City’s £921 Million Verdict Gives Rival Clubs a Claim

An independent Premier League commission found Manchester City guilty of sham contracts that inflated revenue by £855.2 million and hid £66.2 million of costs across nine seasons. The panel’s core findings, published on 29 September 2026, put the combined misstatement at £921.4 million between 2009-10 and 2017-18.

City has until 2 October to appeal. Sanctions wait for a later private hearing. Rival clubs now have a certified figure they can take to the same compensation rule that ordered Everton to pay Burnley in June 2026.

Manchester City Overstated Revenue by £855.2 Million

The Premier League said the club was guilty of all charges related to serious financial-rule breaches over those nine seasons, and of three of the four alleged breaches of its duties of co-operation and utmost good faith. The complaint issued in February 2023 ran to 115 alleged breaches. The commission wrote that the case concerned well over 100 individual breaches across four broad categories.

Abu Dhabi United Group Investment and Development Ltd, the owner since Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan bought the club in 2008, sat at the centre of the money trail. Of £949.94 million recorded as Abu Dhabi sponsorship, the commission found that sponsors paid £119.25 million. The remaining £830.69 million was ADUG money dressed as commercial income. That Abu Dhabi block was 71 per cent of City’s £1.335 billion commercial take in the period.

THE NINE-SEASON MONEY THE COMMISSION REWROTE

The league’s own phrasing was that the schemes inflated revenues and reduced costs by more than £900 million ($1.19 billion) so the club would appear to comply with spending limits. Had the agreements been booked accurately, the commission found, City would have been in breach of both Premier League profitability rules and UEFA’s club licensing and Financial Fair Play limits by a very substantial amount. In 2009-10, the panel said, the scheme let the club avoid recording what would otherwise have been the largest single-season loss in Premier League history.

Only £43 Million of the Title-Season Fees Was Real

City has won eight Premier League titles since the 2008 takeover. Three of them sit inside the charge window: 2011-12, 2013-14 and 2017-18. In those three seasons the club recorded £360 million in sponsor fees. The commission found that only £43 million of that was legitimate. The rest came from the owners and was disguised.

The panel’s language on the contracts was blunt. The relevant sponsorship agreements were shams, or at minimum did not reflect their economic substance. Companies were required to pay only a portion of the fees. ADUG funded the remainder. The commission also rejected the club’s later account that the Abu Dhabi government, rather than ADUG, had subsidised the sponsors, treating that story as an explanation concocted after the fact.

Owner money, as booked, did not stop when the accounts made it look as if it had. City received £1.287 billion in correctly reported ADUG funding between the takeover and the end of 2017-18, with that disclosed support largely fading after 2014-15. Combined with the disguised sponsorship and the other payments the panel traced, owner funding across the first 10 years under Abu Dhabi control reached £2.209 billion.

A Circular Image-Rights Deal Called Fordham

The redacted core decision published on 29 September is a 40-page summary. Appendices remain withheld. One strand the summary does name is Fordham, a third party that bought the club’s players’ image rights.

The commission called Fordham little more than a front for ADUG. Owner funds were used so Fordham could acquire, at an artificially inflated price, the club’s right to benefit from those image rights. That let City record £24.5 million as operating income and keep £49.414 million of costs out of operating expenses. The panel said the arrangement was operated with the knowledge and approval of individuals whose names are redacted.

Further sham arrangements, also funded by ADUG, let the club record lower operating expenses than it actually incurred. The purpose, the commission concluded, was to appear to comply with financial rules. By its conduct, the club clearly intended to circumvent the Premier League rules. It filed misstated accounts and concealed the true state of its finances from auditors and football regulators.

The Panel Found Key City Witnesses Dishonest

The hearing ran 42 days and ended in December 2024. Transcripts ran to about 7,000 pages. The index of the evidence bundle ran to more than 750 pages, and the core documents ran to many tens of thousands of pages. The commission took far longer than it had wished to produce the decision, and said so.

Most factual witnesses, the panel wrote, were doing their best. Evidence from a number of important witnesses called by the club was false in key respects. Certain of those witnesses had given evidence they knew to be untrue, and so had been dishonest. During the league’s four-year investigation, which began in December 2018 after a Portuguese computer hacker’s dump of club files, the commission found that City made concerted efforts to stop and frustrate the inquiry.

The core decision establishes the facts of what happened at Manchester City during this period. It details how the club systematically broke Premier League Rules for nearly a decade. This disciplinary case, and this decision, are the most significant in Premier League history.

Richard Masters, Premier League chief executive, 29 September statement

Masters said the finding vindicated the league’s choice to pursue the case, and that a sanction still has to follow. Lisa Nandy, the culture, media and sport secretary, called the report incredibly stark. David Bernstein, City’s chairman from 1998 to 2003, said the credibility of the league was at stake and that, if the finding stands, a financial penalty would not be enough because money does not mean much to the Abu Dhabi owners.

Burnley’s £35 Million Award Is the New Template

Points and trophies are the argument everyone already knows. The quieter shift is that English clubs can now bill each other for a financial-rules breach, and they have a working example.

In June 2026 a Premier League commission issued the first inter-club compensation award under league rules. Everton was ordered to pay Burnley £26 million in damages and £9.1 million in interest after a profitability and sustainability breach in 2021-22. The PSR cap for that period was £105 million of losses over three years. Everton’s losses were £124.5 million, an excess of £19.5 million. Everton finished 16th on 39 points. Leeds United were 17th on 38. Burnley went down 18th on 35. The panel found, on the balance of probabilities, that the breach caused Burnley’s relegation. Everton, which had already been deducted 10 points in November 2023, later cut to six on appeal and applied in 2023-24, has appealed the compensation order and called it fundamentally flawed.

The City numbers sit on a different scale. Burnley’s case turned on a four-point gap and a £19.5 million overspend in one PSR window. The Manchester file covers nine seasons, £830.69 million of tagged owner money, and a finding that the club intended to get around the rules. Causation will still have to be proved club by club, season by season. The rule that let Burnley sue does not care that the defendant is a champion. It lets a commission order unlimited compensation to any club.

City Has Until 2 October to Lodge an Appeal

City’s public line has not shifted. Hours after the league published, the club said it was disappointed and surprised, innocent of the accusations, and in possession of irrefutable evidence. It will appeal on the basis that the opinion contains clear material errors of law, principle and fact, and is unsafe. It also said it had respected due process for eight years on the basis that the league would behave as an impartial regulator, free from partisan influence, and that it is restricted in what it can say until future proceedings are complete.

A video went to staff in which chief executive Ferran Soriano said the club had given irrefutable evidence that sponsors paid the sponsorship income in full, and that City would take every step to overturn the decision. Asked by reporters whether he owed fans an apology, he declined to answer. Chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak, in a letter to supporters on 26 September, had already told them the process was still confidential and that the club’s position matched its February 2023 statement.

That confidence has a precedent. UEFA banned City from European competition for two years in February 2020 over Financial Fair Play. On 13 July 2020 the Court of Arbitration for Sport overturned UEFA’s two-year Champions League ban in CAS 2019/A/6298. Most of the alleged breaches were not established or were time-barred under UEFA’s five-year limit. The fine for failing to co-operate fell from €30 million to €10 million. The disguise allegation that UEFA could not prove is the allegation the Premier League commission has now found proved on a longer domestic record.

FROM THE 2008 TAKEOVER TO THE APPEAL DEADLINE

1. 2008: ADUG completes the takeover of Manchester City.
2. November 2018: Football Leaks publications trigger regulator interest; the Premier League opens its investigation in December 2018.
3. 13 July 2020: CAS lifts UEFA’s two-year European ban and cuts the non-cooperation fine to €10 million.
4. February 2023: The league issues a 115-charge complaint under Section W.
5. December 2024: A 42-day independent hearing concludes.
6. 29 September 2026: The league publishes the redacted core decision; City says it will appeal.
7. 2 October 2026: Deadline for City to lodge that appeal.

League rules give either party 14 days to challenge, which is why the 2 October date implies the parties received the ruling on 18 September. An appeal goes to a fresh three-member board, is a review rather than a full rehearing, is limited to five days, and must be completed within 12 weeks of being lodged, with a decision due no later than 30 days after the hearing ends. Further challenges then sit in arbitration, and only after that in the High Court on narrow grounds. The league says it wants the full process, including any appeals, finished as soon as possible.

What Sanctions the Premier League Handbook Allows

Guilt and punishment are separate hearings. The sanctions sitting is private until publication is allowed. The commission’s list of tools is broad, and the powers can be stacked.

SANCTIONS THE COMMISSION MAY IMPOSE

• Unlimited fine: The panel may impose a fine with no cap and suspend any part of it.
• Points already scored: It may deduct points scored or still to be scored, which is the only written route to changing a finished table.
• Suspension from matches: It may suspend a club from league games or from specified development competitions.
• Expulsion recommendation: It may recommend that the league board expel the club; expulsion itself is a membership vote, not a panel order, and has never been used on a Premier League club.
• Compensation: It may order unlimited compensation to any person or club, the power Burnley used.
• Registrations: It may cancel or refuse player registrations, and it may add any other order it thinks fit.

Bernstein, speaking as a lifelong supporter, said that if the appeal fails City cannot stay in the Premier League. That is his view, not a finding. Relegation would arrive as arithmetic from a points deduction, not as a separate sentence sending the club to the Championship. Retrospective rewriting of the 2011-12, 2013-14 and 2017-18 tables is legally available because the rules cover points already scored. There is still no published Premier League example of a finished title being taken away through that route, and the sanctions panel has not sat.

United Has Been Counting Lost Champions League Money

Manchester United has already been running internal assessments of league places and Champions League income it says were blocked by City’s conduct, including work done since Omar Berrada became chief executive. Other clubs that finished behind City in the charge years can do the same math: merit payments, European qualification, and, for sides that went down, the gap between Premier League television money and Championship parachute cash. Those claims, if they come, will not wait on a trophy being moved in the record books. They wait on the guilt finding surviving appeal, and on proof that a particular club lost a particular sum because of it.

The public row on 29 and 30 September moved, within hours, from whether the club was guilty to who gets paid and how many points come off. City supporters keep returning to the same gap in the club’s own words. A body of evidence the board calls irrefutable did not persuade a commission that sat for 42 days and then found the sponsorship story was a disguise. That gap is now the appeal.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The guilt finding: All financial-rule charges were upheld, and three of four non-cooperation charges were upheld, for 2009-10 to 2017-18.
• The certified sums: Revenue was overstated by £855.2 million and costs understated by £66.2 million, a £921.4 million misstatement.
• The appeal window: City has until 2 October 2026 to challenge, and has said it will.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The sanction: No points figure, fine, transfer limit, or expulsion recommendation has been issued.
• Title changes: No finished Premier League table has been rewritten, and no cup has been reassigned.
• Civil claims: No rival has yet been awarded a pound against City; Everton’s own £26 million plus interest bill to Burnley is under appeal.

The 2 October filing will decide whether this stays inside the league’s private machinery into winter, or whether the certified £921.4 million becomes the starting exhibit in a line of club-versus-club claims. The sanctions hearing, when it comes, will still be held behind closed doors.