Manchester City have been found guilty of breaching the Premier League’s financial fair play rules, a verdict that leaves the club facing possible relegation and the loss of the trophies it won across a dominant decade and a half. City intend to appeal.
The charges against the club included failing to provide accurate and up-to-date financial reports, concealing salary details and bonuses, inflating sponsorship revenues, and failing to cooperate with or supply requested documents during the investigation. The fair play investigation was launched in 2018, and in 2023 the club learned it was facing more than 100 charges. Its attempts to legally filibuster the charges out of existence over the past three years came to nothing.
Eight trophies won between 2009-10 and 2017-18 — the period in which the club is said to have flouted fair play rules — could now be at risk, among them three Premier League titles and the record-breaking 2017-18 season in which City took the title with 100 points. Pep Guardiola, who has already left the club, was in charge for three of the trophies now under threat.
The verdict has drawn a striking response from City’s own supporters. Writing in The Guardian, the City fan and columnist Simon Hattenstone said the club were “bang to rights” and that the failed legal attempts to see off the charges were deserved. He noted that Everton and Nottingham Forest have been docked points for lesser offences, arguing it would be embarrassing were City to escape punishment — an “undeniable case of one rule for the rich.” He contrasted the club’s modern legal tactics with its origins, founded in 1880 as St Mark’s (West Gorton) by members of St Mark’s Church of England for humanitarian and social rescue purposes, to serve the deprived area of east Manchester.
Hattenstone traced the mood among supporters back to 2008, when fans began singing “City’s going down with a billion in the bank” to the tune of Yellow Submarine. That chant followed the sudden end of Thaksin Shinawatra’s 15-month ownership, after more than £1bn of his assets were frozen, and the arrival of Sheikh Mansour of the UAE. Despite the UAE’s riches, City were in the relegation zone by December of that year. He used the term “Cityitis” for the club’s habit of self-destructing when things appear to be going well, and noted that the chant grew louder when the fair play investigation opened in 2018 and again when more than 100 charges emerged in 2023.
Looking ahead, he expected City to lose trophies, to be “almost certainly” relegated, and to lose their best players, with Erling Haaland among those he thought would depart — though he joked the striker might stay to see how many goals he could score in a Championship season. He recalled that Wayne Rooney, in a recent interview, had suggested City would be docked 60 points, a punishment that would make relegation virtually impossible to avoid.
He took some consolation in the club’s “anni mirabiles” — the unprecedented domestic quadruple of 2018-19 and the 2022-23 treble including the Champions League — seasons in which, he wrote, there was “barely a whiff of scandal.” He argued the biggest positive to emerge from the club’s disgrace would be that justice is done, alongside the prospect of lower ticket prices and a renewed appreciation of success.