City are found guilty of numerous breaches but the repercussions are far from clear as the ’legal process’ continues
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Manchester City’s chairman said yesterday/SAT said he remains confident that the club will be cleared despite being found guilty of breaking Premier League financial regulations.
Eight years after the German magazine Der Spiegel first published allegations that City had circumvented financial rules, three and a half years after the Premier League formally announced an investigation into more than 100 possible breaches of its regulations, and two years after an independent panel heard the case, City had been found guilty.
Spectacularly so, in fact. The club stood accused of failing to cooperate, misrepresenting information relating to sponsorships, failing to provide “full details” of player and manager remuneration and failing to comply with the league’s profit and sustainability rules. The panel, chaired by Gary Hickinbottom, had ruled against the club on all but one of the charges.
Yet City’s chairman, Khaldoon Al Mubarak, said he was sure the club would be exonerated.
“While some people have been quick to reach their own conclusions, and there is so much noise swirling around us, nothing has changed,” he said in a letter to the club’s fans.
“The Premier League process still has a long way to run, and our confidence and intent in proving the club’s innocence is just as strong as when this began. There are so many things that I would like to be able to share with you to help you understand why we feel so confident in our position.
“But the strict confidentiality of the legal process and our determination to respect it means I cannot do that at the moment.”
Within a couple of hours of the verdict landing, staff at the club that became English football’s dominant force over the past 15 years were indulging in the darkest comedy they could muster. Sardonic WhatsApp messages came straight from the gallows. “Nice working with you,” read one. Others followed much the same theme.
In the circumstances, that was all they could do.
Throughout the process, City strenuously insisted on its innocence. The club had publicly referred to a “comprehensive body of irrefutable proof” that would vindicate it. City had taken the same stance internally, reassuring staff that its name would be cleared, no matter how long and arduous the legal case proved to be. The club “always tell us the confidence they have on their innocence,” as Rodri, the club’s former midfielder, said in a press conference on Friday evening.
When the Athletic first reported the panel’s decision, at 2.41pm on Friday, City’s hundreds of employees had not been forewarned. The club’s senior leaders, guided by the expensive battery of lawyers and barristers overseeing the case for them – led by David Pannick KC and Paul Harris KC, supported by the legal firm Clifford Chance – would have been aware that a verdict had been reached.
The BBC, among others, has reported that select officials at other teams had been informed of the outcome after a regularly scheduled Premier League meeting on Thursday, although representatives of at least two leading clubs maintain that did not apply to them.
In the immediate aftermath of publication, City released a brief statement: “The Premier League process remains ongoing, with significant elements to be completed, and subject to strict confidentiality. As such Manchester City FC’s position remains consistent with the club’s statement of February 2023.
“The club has diligently respected due process for eight years on the basis that the Premier League board and executive would behave as an independent, impartial and fair-minded regulator, free from partisan influence.”
It reads like a not especially subtle baring of the teeth, an indication that City retains – and can be expected to take up – its right to appeal.
Quite how long that will take is not clear. It will not be immediate: Manchester City’s players do not, for the most part, have clauses related to the charges in their contracts; there will be no immediate exodus of the club’s stars in January.
There has still, for one thing, been no official confirmation of the verdict. The independent panel has not yet indicated what its recommended sanction will be. The Premier League’s rules allow for almost any level of punishment, ranging from swingeing fines or hefty points deductions all the way to expelling the club from the league.
That would be functionally unprecedented: the only real historical parallel would be the ejection of Leeds City for making illegal payments in 1919. Most executives suspect retrospective punishments – such as stripping City of some of the eight Premier League titles they have claimed since 2012 – are unlikely. But they know that these are uncharted waters.
The rules allow the panel to implement whatever sanction it “shall see fit”. The Independent Football Regulator, established last year to the chagrin of the Premier League as a whole to oversee the broader health of the game, could also theoretically intervene; it has the power to remove licences from owners deemed unsuitable.
Regardless of the penalty, City has always made clear it would fight even the slightest scintilla of guilt. As Simon Cliff, the club’s legal counsel, notoriously wrote in one of the tranche of emails that triggered the initial Der Spiegel investigation, Mubarak said he would “rather spend 30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue [Uefa] for the next 10 years than agree a financial penalty”.
That is not the only uncertainty facing the Premier League in light of the verdict. Should the punishment, whatever it might be, stand after appeal, then there is the prospect of several other clubs, and perhaps even coaches and players, seeking legal redress from City for revenue lost over the period in question.
Liverpool, Arsenal, Tottenham and Manchester United served legal notices in 2024 that effectively entitle them to claim compensation should City be found guilty. Their estimates could run to hundreds of millions of pounds.
There is precedent, too, to suggest that others might follow suit. In June, another independent disciplinary commission ordered Everton to pay Burnley £26m, plus interest of £9.1m, after being found to have breached financial rules in the 2021-22 season. Burnley were relegated that year; their argument was that had Everton’s subsequent punishment been applied at the time, they would not have been. Everton have appealed, but the example has been set.
Then there is the political dimension. The prime minister, Andy Burnham, urged people not to “jump to those kind of conclusions” about City’s potential punishment on Friday, suggesting he would need to “study the independent commission’s report in some considerable detail” before reaching any conclusions. Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, reminded all club owners on Saturday of their duty to “uphold the integrity of the game”.
Burnham was an active and public critic of the Premier League for meting out multiple sanctions to Everton, the club he supports, for its financial transgressions while he was mayor of Greater Manchester; the league itself did not always find his high-profile interventions particularly helpful.
He has also previously praised City’s ownership group, with its links to the royal family of Abu Dhabi, for its investment in Manchester as a whole. “They are more than building a football club,” he told Pod Save the UK in 2023. “They have been huge partners for the city and they have improved a lot of lives here.”