Manchester City found guilty on almost all financial charges as landmark Premier League saga ends
In a verdict without precedent in English football history, Manchester City have been found guilty on almost all of the more than 100 Premier League charges brought against the club, sources confirmed on Friday. The ruling brings to a close an epic disciplinary saga that has engulfed the Abu Dhabi-owned club for the best part of a decade and laid bare what the Premier League alleged was a scheme of financial cheating spanning more than a decade of serial success.
There is no episode in English football's history that even resembles a precedent for the case, which encapsulates the modern game at breaking point. Here was a grand, stoic old club, taken over in 2008 by Abu Dhabi royalty and mega-funded to imperious success, then crowned serial champions by a league simultaneously pursuing charges of monstrous financial cheating. Pep Guardiola's expensively constructed City teams won five Premier League titles and the Champions League during the years since the investigation began in December 2018.
The scale of the charges
There is no precedent either for the scale of the charges: that City failed to provide accurate financial information to the league for nine seasons from 2009-10 to 2017-18 inclusive; failed to provide full details of payment in their contracts with manager Roberto Mancini from 2009-10 to 2012-13; failed to include full payment details in player contracts from 2010-11 to 2015-16; that they breached Uefa's financial fair play regulations from 2013-14 to 2017-18, the Premier League's profitability and sustainability regulations from 2015-16 to 2017-18 — and that City failed 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”.
News of the independent commission's decision has finally emerged almost two years after the hearing of the charges in late 2024. Those hearings followed a mammoth investigation process, in which the Premier League and its lawyers insistently demanded to see all the documentation it requested, against repeated challenge from the club.
The rise of a dynasty
The period of the charges, 2009-10 to 2022-23, runs from the start of all the glittering success attained under the ownership of Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, of the Abu Dhabi ruling family, vice president and deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates. The era of dominance began with FA Cup victory in 2011 after 35 trophy-less years for the club, then the breakthrough 2012 Premier League title won by Mancini through Sergio Agüero's celebrated 94th-minute winner.
Since days after the takeover, City's board has been chaired by Khaldoon Al Mubarak, a senior Abu Dhabi political and business leader, long-term adviser to Mansour's brother Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the ruler of the country and president of the UAE. The new era began with huge losses sustained buying top players, including the statement signing of Carlos Tevez from Manchester United in the summer of 2009, yet within 18 months Mansour had invested £395m. By 2017-18, the structures were mostly in place, Guardiola had won his first title, Mansour's personal investment was declared at £1.3bn, and the club moved into profit.
The Der Spiegel exposé
This stunning exposure of the modern Manchester City's insides was precipitated in November 2018 by the German magazine Der Spiegel sensationally publishing internal City documents, leaked to it from a hack of City's emails. Most damaging in that exposé were emails and financial documents that appeared to show Sheikh Mansour's ownership group was paying the bulk of the multimillion-pound sponsorship of the club by the Abu Dhabi airline Etihad, which includes bearing the name of the stadium.
Der Spiegel's exposé landed as an explosive challenge to the project, revealing not only alleged financial manipulations but a ruthless approach within the new City at odds with the public image. In one of the emails, City's in-house lawyer, Simon Cliff, wrote that Mubarak was resisting a financial sanction from a previous Uefa investigation, into City's massive losses of 2012 and 2013, that ultimately led to a settlement. Cliff wrote: “He 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 the hierarchy met the Der Spiegel coverage with a response that became familiar as the saga developed: outrage and indignation. “We will not be providing any comment on out-of-context materials purportedly hacked or stolen,” City said in a statement. “The attempt to damage the club's reputation is organised and clear.”
A rollercoaster of investigations
The internal body within Uefa responsible for upholding financial fair play launched an investigation into the allegations of financial cheating and misleading. The Premier League announced in March 2019 that it too was investigating, but given City's rollercoaster battle unfolding publicly with Uefa, it garnered little attention and seemed for some time almost theoretical.
In February 2020, Uefa's adjudicatory chamber concluded that City were guilty of deception over the sponsorships by the club's main commercial partner, Etihad, and the UAE telecoms company Etisalat, imposing a two-year ban from the Champions League. City appealed to the court of arbitration for Sport, which in July 2020 overturned the findings and the ban, but found that the club had failed to cooperate with the Uefa investigation and imposed a €10m fine. City then won their third Premier League title under Guardiola, the project approached its dominant peak, and nothing much was heard of any investigation — until a British court judgment published in July 2021 revealed that the Premier League process had been continuing, and that City and their lawyers had been trying to block it at every step.