£830 Million, Hidden in Plain Sight
An independent commission has found Manchester City guilty on 114 of 115 charges. The club has appealed and says the verdict is unsafe. No sanction has been set. Four of the clubs who finished behind City have already reserved the right to send a bill.
In the 2017–18 season, Manchester City's accounts showed £145.73 million of sponsorship income. The companies named as those sponsors paid £11 million.
That one gap, repeated across nine seasons, is the whole case. Everything else is arithmetic and lawyers.
What the commission actually found
On 29 September the Premier League published the redacted core decision of the independent commission that has been hearing its case against Manchester City for the better part of two years. The commission upheld 114 of the 115 charges and rejected one.
The charges come in two bundles. Eighty of them deal with the money itself, across nine seasons from 2009–10 to 2017–18. The other thirty-five deal with how the club behaved once the investigation began, from 2018–19 to 2022–23. On that second bundle the commission found that City had made “concerted efforts to stop and frustrate” the inquiry.
That second finding is the part most reports skipped. The club was not only found to have broken the rules. It was found to have obstructed the people checking.
How the money moved
The mechanism is simple enough to explain at a dinner table. It was designed to be hard to spot in a set of accounts.
Abu Dhabi United Group has owned Manchester City since 2008. It put money into the club. There is nothing wrong with that. Owners are allowed to fund their clubs, and most of them do.
What breaks the rules is calling that money something else. The commission found that more than £830 million of owner funding was recorded as commercial sponsorship revenue from Abu Dhabi companies. On paper it looked like money the club had earned. In reality it was money the club had been handed.
Why does a label matter so much? Because every financial rule in football measures what a club earns against what it spends. Owner money does not count as earnings. Sponsorship does. Change the label and a club that is failing the test comfortably appears to be passing it.
In 2017–18 City's accounts recorded £145.73 million of sponsorship income. The sponsors named in those accounts paid £11 million.
Two smaller schemes ran alongside it. An image-rights arrangement overstated income by £24.5 million and hid a further £49.4 million of costs. Three arrangements funded by the owner kept another £16.8 million of wages and fees off the books. Across nine years, revenue was inflated and costs suppressed by more than £900 million.
The consequences are not marginal. City failed UEFA's break-even test — the rule that a club must roughly live within what it earns — in every one of the five seasons that charge covered. They breached the Premier League's £105 million three-year loss limit in all three of the windows charged.
They did not miss narrowly. The three-year losses the commission arrived at were £338.87 million, £356.96 million and £384.49 million. The ceiling was £105 million. That is three to four times the limit, three times over.
The sentence that will follow the club longest is the one on intent. The commission found that “by its conduct the club clearly intended to circumvent” the rules.
Eight years to get here
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| November 2018 | Der Spiegel publishes leaked internal documents. |
| 2020 | UEFA bans City from the Champions League for two seasons. The Court of Arbitration for Sport overturns it. |
| February 2023 | The Premier League charges the club with 115 breaches. |
| Sep–Dec 2024 | The hearing sits for twelve weeks. |
| 18 Sep 2026 | The decision reaches the parties. |
| 25 Sep 2026 | It leaks. |
| 29 Sep 2026 | The Premier League publishes the redacted core decision. |
| 2 Oct 2026 | City lodge their appeal. |
Eight years from the first leak to the first appeal. The sanction has still not been set.
One detail is routinely misreported. The 2020 CAS ruling was described everywhere as an acquittal. It was not. CAS found some charges time-barred under its own rules and others unproven on the evidence available then. The Premier League's process has no equivalent time limit. That is why a case CAS partly closed in 2020 could be fully reopened in 2023.
What nobody yet knows
No sanction has been imposed. A separate hearing, held in private, will decide that.
There is no tariff for this, and the precedents are smaller than they look. Everton were docked ten points, reduced to six on appeal, then two more for a second breach. Nottingham Forest lost four. Both were three-year overspends of £19.5 million and £34.5 million. City's case is nine seasons, more than £900 million, and a finding of deliberate obstruction on top.
Published estimates of a points deduction run from twenty to a hundred. The football finance lecturer Kieran Maguire puts his own range at forty to sixty. Nobody knows. Anyone quoting a single number is guessing.
The arithmetic worth knowing
City have averaged 86.5 points across the last ten Premier League seasons. Run a hypothetical deduction against the real final tables and three thresholds appear. A deduction of 38 points or fewer would have left them clear of relegation in all ten seasons. A deduction of 67 or more would have sent them down in every one. The coin flip sits around 55.
Last season is the binding case. City finished on 78 points. West Ham finished eighteenth on 39. That is a margin of 38, not the hundred-point cushion of 2017–18. City are far less insulated now than the club's reputation suggests.
Title stripping is a separate question. It is not automatic. It does not need a vote of the clubs or an intervention from the FA either. The commission's own sanctioning power runs to “such other penalty as it shall think fit.”
The appeal, and the tail
City have appealed. They argue that the decision contains “clear material errors, of law, principle and fact, and is unsafe.”
The appeal goes to a three-person board appointed by the chair of the league's judicial panel. One member must have held judicial office. There is no route on to CAS. Rule W.86 sets a target of twelve weeks from lodging to conclusion. A target, not a guarantee.
No rule suspends a sanction while an appeal runs. Everton's, Forest's and Leicester's all took effect immediately. But City are appealing liability, and that appeal comes before the sanction hearing. In practice, it delays any sanction being set at all.
Then there is the tail nobody is pricing. Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United and Tottenham are reported to have reserved the right to claim damages. Burnley's award against Everton landed thirty-one months after the sanction. Whatever happens this season, this case will still be generating invoices in 2029.
Four ways to read it from here
Enforcement took eight years, cost an amount neither side will disclose, and is still not finished. A rule without a funded, staffed, patient enforcement mechanism behind it is decoration. India is building franchise leagues at pace, with governance frameworks nobody has had a reason to test. The lesson is not to write better rules. It is that a rule you cannot afford to enforce is not a rule.
Related-party sponsorship is the oldest mechanism in franchise sport, and in India it is routine. Group companies sponsor teams their promoters own, at prices nobody outside the group has tested. None of that is unlawful. City's case shows what happens when a league finally decides to look. Settle your related-party rules now, while you have no particular reason to.
Three league titles were won inside the charged period: 2011–12, 2013–14 and 2017–18. The other five came after it. Whatever sanction arrives, no two City supporters will ever agree on what those seasons meant. That ambiguity is the real cost here. It lands on people who did nothing.
Every brand that bought space on that shirt between 2009 and 2018 was buying association with a club whose accounts have now been found to be false. None of them did anything wrong. It did not protect them.
If the same investigation were run against an Indian franchise league tomorrow, who would have the standing, the budget and the eight years to see it through?
We do not have an answer. Reply and tell us yours.
Every figure in this piece comes from the Premier League's published redacted core decision of 29 September 2026, except the points-deduction estimates, which are attributed to the people who made them. We have not hardened any single number for a sanction, because none exists yet. Corrections go up with a date on them, on a page that stays on this site permanently.