The independent commission examining Manchester City’s finances found the club guilty of all but one of the charges brought against it by the Premier League, and its published findings conclude that City cheated, did so deliberately and sought to conceal it with a campaign of calculated misinformation.
The club continues to deny wrongdoing. In a statement, City said the commission’s opinion “contains clear material errors, of law, principle and fact, and is unsafe”. It again pointed to “a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence that exists in support of all of its positions”, and maintained that it had “diligently respected due process for eight years on the basis that the Premier League Board and Executive would behave as an independent, impartial and fair-minded regulator, free from partisan influence”.
The chief executive, Ferran Soriano, reinforced that position in a video message, vowing to appeal — City have until Friday to do so — and to pursue “all other legal avenues” to prove the club’s innocence. He dismissed the Premier League’s charges as “a conspiracy theory”, referred pointedly to the independent commission as a “Premier League Commission”, and said the case rested on “a single false accusation” that funds were diverted from the owner to the club under the guise of sponsorship payments, something he said “could not happen and … did not happen”.
The commission’s account of the numbers is very different. The verdict found City overstated income by around £855m and understated outgoings by around £66m. Sponsorship deals were described as “shams” used to obscure investment, overstated by £830m across the nine years in question as part of “a plan to disguise shareholder funding … as ‘commercial partner revenue’”. The Fordham Agreement, an arrangement under which an entity bought player image rights, was “little more than a front”. Attempts to argue that the Premier League had misunderstood how the sponsorship deals worked were dismissed as “an ‘explanation’ that the club concocted well after the event in an attempt to conceal and obscure the realities of the disguised funding scheme”.
The commission also identified what it described as intentional conduct — steps taken to disguise the true nature of revenues and liabilities and expenses, to give the appearance of minimising the club’s financial dependence on the Abu Dhabi United Group, and to create a misleading impression that the club’s financial position was better than it was. Once charged, City “made concerted efforts to stop and frustrate the PL investigation”, according to the panel, which found that evidence given by a number of important factual witnesses called on the club’s behalf was false in key respects, and that certain witnesses had given evidence they knew to be untrue and had therefore been dishonest. On occasions the panel concluded it “should not accept the opinion of an expert”, with its reasoning set out in an appendix.
Only one charge was not proven: a breach of “duties of cooperation” with the Premier League relating to one tranche of accusations. The charges relate to the period between 2009-10 and 2017-18.
Any sanction will be dealt with separately at a further hearing before the independent commission. The scale of the findings has already drawn comparisons with the eight-point deduction Everton received across two accounting windows for an inadvertent breach of profitability and sustainability rules worth around £20m — a case in which the club had cooperated with the investigation. City’s conduct, the verdict found, was not a mistake but a calculated attempt to circumvent the rules.
Writing after the findings were published, Jonathan Wilson argues that any punishment will have to be extremely severe, and that there is a strong argument for City’s expulsion from the Premier League at least under the current ownership. He describes the findings as the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on English football, distinct from the three previous major top-division financial scandals — involving Manchester City in 1906, Leeds City in 1919 and Sunderland in 1957 — which centred on breaches of the maximum wage.
Central to the fallout is the position of the Abu Dhabi United Group, the 81% majority owner of City. In Wilson’s assessment, its reputation and integrity lie in tatters, shredded in careful, measured legal prose, and he argues that the club’s continued denials only reinforce the sense that it has no respect for the regulations.