The claim bouncing around is that Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal and Tottenham must have known City were going down, because back in September 2024 all four quietly instructed lawyers to tell City they reserved the right to seek compensation. A secret club of rivals, tipped off, lying in wait for the verdict. A "red cartel."
It's rubbish, and it falls apart the second you look at a calendar.
September 2024 was before the independent commission had produced anything. The hearing was still running, and nobody at those four clubs owned a crystal ball. What they had was a deadline. The six-year limit on giving notice to seek damages traced back to the original Der Spiegel revelations in 2018, and that clock was running whether City turned out guilty or not. Any competent law firm advising a client with a plausible claim to lost titles or lost revenue files a protective notice before that window shuts. Doing anything else would be negligence. It's housekeeping.
What gives the "cartel" story away is who gets left out of it. Every Premier League shareholder at the time had exactly the same opportunity to reserve their rights. Most didn't bother. Chelsea didn't, the same Chelsea that later faced Premier League and FA charges over historic financial wrongdoing of their own. If reserving a right were proof of inside knowledge, Chelsea's silence would be proof they knew City were innocent, which is obviously absurd. The four who filed were simply the four whose lawyers were paying attention.
Arsenal's decision to reserve rights was shaped by the legal background of former chairman Tim Lewis, who has since left the club, and it's now unclear whether the current leadership even wants to carry the fight forward. That's one club acting on in-house expertise, then wobbling once that expertise walked out the door.
Those four were contacted ahead of the email sent to the other 15 clubs on September 25, the one executives had to sign a non-disclosure agreement to open, simply because they were the only parties with a live, formally registered legal interest, so they were dealt with first. That's standard procedure for clubs that had actually filed paperwork.
If you want to be angry about something, be angry about the timeline. City were found guilty on 114 of the 115 charges, covering breaches from 2009/10 to 2017/18. The leaks landed in 2018. The Premier League didn't even charge City until February 2023. The hearing then dragged into the winter, and the public verdict only arrived at the end of September 2026. The Premier League let the case rot for years until rival clubs had to lawyer up just to keep their options alive against a statute of limitations. That's the mess the league's own glacial process created, and the four clubs just reacted to it.
None of this is finished, either. City lodged a comprehensive appeal on 1 October, maintain their innocence, and call the commission's conclusion "unsafe" with "clear material errors, of law, principle and fact." No sanction has been set. No compensation has been paid or even properly argued. There's dark comedy in City having rebuilt across the squad last year, pushing their 2025 spend past £300m on new players while all of this hung over them, but that's a story about nerve.
They go to Anfield on Sunday sitting top of the table and unbeaten through the opening weeks, which is the only verdict Pep Guardiola can actually do anything about this week. Everything else is lawyers and limitation deadlines.
So spare me the cartel talk. Four clubs filled in a form before a clock ran out. The real scandal is that the Premier League took six years to get here and left them no choice.
