The verdict football had waited years for has arrived: Manchester City have been found guilty of the financial rule-breaking charges first brought against them by the Premier League in 2023. The club continues to insist it is innocent and retains the right to appeal, meaning the legal wrangling is far from over. The guilty verdicts were formally announced by the Premier League in a statement read on Monday.
The immediate focus is the appeal. City have until Friday to lodge it, and the case will be heard by a new three-person commission. Precedent suggests the appeal will be resolved before any punishment is declared: in earlier cases involving Everton and Nottingham Forest, who breached spending rules, the appeal was heard and a decision made before sanctions were announced. How long the process will take, however, is unclear.
City cannot take a further appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, but could potentially argue at the High Court that the process was not impartial. The Premier League has said it wants the matter “concluded as soon as possible”, and the independent commission itself noted how long the case has taken. “It has taken us much longer than we would have wished, and much longer than we had anticipated would be the case when the hearing concluded, to produce our decision,” the commission wrote. “That is regrettable.”
The urgency is easy to understand. City sit top of the Premier League with a maximum 15 points from their opening five matches, but whether they are genuinely in a title race is unclear while players, fans and club owners remain in the dark about the punishment. Were the appeal and sanctions process to drag beyond the end of the season, teams who finished below City, were relegated, or were knocked out by them in the domestic cups could bring legal challenges — challenges that would be far less viable if the club’s real position were known before that point.
On the pitch, two outcomes are central. The first is a points deduction severe enough to leave City in the Premier League’s bottom three, bringing automatic relegation to the Championship. The second is expulsion, which would require 15 of their rival clubs to vote in favour of a motion decreeing it. Expulsion would leave City’s future far less clear, forcing them to apply to the Football Association for re-entry. The EFL and the National League are separate entities from the Premier League and would not necessarily be obliged to accept an entry request; even if the EFL accepted one, its 72 clubs would have to vote on whether to admit them. That is where the possibility of City beginning a reascent in League Two — or potentially even lower — arises.
The gap between a single season in the Championship and a restart far down the pyramid is vast, both sporting and financial. Juventus offer the nearest precedent: relegated from Serie A to Serie B in 2006 after being found guilty of match-fixing charges, they retained some of the world’s best players, including Gianluigi Buffon, Pavel Nedved and David Trezeguet, accepted one season in the lower tier, and returned to Serie A by winning the Serie B title before immediately finishing third and qualifying for the Champions League. Were City facing only one season outside the top flight, players on long, lucrative contracts would be far more inclined to stay, and the economic damage of losing access to top-flight TV rights income would be greatly reduced.
A separate question is whether the case could become a criminal matter. Under the Fraud Act 2006, dishonestly making a false representation with the intention of making a gain or avoiding a loss can lead to individuals being imprisoned for 10 years and facing an unlimited fine, if charges are brought and proven. “Surely the Man City findings are now a police matter,” said Lord Cruddas, a banker and businessman. “If accounts have been falsified and auditors have been misled then it is potentially a criminal matter. The auditors will call in the police, directors are personally liable for any fraud of a UK company even if it is foreign-owned.”
For the case to move from football wrongdoing to something more, an investigation by the relevant authorities would first be required. The bodies able to investigate potential financial crimes in the UK include regional police forces, the National Crime Agency, HMRC and the Serious Fraud Office. BBC Sport contacted each of them and was given no indication that any kind of investigation has begun, though some do not routinely confirm investigations owing to confidentiality. Former Manchester City chairman David Bernstein, who left the club five years before its current owners took control, raised the possibility in an interview on BBC Radio 5 Live. “This is very serious and I wonder whether some of these issues might need to be referred to authorities outside of the league,” he said, adding: “My immediate thoughts are – can the board of directors continue and should the people involved be suspended immediately?” Football finance expert Kieran Maguire, though, feels a wider investigation may be unlikely. “HMRC might consider it but there is not a lot for them to go on,” he said. “There is certainly no corporation tax to recover.”
The final question concerns the owners. The Independent Football Regulator, established in 2025, awards licences to all 116 clubs across English football’s top five tiers, permitting them to operate, and applies an enhanced suitability framework to club owners, directors and senior executives — a strengthened version of the old fit-and-proper-person test. The Football Governance Act 2025 allows the IFR to suspend or revoke a club’s licence as a last resort in cases of wrongdoing. Government intervention is another possibility: in 2022 Roman Abramovich was forced to sell Chelsea following the launch of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with his assets frozen and a full seizure threatened, and the club had new owners within three months. Manchester City’s owners are not subject to any UK government action, and all that has been formally declared is that the club broke football financial rules — but the precedent exists, and any form of ousting would prove a severe test of diplomacy, with relations between the UK and the UAE, whose royal family controls City’s ownership group, having weakened in recent years.