The Manchester City Case: the largest financial case in the history of football

A verdict, and what it is not

On 29 September 2026 the Premier League confirmed that an independent commission had upheld 114 of the 115 charges brought against Manchester City in February 2023. All 80 charges going to the financial substance were upheld, along with 34 of the 35 concerning the club's cooperation with the investigation. The seasons under review run from 2009/10 to 2017/18 — the years in which the club moved from mid-table to European power.

Three things have not happened. No sanction has been imposed; that is a separate hearing. The decision is not final; the club filed its appeal on 1 October 2026. And the club denies the findings in their entirety. Everything below describes what the commission found and what the club says in answer, which are not the same thing and are not presented here as though they were.

What follows is a reading of the mechanism, not a verdict on the people. The interesting part, for anyone who has audited anything, is that the case is not really about spending too much. It is about what a number was called.

The club that changed scale, and the rules that arrived after

Manchester City was bought in 2008 by Abu Dhabi United Group, the investment vehicle of Sheikh Mansour, a member of Abu Dhabi's ruling family. The spending changed scale immediately: squad, staff, training ground, everything.

Three years later UEFA introduced FFP, and the Premier League followed with its own PSR. Both work the same way. They compare what a club spends to what a club earns.

Which leaves a club that wants to keep spending with two levers, and only two: earn more, or cost less. The question put to the commission was whether those levers had been pulled in substance, or only on paper.

It began in an inbox

The case does not start on a pitch. In November 2018 the German magazine *Der Spiegel* published a series of articles drawn from the Football Leaks, millions of internal documents obtained by the Portuguese hacker Rui Pinto. Among them were exchanges between club executives describing arrangements intended to get around financial fair play.

UEFA moved first. In February 2020 it banned the club from European competition for two seasons and fined it €30m. In July 2020 the CAS set the ban aside and cut the fine to €10m, finding part of the conduct time-barred and part insufficiently established, while penalising the club's failure to cooperate.

That outcome matters, and the club has cited it ever since. But it does not resolve what came next: the Premier League was not working under the same limitation period, and had wider powers to compel documents. It continued its own investigation, and in February 2023 it charged.

What 115 charges actually contain

The figure is widely quoted and rarely understood. It is not 115 separate offences. It is five families of grievance, counted season by season across nine years.

Read by weight rather than by count, the shape of the case becomes clearer.

Sixty-eight charges — fifty-four on financial information, fourteen on remuneration — allege that the accounts were not true. Twelve allege a direct breach of a spending limit. Thirty-five concern the club's conduct during the investigation.

That proportion is the point. The commission was asked, overwhelmingly, not whether the club had spent too much but whether what it reported bore any relation to what had happened.

How it is said to have worked

The commission's decision runs to some forty pages. The word *sham* appears eight times. The scheme it describes rests on a single idea: bring the owner's money into the club wearing a different label. Across the nine seasons, the aggregate effect is put at around £900m.

Sponsorship priced by the party funding it

This is the principal lever. The club signed sponsorship agreements with companies based in Abu Dhabi, among them the airline Etihad. The commission found the contracts valued well above market, and — the decisive part — that the sponsors paid only a portion of the amounts written into them. The difference came from the owner's vehicle. The sums it paid to the sponsors exceed £830m.

The accounting consequence is immediate. What was in substance a shareholder contribution appeared in the accounts as commercial income.

Contracts amended to close a gap

Pay routed around the accounts

The third mechanism concerns wages. The commission found that part of the remuneration of certain players and managers was paid by third parties in fact funded by the owner, sometimes through consultancy agreements. In 2018 *Der Spiegel* illustrated the pattern with Roberto Mancini, reported to have signed, on the day he joined, a second contract with the Abu Dhabi club Al Jazira, better paid than the Manchester one. In total the commission puts at £66m the costs taken out of the club's accounts by this route, including payments made by the owner's vehicle to staff and to agents.

What Manchester City says

The club rejects the conclusions in full. Its statements describe the decision as containing material errors of law, principle and fact, and as unreliable; it says it holds irrefutable evidence supporting all of its positions.

On the substance, its central argument is that the additional sums paid to the sponsors came from the government of Abu Dhabi, not from its owner ADUG. Had that been accepted, the contracts could not have been characterised as sham within the meaning of the rules. The commission rejected it, finding the explanation constructed after the fact.

Two points stand in the club's favour and belong in any fair account. CAS found for it in 2020 on part of the same conduct. And the decision is not final: until the appeal is determined, the club remains entitled to contest its liability. In October it added Mark Howard KC, one of the most prominent commercial advocates in the United Kingdom, to its legal team.

Where the case stands on 2 November 2026

No sanction has been imposed. The file now runs on two tracks at once.

**The appeal.** Filed on 1 October, it goes to a fresh panel of three, at least one of whom has held judicial office. The panel does not retry the case; it reviews the decision, and may uphold, quash, remit or vary a sanction. The hearing is confidential until the decision is published. The league's rules allow twelve weeks for the process — an 18 December horizon — and thirty days after that for a decision, a timetable that may well not hold.

**The sanction.** A separate and also confidential hearing fixes the penalty. It may run while the appeal proceeds, and either side may then contest the result. The rules give the commission wide latitude: a fine, a points deduction, a transfer embargo, up to expulsion from the league. Stripping titles has been raised in the press.

English outlets report the league hoping for an appeal decision early in 2027, and some have floated deductions of 40 to 60 points. Those figures are speculation. No official source has said anything about scale, and this piece does not repeat them as though it were otherwise.

The precedents, and why neither fits

Everton was deducted ten points in November 2023 for losses of £124.5m over three seasons, £19.5m above the ceiling — reduced to six on appeal in February 2024, with two more added that April for a further breach. An overspend of a few tens of millions, with no allegation of concealment.

Chelsea was penalised for undisclosed payments to agents and third parties under the Abramovich era, between 2011 and 2018, totalling around £47.5m: €10m to UEFA in 2023, a record £10.75m Premier League fine in March 2026 with a suspended transfer ban, then £10m from the FA in July 2026, again with a suspended ban. No points.

The difference in treatment rests on three things. Chelsea's new owners reported the breaches themselves. They cooperated throughout. And the league concluded that even counting the payments, the club would not have exceeded its limits. This file presents the mirror image of all three.

The bill the other clubs may send

Sporting sanction may not be the only exposure. Several Premier League clubs have taken legal advice on whether they can claim compensation, arguing they were financially harmed. Those claims could be brought club by club or consolidated by the league.

Some moved early. As far back as November 2024, Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United and Tottenham had filed protective notices to preserve their right to sue, the concern being that a six-year limitation period — potentially running from the *Der Spiegel* publication in November 2018 — would expire before any verdict. Such claims would proceed through the arbitration route in the league's own rules. The losses claimed could cover titles, European qualification and the income attached to both.

That decision is what makes the exposure concrete rather than theoretical. The commission reasoned in points: it estimated how many points the breach had bought Everton, then recalculated the table without that advantage. Applied to nine seasons, with titles and Champions League places in play, the same method would produce far larger figures. It remains hypothetical while the verdict is under appeal.

A case that left football

Manchester City is not an ordinary club. Its owner is tied to Abu Dhabi's ruling family, and its chairman, Khaldoon Al Mubarak, holds several senior positions in the emirate's government. The verdict acquired a diplomatic dimension within days.

Emirati officials are reported to have warned the British government that the severity of any sanction could reduce their appetite for major investment in the United Kingdom. Downing Street has not denied the reports. The timing is awkward: the investment partnership between the two countries was due to be revisited at a London summit with Abu Dhabi in October, and Khaldoon Al Mubarak had met the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, at Downing Street a fortnight before the decision was published.

There is a particular English symmetry to this. The Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, was until July 2026 the mayor of Greater Manchester, and has said he is concerned at the prospect of the club's owners leaving a city whose regeneration they have helped finance — among other things through a partnership with the council to build 6,000 homes.

The government's position is that sporting regulation and disciplinary proceedings are not matters for the state. Two readings compete. On one, a country cannot afford to strain a strategic economic relationship over a sporting dispute. On the other, this pressure is precisely the problem that state ownership of football clubs creates, and the independence of disciplinary bodies has to be protected whatever it costs.

What the case says about the business

Beyond this club, the file poses a question nobody has answered. Can a sporting regulator effectively police a club backed by a state? Eight years passed between the first documents and a first finding, and the matter is still not closed.

The consequences run past Manchester either way. If liability is confirmed, rival clubs may claim compensation and an era of the Premier League gets re-read. If the appeal succeeds, it is the credibility of the league's financial controls that is left in question.

Both answers come from the same place, the appeal board, probably in the early months of 2027. We will follow it.