On 29 September the Premier League published the independent commission’s ruling in the Manchester City case. The club was found guilty on every charge of serious breaches of the financial rules across nine seasons, from 2009/10 to 2017/18. No punishment has been handed down yet, and on the evening of 1 October City lodged an appeal.
What the commission found
The headline finding is about money that looked bigger in the accounts than it was in real life. According to the commission, the club used sham commercial contracts and other arrangements to inflate its revenue and understate the costs it reported. Taken together, those arrangements overstated income and understated costs by more than £900m. The paperwork also kept quiet about where some of the sponsorship money really came from.
The second strand of the case gets less attention, though for the league it is arguably just as painful. The charges that the club failed to cooperate with the investigation were grouped into four sets, and the commission upheld three of them.
Almost eight years
The Premier League opened its investigation back in December 2018. The formal complaint only arrived in February 2023. The hearings ran behind closed doors for 42 days and wrapped up in December 2024, with the witness transcripts alone running to about 7,000 pages (a couple of dozen thick novels, give or take).
A year and nine months passed between the last day of hearings and the verdict.
The nine seasons covered by the charges are exactly the years when City grew from a solid mid-table side into champions. Over that stretch they won the Premier League three times, in 2011/12, 2013/14 and 2017/18. So the talk turned to titles on day one, even though nobody has ruled on them.
Numbers on paper
The league’s financial rules rest on what the clubs themselves report. A club declares how much it earned from sponsors and how much it spent, and the permitted losses are calculated from those figures. If a contract says one thing on paper while the money actually comes from somewhere else, the whole calculation becomes fiction. That is precisely what the commission put on record.
Industries that live on trust in their numbers tend to build the check into the product itself. Online casino slots carry a stated return to player, or RTP. The provider calculates it, and independent testing labs check it against the game’s maths. Slots at Spinchester Casino have that figure too, usually listed in the game rules before the first spin. Football, by contrast, needed almost eight years to get a comparable audit.
The appeal and the timetable
City filed a comprehensive appeal on the evening of 1 October, arguing that the commission made significant errors of law, of principle and in its assessment of the facts. Hardly a surprise: back in 2023 the club was already talking about “irrefutable evidence” in its favour.
According to AP, the appeal hearing should take place within 12 weeks, so roughly by the end of December. The same report says the hearing itself is expected to last no more than five consecutive days.
What punishment is possible
The sanction will be decided separately. The rules allow for a fine, a points deduction and other sporting measures, but nothing has been decided. So it’s too early to claim City have already lost points, titles or their place in the Premier League.
The league does have precedents, albeit on a different scale. In 2023/24 Everton were docked eight points in total for breaching the profit and sustainability rules, twice what Nottingham Forest lost. Those cases were about exceeding permitted losses rather than arrangements worth more than £900m, so carrying those numbers over to City probably doesn’t work.
City have fought regulators before, too. In 2020 UEFA banned the club from European competition for two seasons, but the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne overturned the ban and cut the fine from €30m to €10m. It looks as though the club is counting on the appeal this time as well.
What happens to the table
For the title race, it all comes down to timing. At the start of October City sit top. If the appeal is heard before the new year, a sanction could land in the middle of the season, and the table would have to be redrawn on the fly. If the process drags on, the league risks finishing the season with a leader whose fate is being decided off the pitch.
The next step in the case is the appeal hearing, and no exact date has been given yet.
