English football’s biggest case: Why Manchester City could lose points, titles or their place in Premier League

Neither side has confirmed the verdict. The Premier League declined to comment. City said in a statement that “the Premier League process remains ongoing, with significant elements to be completed, and subject to strict confidentiality”. The club added that it had “diligently respected due process for eight years” on the basis that the league’s board and executive would behave as “an independent, impartial and fair-minded regulator, free from partisan influence”. But City are expected to appeal. A person with knowledge of the situation told the Associated Press (AP) that an appeal would take several months.

City have been the most successful club in England since Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG) bought them in 2008. Over that time, they have won eight Premier League titles, four FA Cups, seven League Cups and the 2023 Champions League. They top the table this season after winning their first five matches under Enzo Maresca, who replaced Pep Guardiola at the end of last season.

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The punishments could range from a reprimand and fines to points deductions and expulsion from the league.

BBC Sport said the charges are for:

The allegations stem from leaked e-mails and documents that German magazine Der Spiegel began publishing in 2018.

They cover three kinds of alleged conduct. The first concerns sponsorship. Der Spiegel alleged that City inflated income from two Abu Dhabi companies, the state-owned airline Etihad and the state-controlled telecoms firm Etisalat. According to the magazine, the money came from ADUG and was channelled through the two companies’ accounts, so that it appeared as sponsorship. This, it was alleged, helped City stay within the loss limits set by FFP and PSR.

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The second concerns Roberto Mancini, City’s manager at the time. Documents purportedly showed off-the-books payments to him through consultancy fees from Al Jazira, another club owned by Sheikh Mansour. Der Spiegel claimed Mancini was paid more as an adviser to Al Jazira than for managing City, according to The Athletic. Mancini denied any wrongdoing.

The third is that City paid players more than was officially recorded, so that the club’s accounts showed lower spending than it actually incurred.

City, along with the companies involved, strongly denied breaking any financial rules.

The club refused to comment on Der Spiegel’s reports, saying the e-mails had been obtained illegally and were an “attempt to damage the club’s reputation”.

The period covered by the charges spans the tenures of Mancini and his successor Manuel Pellegrini, and Guardiola’s first two seasons in charge. Guardiola has previously backed the club’s position.

City is widely considered one of the most successful sporting investments from West Asia.

The ownership is central to the case because the key allegation involves money moving between the owner and Abu Dhabi companies. City maintain that ADUG is a private fund and have always denied being state-owned.

The club has also faced wider criticism. Human rights campaigners have claimed City are being used to “sportswash” what Amnesty International has called the UAE’s “deeply tarnished image”. City have always denied that the club is being used to enhance the country’s reputation.

The case also has diplomatic implications. Prime Minister Andy Burnham has been trying to improve Britain’s relations with the UAE since taking office, Bloomberg reported. Asked whether City should be stripped of their titles, Burnham told ITV Granada Reports: “I think we would all need to study the independent commission’s report in some considerable detail before reaching any conclusions,” according to AFP.

UK’s culture secretary Lisa Nandy told BBC Radio 5 Live that the government “can’t apply those rules for the Premier League”, and that the league would “have to resolve this as swiftly as possible”. Caroline Dinenage, chair of Parliament’s culture, media and sport committee, said in a statement that “the extraordinary length and cost of this process raise serious concerns”, Reuters reported.

In May 2014, Uefa fined the club £49 million, £32 million of it suspended, for breaching FFP limits. It also restricted City to a 21-man squad for the 2014-15 Champions League. The club maintained it had been compliant.

Der Spiegel published its first articles on November 5, 2018. They were based on documents from Football Leaks, a whistleblower platform set up by Portuguese computer hacker Rui Pinto, according to The Athletic.

Uefa opened a formal investigation in March 2019. In February 2020, it banned City from European competitions for two years and fined them €30 million. The Court of Arbitration for Sport (Cas) overturned the ban five months later. It found that the alleged breaches were either not established or time-barred, meaning they had happened too long ago to be punished under Uefa’s regulations.

Cas did find that City had failed to co-operate with Uefa by failing to provide substantial amounts of evidence. It called that breach “severe”, and City were fined £8.8 million. Failure to co-operate also accounts for 35 of the Premier League’s 115 charges, according to BBC Sport.

The Premier League cases moved more slowly. In July 2021, City lost a ruling on jurisdiction, which allowed the media to report that the league was investigating them. The charges followed in February 2023. The hearing ran from September 16 to December 6, 2024, before a commission of three people appointed by the independent chair of the Premier League Judicial Panel, Reuters reported. Their identities will become public only once a written judgment is released.

The Premier League’s handbook lists the sanctions under Rule W.51: a reprimand, fines, points deductions and expulsion. Rule W.51.7 allows the panel to combine them or impose other sanctions it considers appropriate. Whatever it chooses must be proportionate to the breaches, or it risks being overturned on appeal, according to The Athletic.

Fines and points deductions can be immediate or suspended, and points can be taken retrospectively.

Expulsion would mean City lose their Premier League membership and are demoted to a lower division at the end of the season. A large enough points deduction would have the same effect. The BBC also reported that several City players do not have release clauses in their contracts covering relegation.

“There is a wide range of options, with a transfer ban at the more moderate end of the spectrum and expulsion from the league the most severe repercussion,” Ian Hargreaves, a partner at disputes firm Quillon Law, told Reuters. He added that much would depend on the detail of the panel’s findings and reasoning, and whether they could withstand a hard-fought appeal.

But lawyers say it may not come to that. “Generally, panels don’t like deciding titles in a court process. Doing it that way does not give a real tangible punishment to the club,” James Hill, a sports regulatory lawyer at Onside Law, had told The Athletic in 2023.

Money may be the bigger fight. Premier League clubs are seeking legal advice on claiming compensation from City. Paul Gilroy KC, a football law expert, told BBC Radio 4 that four clubs had already lodged protective claims, reserving the right to seek compensation if City were found guilty.

There is a recent precedent. In June, Everton were ordered to pay Burnley £35 million, made up of £26 million in damages and £9 million in interest. Burnley had argued that Everton’s breach of the profitability rules, which related to the 2021-22 season, hurt their chances of staying in the Premier League. Everton are appealing.

Christian Purslow, a former Liverpool managing director and Aston Villa chief executive, said on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that every club in each affected season suffered “easy-to-compute loss”, with every league place worth £3 million. Clubs that missed out on the Champions League, or were relegated, may have lost far more. “A never-ending waterfall of legal claims and uncertainties for another four or five years would be absolutely appalling for the game,” he said.

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Chelsea were fined a record £10 million and given a suspended transfer ban in 2026, after the club admitted making more than £47 million in secret payments linked to transfers in the 2010s. The Premier League accepted that the case involved “deception and concealment in relation to financial matters”. It applied leniency because Chelsea’s new owners had reported the breaches themselves and co-operated, the BBC reported.

In Italy, Juventus were deducted 10 points in Serie A in 2023 over inflated transfer revenue, after an initial 15-point penalty was overturned and re-examined. Uefa then removed them from the Europa Conference League and fined them €20 million, half of it conditional on future compliance.

Juventus chose not to appeal. Club president Gianluca Ferrero said it could “now face the new season by focusing on the field and not on the courts”, AP reported.

City’s case differs from all of these. The club denies every charge and is contesting the case. It has had no change of ownership that could count as mitigation. The alleged breaches cover more than a decade, which has been described as unprecedented in scale.

Other Premier League clubs have been told of the decision by e-mail, and a select group of directors had to sign a non-disclosure agreement before reading it, a source told the BBC. No date has been given for an official announcement.