An independent commission has reached a verdict in the Premier League’s long-running case against Manchester City, with sources confirming guilty findings on almost all of more than 100 charges. The decision has emerged almost two years after the charges were heard in late 2024. There has been no official confirmation from the Premier League or from the club, and no full judgment from the panel. City said the process “remains ongoing, with significant elements to be completed, and subject to strict confidentiality”.
The scale of the allegations is without precedent in English football. City are said to have failed to provide accurate financial information to the league for nine seasons, from 2009-10 to 2017-18 inclusive; to have failed to provide full details of payment in their contracts with manager Roberto Mancini from 2009-10 to 2012-13; and to have failed to include full payment details in player contracts from 2010-11 to 2015-16. They are also charged with breaching Uefa’s financial fair play regulations from 2013-14 to 2017-18 and the Premier League’s profitability and sustainability regulations from 2015-16 to 2017-18. The remaining category covers City’s failure to cooperate with the league’s investigation throughout, from its inception in 2018-19 to the 2022-23 season in which the club was charged, including the duty to provide documents and information to the Premier League “in the utmost good faith”.
City’s modern era began with the 2008 takeover by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, of the Abu Dhabi ruling family and vice president and deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates. Since days after the takeover, the board has been chaired by Khaldoon Al Mubarak, a senior Abu Dhabi political and business figure and a long-term adviser to Mansour’s brother, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, ruler of the country and president of the UAE. The transformation began with huge losses spent on top players, including the statement signing of Carlos Tevez from Manchester United in the summer of 2009, while Mansour promised long-term investment and eventual profitability. Within 18 months he had invested £395m. There was scoffing at the corporate language when Mark Hughes was sacked for failing to meet “targets that were agreed and set”, but the doubts were largely blasted away when the era of dominance opened with FA Cup success in 2011 after 35 trophy-less years, followed by the 2012 Premier League title sealed by Sergio Agüero’s celebrated 94th-minute winner.
Funds were poured into every area: the stadium was expanded, a vast academy and campus built, and a multi-club football empire assembled. The hierarchy identified Barcelona as the ideal model, and Guardiola — the manager who had brought success to the Catalans — was finally recruited to east Manchester in 2016. Owning a successful Premier League club was understood from the outset as a showcase for Abu Dhabi, with sponsors from the beginning including the Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority. By 2017-18 the structures were largely in place, Guardiola had won his first title, Mansour’s personal investment was declared at £1.3bn and the club had moved into profit.
It was in November 2018 that Der Spiegel published internal City documents, leaked from a hack of the club’s email servers, that precipitated the exposure. Most damaging were emails and financial documents that appeared to show Sheikh Mansour’s ownership group was paying the bulk of the multimillion-pound sponsorship by the Abu Dhabi airline Etihad, which includes the naming of the stadium. The published material suggested a regime circumventing financial fair play rules — introduced by Uefa in 2011 and then mirrored by the Premier League in 2013 — which restrain overspending by limiting the losses owners can fund, and which bar owners from using a sponsor as a vehicle for putting in more money.
One email from City’s in-house lawyer, Simon Cliff, recorded Mubarak resisting a financial sanction from an earlier Uefa investigation into the club’s heavy losses of 2012 and 2013, which ultimately ended in a settlement. Cliff wrote that Mubarak “would rather spend 30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue [Uefa] for the next 10 years”. City have always denied any wrongdoing, and met the Der Spiegel coverage with outrage familiar from the years that followed, saying: “We will not be providing any comment on out-of-context materials purportedly hacked or stolen. The attempt to damage the club’s reputation is organised and clear.”
Uefa’s financial fair play body opened its own investigation, and in February 2020 its adjudicatory chamber found City guilty of deception over the Etihad and Etisalat sponsorships, imposing a two-year Champions League ban. City appealed to the court of arbitration for sport, which in July 2020 overturned the findings and the ban but found the club had failed to cooperate, imposing a €10m fine. The Premier League had announced its own investigation in March 2019, but against the backdrop of the Uefa fight it drew little notice. A British court judgment published in July 2021 changed that, revealing that the league’s process had been running since December 2018 in response to the Der Spiegel coverage, and that City and its lawyers had been trying to block it at every step. The club refused to supply requested information and documents, prompting a disciplinary complaint in August 2019, and challenged the independence of the commission set up to decide it. The league then brought an arbitration; the tribunal rejected City’s challenge and on 2 November 2020 ordered the club to hand over the documents. City appealed to the high court, and in March 2021 Mrs Justice Moulder ruled against the club and ordered that her judgment be published.
In February 2023 the Premier League unveiled the charges in full. Three months later City won the league again, and in June 2023 Sheikh Mansour and Sheikh Mohamed were in the stands in Istanbul as the club finally lifted the Champions League. In 2023-24 City won the title once more, a record-breaking fourth in a row and Guardiola’s sixth, with the league dutifully crowning them champions while its accusations moved towards a hearing. Across the years since the investigation began in December 2018, Guardiola’s expensively constructed sides won five Premier League titles and the Champions League.
What happens next remains open. The long-hanging question of whether City could be stripped of titles, and how extreme any sanctions might be, has still to be answered, and the club can apparently appeal against these findings. With the news having leaked out rather than been formally announced, an extreme and unprecedented picture of the modern game — and of the times it is being played in — remains incomplete.