Punishing Manchester City Proves Harder Than It Looks

2026-10-07 original Football

Seeing the headline that Rio Ferdinand is saying “send me the medal” rang a bell from something I’d heard before, but enough time had passed that I couldn’t place it right away. Manchester City had been found guilty on nearly all counts of breaching the Premier League’s financial rules, and now former United and Liverpool players, representing clubs that had titles taken from them by City in the past, are speaking up to demand those titles.

Goal.com: Ferdinand and Jose Enrique demand title awardswww.goal.com

What caught my attention, though, was something further upstream.

City’s owner is an investment company tied to the Abu Dhabi royal family, and money is no object for them. It’s common knowledge, and no secret at all, that pouring that money into the club is what made it strong. I already knew there were regulations against running deficits, like Financial Fair Play (FFP). What I hadn’t grasped in detail was exactly which rule, and exactly where, an owner pouring in their own money would run afoul of.

Digging into it, what was actually at issue was the source of the money.

As a refresher: the Premier League has a cap on deficits called PSR (Profitability and Sustainability Rules). There’s a ceiling on cumulative losses over three years, and even if the owner covers the shortfall, only up to £105 million is permitted. UEFA’s FFP operates on the same principle. The key point is that capital injections from the owner don’t count as “revenue” in this calculation. No matter how much money the owner puts in, it stays a deficit on the books.

City was accused of disguising this owner money as sponsorship payments, and this time that charge was upheld and they were found guilty.

Under the independent commission’s findings, City signed sham contracts with multiple sponsors, the sponsors paid only part of the contracted amount, and the owner’s company, ADUG, covered the rest. On the cost side too, there were schemes to make operating expenses look smaller than they actually were, along with circular transactions that routed the owner’s money through a company that had bought up players’ image rights. Over the nine seasons from 2009-10 to 2017-18, inflated revenue and suppressed costs combined to exceed £900 million, and of that, owner funds disguised as sponsorship alone came to more than £830 million. The commission concluded that if City had reported accurately, they would have blown far past the regulatory ceiling.

Al Jazeera: what the guilty verdict means and what happens nextwww.aljazeera.com

The figure of 115 charges also makes this structure clear once you break it down. 54 charges were for violating the obligation to provide accurate financial information — the disguise itself. 14 charges were for violating the obligation to fully disclose manager and player compensation — the part where pay was kept off the books to make costs look smaller. 5 charges were for breaching UEFA’s FFP, and 7 for breaching the Premier League’s PSR — the regulatory side that the disguise was evading. The remaining 35 charges were for non-cooperation with the investigation between 2018 and 2023.

In other words, false reporting and hidden compensation were the means, and evading FFP and PSR was the end — a two-stage structure. This time, the commission upheld every one of the financial charges and most of the non-cooperation charges as well. The single charge that wasn’t upheld was part of the non-cooperation set.

So far I’ve more or less sorted out what was actually at issue. The question is how to punish it.

This is where things fall apart completely.

The first thing that comes to mind is a points deduction. As precedent, Everton were docked 10 points in 2023 for a single three-year overspend (later reduced to 6 on appeal), and Nottingham Forest lost 4 points as well. City’s violations span nine seasons and come with non-cooperation on top, so this is a different order of magnitude. Football finance expert Kieran Maguire reportedly said the figures for Forest and Everton should have a zero added to them, suggesting a level of 40 to 60 points.

NBC Sports: Everton's points deduction reduced from 10 to 6 on appeal (February 2024) NBC Sports: Everton’s points deduction reduced from 10 to 6 on appeal (February 2024)www.nbcsports.com

But right away you hit a wall: which season’s points do you deduct? The violations occurred between 2009 and 2018, and today’s City is a different team. The titles won from 2018-19 onward fall outside that period. Deducting 40 points from this season’s total would punish today’s players, who weren’t even at the club during the violation period, and would even shift the fate of clubs currently fighting relegation this season.

So strip the titles instead. As Ferdinand says, hand the 2011-12 title to United. But this isn’t seen as realistic either — Tony Pulis, Stoke’s manager at the time when they lost to City, has said he doesn’t believe the trophy will actually move. And even if you rewrite the title, that doesn’t undo the damage to the clubs that were relegated that year or missed out on European competition.

The thorniest problem is timing. City intend to appeal, and the appeal will be heard by a new three-person panel. The sanction will be decided by the same commission in a separate, non-public hearing. If a heavy sanction is imposed before the appeal, the ruling could be overturned after City have already been relegated. If the league waits for the appeal, City continue competing with this season’s points intact, and in the meantime other clubs might lose out on survival or European qualification. Whichever way it goes, someone ends up with an irreversible loss.

There’s no mechanism for delivering the right punishment at the right time.

The league has actually already run into this exact gap once before, in a different form. In Everton’s case, because no sanction was applied in the 2021-22 season when one should have been, Burnley argued that they would have stayed up if the sanction had been applied at the time, and this June, Everton were ordered to pay Burnley more than £35 million (Everton are appealing). It was a case of settling after the fact with money what the points tool couldn’t handle in time.

ITV News: Everton ordered to pay Burnley over £35 million in compensation (June 2026)www.itv.com

I think this is a clue.

Points and titles are tools that only work for a given position in a given year; they’re poorly suited as tools for judging, years later, a violation from a decade ago. Money, on the other hand, can move across time. You estimate the gain obtained through the violation and the damage suffered by other clubs, and make the offender pay it back. Redesigning the punishment as a “settlement of damages,” detached from “that year’s standings,” seems more coherent, at least for a long-running financial violation like this one. Of course, a separate problem remains: how much does a few hundred million pounds actually hurt an owner? Does a punishment settled in money even work on an owner who has effectively unlimited money to begin with? That part isn’t really funny.

While I’m at it: the practice of paying compensation through third parties would, under ordinary logic, also raise questions of personal income tax and social insurance contributions. At this point, though, I haven’t seen any reporting that UK tax authorities or investigative bodies have taken action. This proceeding is strictly a private disciplinary matter under league rules, and the bar for criminal proof is far higher. If the written ruling is published and it becomes clear who moved how much and how, that could change.

So my answer is “settle it after the fact.” But I still don’t have an answer to the most immediate question: what to do about this season’s league table. The appeal deadline is this Friday, and the sanction hearing is still to come.

References

This piece was conceived and directed by Yuichiro Kuzuryu, with the writing done by AI.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2026/10/1849/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.