeal in November 2019, and Silver Lake made a $500m investment. In February 2020 Uefa banned City from the Champions League for two seasons and fined them €30m after finding they had broken FFP rules and misled European football’s governing body; City vowed to go to CAS, and weeks later the season halted as the Covid pandemic hit Europe. City won their appeal in July 2020, with a three-person panel concluding that “most of the alleged breaches were either not established or time-barred” and reducing the fine to €10m for failing to cooperate with Uefa’s club financial control body. They finished a distant second to Liverpool and lost to Lyon in the Champions League quarter-finals, with new record signing Rodri (£62.8m) struggling to replace Fernandinho.
City reasserted themselves in 2020-21, finishing 12 points clear of United and winning a fourth successive League Cup, but lost their first Champions League final 1-0 to Thomas Tuchel’s Chelsea. Rúben Dias (£62.1m) and Nathan Aké (£40m) arrived, and the club made nearly £18m in profit on Sané’s move to Bayern. In April 2021 City were revealed as one of six Premier League clubs signed up to the European Super League, which collapsed within 48 hours amid an outcry; City followed Chelsea in withdrawing as fans protested. They broke their transfer record again in 2022 by paying £100m for Jack Grealish, sold Sterling to Chelsea for £47.5m and made a £27.5m profit on Ferran Torres’s move to Barcelona, then won the title with 93 points to Liverpool’s 92. Real Madrid’s late fightback denied them a Champions League final place. Off the field, Der Spiegel reported that the Premier League had been investigating City’s potential FFP breaches for three years, and Guardiola said he would leave if he felt lied to by the club.
In February 2023 the Premier League published 115 charges against City, to be decided at an independent hearing, with the number of potential breaches subsequently revised to more than 130 across nine seasons: 54 for failing to provide accurate and up-to-date financial information, 14 for failing to provide accurate player and manager compensation reports, five for failing to comply with Uefa’s regulations including FFP, seven for breaching the Premier League’s profitability and sustainability rules, and 35 for failing to cooperate with Premier League investigations. The ownership responded by referring to a “body of irrefutable evidence that exists in support of its position”. On the pitch, City won 12 league games in a row to overtake Arsenal, beat United in the FA Cup final, and — after Erling Haaland’s 52-goal first season — won the Champions League through Rodri’s winner against Inter in Istanbul to complete the treble.
City spent again after the treble, signing Josko Gvardiol (£77.5m) and Jérémy Doku (£55.4m), with sales of Mahrez and Laporte to Saudi sides and of Cole Palmer to Chelsea helping balance the books, and overhauled Arsenal to win an unprecedented fourth consecutive English title. Girona, a City Football Group partner club, finished in La Liga’s top four and were cleared by Uefa to play in the Champions League, while the group grew to 12 clubs; Savinho, owned by fellow CFG club Troyes, joined City for £30m in summer 2024, and Júlian Álvarez was sold to Atlético for a club-record €75m (£64.4m). With Richard Masters saying “the time is right” to resolve the charges, a private hearing began in London in September 2024, with David Pannick KC leading City’s defence, and ended on 6 December. In a separate case over the Premier League’s associated party transaction rules, City claimed victory on two key issues in October 2024 and asserted the rules were “found to be unlawful”, while the league said the ruling “upheld the need for the APT system”.
City’s form then unravelled: after an unbeaten start to their title defence they lost 2-0 at Bournemouth in early November and won only one of 13 games in all competitions before beating Leicester on 29 December, falling out of the title race even after Guardiola signed a contract extension. In February 2025 a tribunal found the league’s original APT rules “void and unenforceable”, while on the pitch City were knocked out of the Champions League by Real Madrid despite spending over £170m on four January signings; Guardiola said he expected a verdict “in one month”, which proved wide of the mark. The 2024-25 season ended with an FA Cup final defeat to Crystal Palace and a Club World Cup exit to Al-Hilal in the last 16. With no verdict or even a date for one, City spent about £175m on new signings and recouped close to £80m, then lost two of their first three league games, at home to Spurs and away at Brighton.
Having failed to keep pace with Arsenal, City spent £85m in January 2026 on the Crystal Palace defender Marc Guéhi and the Bournemouth winger Antoine Semenyo, taking the number of first-team signings in 13 months to at least 10, with speculation swirling that Guardiola could call time on his tenure at the end of the season. City won both domestic cups in May 2026, beating Arsenal in the Carabao Cup final and Chelsea in the FA Cup, with Semenyo scoring the winner — but Arsenal took the title, and Guardiola confirmed his departure before the final league game, against Aston Villa. The Etihad Stadium’s North Stand was renamed in his honour, his former assistant Enzo Maresca was lined up to replace him, and Maresca’s first window was headlined by a British transfer-record-equalling move for Enzo Fernández.
That is the backdrop against which the reported verdict arrived in September 2026, more than three and a half years after the charges were brought. City are reported to have been found guilty of all but one charge of more than 100 breaches, with no immediate details of any sanctions.