Over nine seasons, Manchester City booked £949.94 million in sponsorship from companies in Abu Dhabi, but the sponsors paid only £119.25 million of it and the club’s owner secretly supplied the other £830.69 million, according to an independent commission’s decision that the Premier League published on Tuesday.
The commission found City guilty of every charge that it broke the league’s financial rules from the 2009-10 season through 2017-18, and of three of the four charges that it failed to cooperate with the league’s investigation, the league said in a statement. It called the sponsorship deals “sham” contracts. Together with a separate set of owner-funded arrangements that kept costs off the books, they made City’s revenue look higher and its costs lower “by more than £900 million,” the league said. Had the club reported honestly, it would have broken both the league’s and UEFA’s spending limits “by a very substantial amount.” Reports have put the tally at 114 of the 115 charges brought in February 2023.
City denies wrongdoing. The club said it was “disappointed and surprised” and would appeal “on the basis that the opinion contains clear material errors, of law, principle and fact, and is unsafe.” Richard Masters, the league’s chief executive, called the case “the most significant in Premier League history” and said the league was “committed to moving swiftly” to a punishment that has not yet been decided.
The decision, published as a redacted 40-page document, settles what happened. It does not settle what City will pay, and that is where the league’s record is thinnest. Its recent cases involved single, admitted overspends, and the first penalty did not always last. Everton’s 10-point deduction became six on appeal. Chelsea, whose former owner’s associates made £47.5 million in undisclosed payments, lost no points at all. In Italy, Juventus’s first penalty in its 2023 accounting case was annulled and then reimposed at a lower figure. And the heaviest option, expulsion, needs 15 of the 20 clubs to vote for it.
How the money moved
The scheme is laid out in a table in the decision, which The Guardian reported and Paul Quinn, who writes legal analyses of Premier League cases on the Everton site The Esk, went through line by line. In 2009-10, City recorded £27 million from the Abu Dhabi sponsors, of which they paid £4.5 million. By 2017-18 the recorded figure was £145.73 million and the sponsors’ share was £11 million. The owner’s top-ups, which the commission called “tagged sums,” rose in all but one season, from £22.5 million to £134.73 million.
Across the nine years, the owner’s money made up 87 percent of what City reported as Abu Dhabi sponsorship. In the three seasons City won the league, 2011-12, 2013-14 and 2017-18, it recorded £360 million from those sponsors, and £43 million of that came from the sponsors themselves, BBC Sport reported. Two Abu Dhabi deals were accepted as arm’s-length and at fair market value, according to Quinn’s reading.
The panel traced the start to early 2010. City was “adamant” that it should not break the record for a single-season loss in the Premier League, then Chelsea’s £140 million from 2006, and with UEFA’s financial fair play rules on the way, it “devised a plan to disguise shareholder funding,” the commission found. The Guardian’s Paul MacInnes quoted the panel’s verdict on the contracts in one line.
Each of the Abu Dhabi sponsorship agreements was a sham.
Costs went through other routes. Fordham Sports Image Rights, a company that bought City players’ image rights, was “little more than a front for ADUG,” the commission found. ADUG is Abu Dhabi United Group Investment and Development, the owner’s vehicle. The Fordham arrangement overstated City’s income by £24.5 million and understated its expenses by £49.414 million. Three former employees received more than £15 million through consultancy agreements kept outside their employment contracts, The Guardian reported. The three are understood to include Roberto Mancini, the manager from 2009 to 2013, and the midfielder Yaya Touré.
Names in the decision are redacted, and Mancini was not a party to the case. Asked about it after the verdict, he said: “Manchester City has not been found guilty, and the alleged double contract is not my concern. It’s their issue, not mine.”
On Reddit’s r/soccer, one reader compared the sums with the transfer market of 2009, the year the case begins.
They gained an advantage of £100M per year on average. Back then that would have paid for the highest transfer in history with £20m of change to spare or two other megastars with only a £20m net spend.
The arithmetic roughly holds. Spread over nine seasons, the more than £900 million the league cites comes to about £100 million a year, and the owner’s sponsorship top-ups alone average £92.3 million. They were smallest at the start, £22.5 million in 2009-10, a summer in which City spent more than £100 million on players including Carlos Tevez and Emmanuel Adebayor. They were largest at the end, when City was already champion. Whether the money bought the trophies is a matter of opinion. The commission found something narrower: without it, City would have been over the limits.
The emails, 2018
The case goes back to Nov. 2018, when the German magazine Der Spiegel published City emails from Football Leaks, a cache released by the Portuguese whistleblower Rui Pinto. One, from the City executive Simon Pearce in April 2010, dealt with a £15 million annual deal with the Abu Dhabi investment company Aabar. “As we discussed, the annual direct obligation for Aabar is £3m,” it read. “The remaining £12m will come from alternative sources provided by His Highness.” City said then that its sponsors were independent (Sports Illustrated, 2018).
In another email, written after Mancini’s dismissal in 2013, the chief financial officer, Jorge Chumillas, flagged a £9.9 million shortfall against UEFA’s rules and wrote that “the only solution left would be an additional amount of AD sponsorship revenues that covers this gap,” Der Spiegel reported. City said the publication was an organized attempt to damage its reputation, and that the emails had been hacked and taken out of context.
UEFA had already punished City once, before the leaks. In May 2014, over losses shown in the club’s accounts, it imposed a £49 million fine, £32 million of it suspended, and capped City’s Champions League squad at 21 players. After the leaks, UEFA banned City from European competition for two seasons in Feb. 2020 and fined it €30 million. On July 13, 2020, the Court of Arbitration for Sport lifted the ban. It found that most of the alleged breaches were “either not established or time-barred” under UEFA’s five-year limit, and it cut the fine to €10 million for City’s failure to cooperate, Sky Sports reported. CNN put the two fines at $34 million and $11.3 million.
At the CAS hearing, Pearce was asked whether he had ever arranged payments to Etihad connected with its sponsorship of City. “Absolutely, categorically not,” he said. A Dec. 2013 email from Pearce to an Etihad executive, which became public only after the ruling, showed the airline providing £8 million of £99 million in sponsorship, Nick Harris wrote in Sporting Intelligence. City declined to comment on the conflict when Harris asked.
City’s case
Ferran Soriano, City’s chief executive, gave the club’s answer in a video sent to staff on Tuesday, The Independent reported. He said City had given the commission bank records, transfers and witnesses showing the money did not come from the owner, and that the panel had produced “an opinion that supports the Premier League’s conspiracy theory.”
The whole Premier League case against us is based on a single false accusation
Etihad Airways, City’s main sponsor since 2009, said on Wednesday that it “categorically rejects any finding, conclusion or implication” that it took part in improper deals, and that “at no time did the Premier League reach out to or engage with Etihad.” The airline said it would take legal advice, Sky Sports reported. The decision does not name any sponsor.
The strongest version of City’s defense came before the verdict, from Stefan Borson, a lawyer who advised the club on finance from 2002 to 2007. In a 2023 post, he wrote that “in English law, the general starting point in cases of this type is that people do not usually act dishonestly.” He argued that the league needed cogent evidence and would have to show that sponsors, executives and auditors were all involved or misled. After the verdict, he told talkSPORT that an appeal “on the facts, is highly unlikely to succeed.”
The record is on the side of the later Borson. The CAS panel in 2020 worked under a five-year limit that put much of UEFA’s case out of reach, and it ruled on what UEFA could prove. This commission heard 42 days of evidence, worked from more than 7,000 pages of transcripts and judged the credibility of City’s own witnesses. An appeal does not rerun that. Under the league’s rules, an appeal is “by way of a review of the evidence” heard by the commission unless new evidence is allowed, according to the appeal judgment in Nottingham Forest’s 2024 case. In that case the board criticized Forest’s lawyers for a “microscopic forensic examination” of the original ruling.
City’s witnesses will be the hardest part to move. Miguel Delaney, chief football writer at The Independent, posted the commission’s finding on them within hours of the decision’s release.
City have until 2 October to appeal
One conclusion from the decision reads:
“that certain of those factual witnesses had given evidence at the hearing that they knew to be untrue and so had been dishonest.”
City’s better arguments are procedural, Quinn wrote: the delay, the redactions and evidence the panel did not have. The commission itself called the time it took “regrettable”. Its decision came nearly 22 months after the hearing ended in Dec. 2024. In Quinn’s view, such points bear more on the sanction than on guilt.
The English benchmarks
When the clubs adopted the league’s first loss limit, £105 million over three seasons, in Feb. 2013, Richard Scudamore, then the chief executive, said what a breach would cost, BBC Sport recalled.
If people break the £105m we will look for the top-end ultimate sanction range - a points deduction
For more than a decade, no Premier League club lost points under that rule. Everton were the first. On Nov. 17, 2023, a commission docked them 10 points for losses £19.5 million over the limit, below the 12 the league had asked for. On Feb. 26, 2024, an appeal board cut it to six. The board rejected seven of Everton’s nine grounds and accepted two. The commission had been wrong to call the club “less than frank,” and it should have considered benchmarks such as the English Football League’s sanction guidelines. Everton lost two more points that April for a second breach.
Nottingham Forest went £34.5 million over its limit and lost four points on March 18, 2024. An appeal board upheld that penalty on May 7. Leicester City lost six points in February for a £20.8 million overspend, a case the league took over after the club’s 2024 promotion. On April 8 the appeal board kept the penalty and also turned down the league’s request for one more point.
Each of those clubs admitted one overspend over a three-year window, and none was found to have concealed anything. Kieran Maguire, a football finance academic and the author of The Price of Football, has said City’s penalty should “add a zero to what we’ve seen in terms of Forest and Everton,” or 40 to 60 points, Al Jazeera reported. Al Jazeera also cited a U.S. outlet’s calculation that a 40-point deduction would have left City 18th last season, in the relegation zone.
After Chelsea’s fine in March, Maguire quoted what the league itself had argued in the Everton case.
Interesting that in the Everton points deduction verdict the Premier League said “A financial penalty for a club that enjoys the support of a wealthy owner is not a sufficient penalty” and that “the requirements of deterrence, vindication of compliant clubs, and the protection of…
The appeal rulings follow a pattern. When a commission explained its sanction, the board left it in place. Everton’s was cut because the commission’s reasoning had a legal flaw and ignored benchmarks that existed. For nine years of concealment there is no benchmark at all. The commission will have to set one, and an appeal board will then decide whether it is proportionate.
Chelsea’s discount
The closest English case is Chelsea’s, and it ended without a points deduction. On March 16 the league fined Chelsea £10.75 million, its largest penalty, ahead of a £5.5 million fine on West Ham in 2007. It also banned the club from signing academy players for nine months and imposed a one-year first-team transfer ban, suspended for two years. Between 2011 and 2018, third parties tied to the former owner, Roman Abramovich, made £47.5 million in undisclosed payments to players, unregistered agents and others, OCCRP reported. The league called the breaches “obvious and deliberate.”
Two findings kept Chelsea’s points intact. The new owners reported the breaches themselves after buying the club in 2022 and handed over about 200,000 documents. And the league concluded that “in no scenario” would Chelsea have broken its profitability rules, even with the payments counted. In July, the Football Association fined Chelsea £10 million over agent payments, and an appeal board threw out a suspended six-point deduction as “excessive,” finding “insufficient evidence” of a sporting advantage, Al Jazeera reported.
On r/soccer, one reader argued that City was being punished for something Chelsea had done first.
But Chelsea did exactly the same thing as City with the Abramovic takeover, the rules that City broke just weren’t in place yet
The timeline supports half of that. Abramovich bought Chelsea in 2003, and his early spending came before UEFA’s break-even rules took effect in 2011 and the league adopted its loss limit in 2013. But the hidden Chelsea payments ran from 2011 to 2018, when the rules applied, and they were punished. The cases differ in what the league found. Chelsea came forward and would have stayed within the limits. City, the commission found, would have broken them “by a very substantial amount” and “made concerted efforts to stop and frustrate” the investigation.
Italy’s appeals
Italy has the only modern case of a champion sent down. In the Calciopoli referee scandal, a federal tribunal on July 14, 2006, relegated Juventus to Serie B, deducted 30 points and stripped its 2004-05 and 2005-06 titles. Appeals cut the deduction to 17 points and then to nine, but the relegation stood. The 2005-06 title went to Inter Milan, which had finished third, and the 2004-05 title went to no one, according to the record of the trials.
Juventus’s 2023 accounting case went the same way. In January, an Italian federation appeals court docked the club 15 points over inflated transfer valuations. In April, the Collegio di Garanzia, the top sports court of the Italian Olympic Committee, annulled the penalty. On May 22 the federation court imposed 10 points instead, which pushed Juventus out of the Champions League places, CBS Sports reported. The club settled a related salary case for €718,000. UEFA then fined it €20 million, half of it conditional, and barred it from the 2023-24 Conference League.
City’s trophies are the open question. The 2011 FA Cup and the 2012 league title fall inside the period. The sanctions rule ends with a power to “make such other order as it thinks fit,” which in theory leaves room to strip honors, Al Jazeera reported. Tony Pulis, whose Stoke City side lost that FA Cup final, told the BBC he did not expect trophies to change hands. “I still feel cheated,” he said.
The vote to expel
Rule W64 lets the commission fine City, deduct points or expel it. Expelling a club is not up to the commission alone. It takes a special resolution of the clubs with 15 of the 20 votes, Miguel Delaney reported in The Independent, where he argued for expulsion.
There is surely little choice but to expel Manchester City from the competition.
The numbers make that hard. City’s own vote counts, so the club needs only four other clubs to block a resolution. An expelled club also has nowhere set to go. A new member of the English Football League starts in League Two, the fourth tier, and placing City any higher would take a majority vote of the league’s 72 clubs, Sky Sports reported. Maguire has argued that the Premier League cannot itself send City below the Championship, because the EFL has proved no charges against the club.
A reader on r/soccer made the case for a vote more plainly.
The league works because, on some level, everyone are good actors. City broke this ‘social’ contract again and again, and basically argue that they will continue to do so.
That reader’s case rests on City’s conduct during the investigation, which the commission did find against. No club has said in public how it would vote. David Bernstein, City’s chairman from 1998 to 2003, went further on the BBC and said the sanctions “cannot just be financial.”
If the appeal fails, Manchester City cannot stay in the league, they have to suffer. And I say that as a supporter and a fan.
The owners face a separate test. The Independent Football Regulator, created in 2025, can judge whether owners, directors and executives are suitable. Its chairman, David Kogan, said the decision “raises serious issues” and that the regulator would use its powers “where appropriate,” but would wait for the proceedings to end, ESPN reported. Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, told the BBC: “It’s incredibly serious, the Premier League report is incredibly stark.”
Claims from rivals
Rival clubs’ damages claims could cost more than any points penalty. On June 10, a league commission ordered Everton to pay Burnley about £35 million, £26 million in damages and £9.1 million in interest. Burnley had argued that it lost its chance of staying up in 2021-22 because Everton’s breach went unpunished that season. Everton called the ruling “fundamentally flawed in both law and fact,” and its appeal is due to be heard in January.
Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur are understood to have filed holding claims to preserve their right to seek damages from City, CBS Sports reported. Christian Purslow, a former Liverpool and Aston Villa executive, told BBC Radio 4 that “every place was worth £3m” in the table and that “the potential here for this to spiral out of control is huge.”
What comes next
A new three-member appeal board, chaired by someone who has held judicial office, will hear City’s appeal. It can allow the appeal, dismiss it or change the commission’s order, the league said. Under Rule W.86 the hearing should last no more than five days, within 12 weeks of the appeal being filed, CBS Sports reported. City cannot go to CAS. After the board rules, the club’s options are arbitration or the High Court, and only on narrow grounds such as bias, fraud or serious procedural unfairness.
City’s penalty will be set without a fixed tariff. The league now has one for future cases, under squad-cost rules the clubs approved in Nov. 2025 that apply from this season: six points for a club over the top threshold, plus one point for every £6.5 million beyond it, Sky Sports reported. It covers spending from now on, not 2009.
At the sanction hearing, the league will propose a penalty, City will respond and the commission will decide. It is not clear whether the commission will wait for the appeal on guilt. In Everton’s case it gave less than the league asked for. The Times reported that the hearing could come within weeks, and BBC Sport said it could be months away. No date has been set. City’s appeal is due Friday.