Where is the Premier League v Manchester City decision? A very good question and one nobody seems to be able to answer.
But one person that does know one way or another if it is out is Lord Pannick KC, City’s lead barrister. Last week he was in theRoyal Box at Wimbledon without a care in the world. He was not poring over 1,000 pages of a disciplinary panel’s award on City. For what it is worth, my latest information as of a couple weeks ago was that there was still no decision to pore over.
In the search for clues, I stumbled upon Lord Pannick’sHouse of Lords page. It represents a good overview of when he’s been busy over the last couple of years and when he has had time to be in the Lords and voting.
Between September 2024 and January 2025, he attended a single vote on 22 November 2024 and made no oral contributions at all between 10 September 2024 and 9 December 2024. He was busy on something!
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Lord Pannick appears to be spending more and more time on Lords business but he still does select jobs as a barrister including most recently an overnight stint for Southampton in theSpygate saga. He also successfullywon an interesting case on issue estoppel in the Supreme Court on 1 July 2026 (heard in February 2026).
Further, Lord Pannick KC’sRegister of Interests, updated as recently as last week, tells us something about Manchester City that no panel has yet ruled on (as far as we know).
Since 2021, peers who practise at the Bar must itemise fees from foreign states. Lord Pannick fought the rule, calling it “an intrusion”, and lost. His register currently shows recent results including: £120,000, £245,000, £300,000, £350,000 and £590,000 from the government of Denmark between November 2025 and February 2026, a string of entries for Gibraltar, £141,200 from Hong Kong public bodies, and on 27 March 2026, £500,000 “from a company owned by The People’s Republic of China”.
Between the rules changing in 2021 and today, Pannick has received a single fee of£195,000 from the government or a government official of the United Arab Emirates alongside entries for Ukraine, Mauritius and the Cayman Islands. That single UAE entry cannot be Manchester City because we know Pannick’s fees for acting for the club in the most consequential regulatory proceedings in English football are many times that individual payment and have been recurring since 2023. The fees for Manchester City or City Football Group sit silently under the generic entry “Practising member of the Bar”, where fees from any private client belong.
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Paragraph 56 of the Guide to theCode of Conduct requires that fees must be itemised where the client is a foreign government, an official of a foreign state acting in that capacity, or an organisation which “may be thought by a reasonable member of the public to be foreign state-owned or controlled”.
So, the test is not whether the client is in fact state-owned. It is not even what Pannick himself believes. It is whether a reasonable member of the public might think so.
So every time the register updates without a City entry, Pannick renews a considered professional judgment: that no reasonable member of the public could think Manchester City is owned or controlled by the UAE. Not that the claim is wrong, or unproven when Der Spiegel prints it or the Premier League allege it (if they did) - that a reasonable person could not even hold it.
City’s position has always been that City and its parents are the private property of Sheikh Mansour, held personally and not on behalf of the state, and no tribunal has found otherwise. But paragraph 56 sets a deliberately lower bar than City’s representations, and Pannick, of all people, knows precisely where that bar sits. He told the Lords in 2021 that the rule was misconceived but he did not say it was unclear.
The absence of a disclosure in the Register of Interests is a position, restated daily, from England’s top barrister whose reading of it cannot be put down to inattention or lack of understanding. Whether he is right is one of the many questions that will be answered when the long-awaited decision is finally published.
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