The Premier League’s independent Commission published its 40-page Core Decision last week, finding Manchester City guilty of breaching the Premier League’s financial rules during the period of 2009/10 to 2017/18 and obstructing the investigation. Some Aston Villa fans wondered whether that might mean the 2020 League Cup final, which Villa lost to City, could be retrospectively handed to them. But it was an unlikely oracle who pointed to the bigger picture. Many Villa supporters were suspicious of what was happening at City, but Gabby Agbonlahor was feeling the impact from within the Villa dressing room, watching the injustice play out in real time.
“I played in that era, 2009-2018,” the former Villa striker said on Talksport last week. “You know what they did in 2009? They took our best player, Gareth Barry. You know what they did in 2010? They took our best player James Milner. You know what they did in 2015? Took our best player Fabian Delph.”
Any progress Villa attempted to make was constantly halted by having their best player poached, and, as we now know, City’s summer spending was being facilitated by a scheme the Commission has called a “Disguised Funding Scheme”: hundreds of millions of pounds of owner equity dressed up as commercial sponsorship and slipped through the accounts.
In many ways, the 2020 League Cup final is a distraction from City’s impact on Villa, and indeed many other Premier League clubs. What Agbonlahor is describing, and this Commission has now confirmed, is a decade of structural fraud that reshaped English football’s competitive order and directly hollowed out and kept in check clubs who were trying to compete. While Agbonlahor is often dismissed as a typical Talksport engagement banter merchant, while he giving a simplistic version of events, at its core is a chilling story.
City’s disruption to Villa’s rise under Lerner.
The story of Gareth Barry is instructive in terms of being an initial example of what City were setting themselves up to do.
In the summer of 2008, Liverpool came for him: proper, public, protracted interest from Rafa Benitez.
Villa had been rejuvenated under the owner and manager combination of Randy Lerner and Martin O’Neill, and were trying to get in the Champions League. Despite Barry publicly declaring he was open to a transfer, the club, to their considerable credit, held firm. Liverpool moved on. Villa kept their captain.
Meanwhile, City had been bought by Sheikh Mansour’s Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG) in the same summer, and 12 months later, Manchester City rang Barry.
“From nowhere, Man City got in touch,” the player later recalled in an interview with Birmingham Live. “They started speaking about certain players they were on about signing, which even then was hard to believe.
“They painted the picture that this was the fast train and if you don’t get on it you’re going to regret it.”
City were now promising a level of ambition and wage structure that no English club could rationally compete with, and Barry left for £12m.
The following summer, James Milner went the same way. His departure, coming hot on the heels of Barry’s, served as the catalyst for Martin O’Neill walking out as Aston Villa manager and contributed to the increasing disillusionment owner Randy Lerner felt.
Of course, O’Neill’s lax dressing room, wasteful transfers, and the ceiling on his managerial ability were the main reasons Villa fell short of Champions League football and silverware. Off the pitch, Villa were antiquated too, lacking modern infrastructure and vision both commercially and on the football side. But the slow death spiral can be traced back to the Milner sale: that was when they began to unravel and eight years later, Villa were stuck in the Championship, unable to pay a £4m tax bill, as Tony Xia’s ownership faltered.
City, by contrast, had a modern, forward-thinking outlook, supercharged by what Arsène Wenger called, at the time, “financial doping”.
Villa could not hold on to their best players, and by the time Delph left, Manchester City were recording more than £100m a year in fictitious commercial revenue just to maintain the illusion of regulatory compliance.
While the charged period is 2009/10 to 2017/18, it also built the foundation for what was to come. The story of City pilfering Villa’s top talent did not end with Barry, Milner and Delph.
For several summers Villa fought off interest from various clubs for their talismanic homegrown hero Jack Grealish. They gave him a new contract and the armband, even displayed his image on the North Stand at Villa Park.
For Villa’s new owners at the time, especially Wes Edens, Grealish was the equivalent of a franchise player, as Giannis Antetokounmpo had been at Edens’ Milwaukee Bucks. He was the cornerstone to what they were building.
Then Manchester City came in with £100m.
Beating off earlier interest for Grealish from Manchester United and Tottenham was one thing, but City flexed their financial muscle injected by the fiscal steroid of accumulated structural advantage from their previous nine years of sham agreements.
Many Premier League clubs will have similar stories, but Villa’s case provides a clear insight into the scale of the impact of Manchester City’s actions and how difficult it will be to arrive at a suitable punishment retrospectively.
City have maintained their innocence and lodged an appeal on 1 October against a case and decision that Premier League chief executive Richard Masters called “the most significant in Premier League history”.
Manchester City’s inflated sponsorships
The full Commission verdict is quite the eye-opener: systematic, sustained and intelligently designed deception.
City entered into sponsorship agreements with a series of Abu Dhabi-linked companies (the “AD Sponsors”). These agreements recorded large sponsorship fees. The AD Sponsors only ever paid a fraction: the genuine commercial value of the arrangement. The remainder was secretly paid by ADUG, City’s owner.
The table below shows the precise financial manipulation recorded in the Commission’s Core Decision, season by season. The final column shows the actual sum of fabricated income per season, secretly funded by the club’s own owner:
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Season Recorded sponsorship (£m) Sponsors’ spend (£m) Paid by owner (£m)
2009/10 27.0 4.5 22.5
2010/11 41.25 12.75 28.5
2011/12 86.75 16.0 70.75
2012/13 121.75 16.0 105.75
2013/14 127.5 16.0 111.5
2014/15 123.2 16.0 107.2
2015/16 136.17 16.0 120.17
2016/17 140.59 11.0 129.59
2017/18 145.73 11.0 134.73
Total £949.94m £119.25m £830.69m
Separately, the Commission found around a further £91m was disguised through an image-rights arrangement with a company called Fordham and three hidden remuneration arrangements.
The Commission concluded that when City’s accounts were restated accurately, the club had breached UEFA’s Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules by “a very substantial amount” across five seasons, and Premier League Profitability and Sustainability Rules (PSR) by “a very substantial amount” across three seasons.
Look at the 2015/16 row in the table above: £120.17m of the £136.17m City recorded that season was fiction. Villa had lost Delph to City at the start of that season, which saw them collapse into a 17-point relegation season, followed by three seasons incapacitated in the Championship.
How do you start to compensate clubs in this context? When Agbonlahor was asked the question, his answer touched on the amount being endless.
“What if you have missed out on Champions League qualification? What if you missed out on relegation, what if you have missed out on winning league titles, every league position you miss out on is a few million pounds, isn’t it? All the money that Man City might have to pay to these clubs – off the scale,” he said.
Hacker for Justice
Disappointingly, despite it being obvious that Manchester City were cooking their books, with managers like Wenger and Jürgen Klopp calling it out and supporters constantly discussing it, the FA and Premier League seemed to be doing very little at the time. It took a young Portuguese man sitting alone at a computer in Budapest to start a chain of events that could lead to justice.
Rui Pinto, who grew up in the Porto area, hacked City’s servers in 2017 and obtained tens of millions of internal documents: emails about sponsorship deals, internal communications, financial arrangements. He passed them to Rafael Buschmann, a journalist at the German magazine Der Spiegel, who assembled a team to work through more than three terabytes of material.
Der Spiegel published its first articles in November 2018. They laid out the true structure of the Abu Dhabi sponsorship arrangements: that City’s commercial revenue was not what it appeared to be. The Premier League began its investigation the following month.
Pinto has lived in witness protection ever since, the subject of multiple prosecutions across Portugal and France. He received a four-year suspended sentence in 2023. His lawyer told BBC Sport that the outcome of the City case “would be important for him to feel vindicated that it was useful, that something happened”.
Football owes Rui Pinto a complicated debt. He may be deemed a criminal, technically, but he has been the only person who has actually told the truth.
You only have to look to City’s witnesses for proof of that. The Commission also found, in damning terms, that a number of City’s witnesses had given evidence that was “false in a number of key respects”, and that certain witnesses “had given evidence at the hearing that they knew to be untrue and so had been dishonest”.
The end of football as we knew it
The Manchester City verdict lands at a time when football has become increasingly obsessed with wage-to-revenue ratios and squad cost limits, rather than formations, forward presses and offside traps.
Meanwhile, clubs like Chelsea and Villa have been forced into financial gymnastics to meet the rules City were covertly evading. Both sold their women’s team effectively back to themselves, and Villa extended the principle to assets like the Warehouse building. Hardly the actions of clubs in a healthy financial ecosystem.
Rui Pinto proved the game’s governing bodies have struggled to police themselves, and the Commission has now confirmed what he exposed.
Football, as we once knew it, the game with its working-class soul and tradition, is not dying. It is already dead. Money killed it. It just hasn’t been buried yet.
The lawyers have taken possession of the body, the accountants are arguing over the estate, and the rest of us are left trying to calculate the damage. What happens next will be decided in appeal chambers, not on football pitches.
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