Will the football authorities actually force Manchester City's owners out, or will money and political pressure hand them a way out? They won't do it. The regulator has the power, it just told us so, but nearly every incentive in English football and British politics is lined up to make sure that power never gets used.
Start with what was actually said. David Kogan, who chairs the new Independent Football Regulator, went on a podcast and claimed his organisation has "absolute power" to force an owner out of a club run "in a way that is neither fit, fair or done with propriety." Asked if an owner could simply refuse to sell, he said: "No, no, no. We've got absolute power to do so." A regulator saying that out loud about one of the biggest clubs in English football, owned by a senior figure in a Gulf royal family, should be a thunderclap. Then, in the next breath, Kogan said it was "premature to talk about any action his organisation might take," because City have appealed.
That's the tell. You don't call your own power absolute and immediately ask everyone to calm down unless you already suspect you'll never have to use it.
Back in February 2023, City were charged with 115 breaches of the Premier League's financial rules covering 2009 to 2018. A three-person independent commission heard the case over a 10-week stretch from September to December 2024. The verdict, delivered in late September 2026, found City guilty of all 80 financial charges and 34 of 35 charges of failing to cooperate. The panel described "sham" commercial arrangements used to inflate revenues or cut costs by over £900 million, and found "concerted efforts" to "stop and frustrate" the investigation. In plain English: City cheated and spent years trying to hide it. City deny wrongdoing and are appealing, arguing the ruling is "unsafe" and contains "clear material errors." No sanctions have been announced yet.
If this ends in a wet slap, blame starts with the ownership. The commission's findings are a record of deliberate, sustained dishonesty by one of the richest clubs on earth.
Second, and City fans won't like this: Andy Burnham. The Prime Minister, who spent years as Greater Manchester's mayor cosying up to this ownership group, told the BBC he'd be "really concerned" to lose them, calling Abu Dhabi "such a huge partner in the building of modern Manchester." That's a sitting head of government fretting about the feelings of owners in the middle of a guilty verdict for financial cheating. Downing Street had to walk it back and insist no one is "above the rules." You don't issue that correction unless you've already given the game away. Details of Burnham's earlier contacts with the club, including meetings with chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak, came out on October 12, and opposition MPs weren't impressed by how little was disclosed.
Third, the UAE, which has reportedly made the quiet part loud: warnings that it could pull billions of pounds of investment out of Britain, with projects like the Oxford-Cambridge Growth Corridor said to be in the firing line. That's leverage, applied in daylight, against the independence of a sporting disciplinary process.
There's an obvious escape hatch here. Even if a forced sale is ordered, what stops the owners from slapping a deliberately absurd price tag on the club so no buyer ever meets it? "Absolute power" to order a sale is worthless if there's no power to set a fair value. The regulator can point at the door all it likes. It can't make anyone walk through it on terms they refuse.
City eat a fine and a points deduction that stings without killing them. Relegation to League Two is already being written off as too extreme; a Championship-level punishment is the serious scenario in play. The appeal drags past this season. When it's over, the ownership stays exactly where it is. Kogan says he'll resign if there's political interference, which is noble and beside the point, since a resignation doesn't un-threaten a Gulf investment fund. The money that built modern Manchester is the same money facing confiscation, and both the owners who cheated and the government too spooked by investment flows to let its own regulator do its job are going to get away with it.
