Manchester City may face severe punishment if its financial breaches are upheld on appeal. But the people who will live with the consequences had no say in the decisions that brought the club here.
Football fans: who amongst us hasn’t wished for untold success for our club? To lift countless trophies, win handsomely against the strongest opposition, sign the world’s best players, and achieve glory year after year? Whatever the challenge, the club will have the funds, influence and clout to put an elite 11 players on the field each week. Success will only ever be just around the corner.
As the English Premier League returns after the international break, there will be many with just those dreams.
But this weekend, the league returns under a cloud. Many clouds. 114 of them, in fact.
That’s the number of charges of which an independent commission has found Manchester City guilty. To call it unprecedented doesn’t scratch the surface of the sheer scale and impact of what the commission said the club did over nine seasons from 2009/10 to 2017/18 – more than £900 million in distorted revenues and costs.
The club denies wrongdoing and is appealing the findings.
The impact of the scandal could have profound effects for the club, its fans, countless other clubs around the country, and even the state relationship between the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates.
Within days, politics had invaded the pitch. Prime Minister – and former Mayor of Greater Manchester – Andy Burnham expressed concern at the prospect of City’s Abu Dhabi owners walking away, praising their contribution to Manchester, before Downing Street clarified that the disciplinary process must remain independent. Meanwhile, Emirati officials reportedly warned that the verdict could influence the bilateral relationship and future investment in Britain.
Football’s regulatory process is suddenly brushing up against state diplomacy.
If you haven’t been following, here’s what you need to know. In 2018, Der Spiegel published material obtained from hacked Manchester City emails. Five years later, the Premier League brought formal charges. The independent commission appointed to hear the case sat in 2024.
The central finding is extraordinary. The commission concluded that in 2010 City devised what it called a ‘Disguised Funding Scheme’ – the purpose of which was to make money supplied by the club’s owner, Abu Dhabi United Group, appear in the accounts as genuine commercial sponsorship. In doing so, they broke the league’s financial fair-play rules, because owner equity wasn’t permitted to count as revenue.
The commission found City’s income was overstated by more than £830 million because of this; the league says all the arrangements combined inflated revenues and reduced costs by more than £900 million.
The commission said City “clearly intended to circumvent the Premier League rules”.
But wait, there’s more. The commission found that the club had made “concerted efforts to stop and frustrate the investigation”, and that evidence given by a number of witnesses called by City was false in key respects, with some witnesses giving evidence they knew to be untrue.
No punishment has yet been imposed. By the league’s timetable, an appeal decision is expected by January, although further proceedings could follow.
But what if City do lose the appeal? The commission’s powers include fines, points deductions and other sporting sanctions.
There have been rule breakers in the league before, but nothing even remotely on the scale of this. Everton was hit with a 10-point deduction – later reduced to six points on appeal – for being £19.5 million over the league’s permitted loss threshold. Nottingham Forest was deducted four points for being £34.5 million over.
The City scandal is a whole other universe of seriousness. Over nine seasons. And nine seasons where the club had unprecedented success: three Premier League titles, an FA Cup, three League Cups, and a season in which City became the first English top-flight team to reach 100 points.
The implications of this are enormous. Every club beaten by City in that period could feel aggrieved and cheated. That’ll be felt most acutely at the clubs who lost cup finals against them, or came second in the league behind them, or were relegated in a season they lost to them. Where will the legal challenges and demands for compensation stop? It could be a Pandora’s box.
City, of course, has to be punished if the commission’s findings are upheld. Sporting integrity demands it.
But a football club is more than its owners, directors, managers, players and staff. A football club is also its fans – including, in City’s case, the fans who were with them in the dark days of the third division, long before Abu Dhabi’s riches arrived.
Manchester City’s fans didn’t choose the club’s owners. They didn’t make accounting decisions for the club. Didn’t sign players. Didn’t frustrate the Premier League’s investigation. They undoubtedly enjoyed the success – who wouldn’t? But they are not in any way to blame for what the club they love did.
But punishment – whether points deducted, relegation, having titles stripped, or expulsion – punishes those fans alongside the club itself.
This is not an argument for leniency. Rules have to be followed, and clubs that complied were entitled to expect their rivals to do the same. There must be justice.
But it is an argument about the moral structure of modern football – where owners exercise almost total power, and supporters inherit the consequences.
I’m not a City fan. In the nine seasons covered by the commission’s findings, City beat the team I support, Crystal Palace, eight times in the league and three times in cups. Twice, in the same year, they thrashed us 5-0.
Crystal Palace has twice been on the verge of extinction after prolonged periods of being in administration. When that happened, I felt the fear of losing them as I would anything else, or anyone else, that I loved. So, while I have no sympathy towards Manchester City the club, I have every sympathy towards their fans. I have a sense of how they must feel to have this hanging over their club.
The modern Premier League is a towering colossus of the worst excesses of late-stage capitalism. But football clubs don’t have to be like that. They don’t have to have vastly wealthy state-linked owners buying success. They don’t need to be removed from the wishes and input of fans.
Under the German Bundesliga’s 50+1 rule, club members must, as a rule, retain majority voting control, preventing outside investors from having the ultimate say. The principle aims to safeguard what’s important to fans – the club, its identity, and its future.
Of course, anyone who has ever been a member of anything knows that member organisations are perfectly capable of utterly stupid decisions. So, 50+1 might not have prevented what has happened at City.
But if supporters are ultimately expected to carry the consequences of decisions made in their club’s name, shouldn’t they also have some constitutional power over who gets to make those decisions? Manchester City’s fans will have to live with the consequences of an ownership structure that transformed their club, but without ever having a say in that structure.
Football has always liked to talk about how the game belongs to its supporters. Perhaps it’s time club ownership structures started acting like that was true?
Martyn Pearce is the sub-editor at Pearls and Irritations