For years the only thing you could argue about was a leak. Now there's a finding. On September 29, 2026, an independent commission found that City broke Premier League financial rules across nine seasons, from 2009/10 to 2017/18, and upheld three of the four charges that City failed to cooperate with the investigation. City lodged an appeal on October 1. No sanction has been set and no hearing date fixed.
Strip away the legalese and here is what the people who actually read the books concluded: over nine seasons, the rules were broken. City's response is to keep fighting.
This is the answer to the question City fans have spent a decade waving away. How do you build a wage bill no club on the continent can touch, become the first British club to clear £400m in annual wages, and have nobody stop you? The commission's answer, for that window, is that the numbers on the page weren't telling the whole story.
The European dominance came later. The first Champions League in 2023, the treble, four league titles in a row. But that machine wasn't assembled in 2023. It was assembled in exactly the years the commission has now flagged. The foundations of the side that beat Inter Milan were poured in seasons where, on this verdict, the financial reporting didn't hold up. You don't get to keep the trophies and disown the building site that made them.
The defence City supporters reach for is that everyone spends, that City only matched the oil money and American money swilling around the rest of the league. The commission looked at that same spending and found breaches anyway. Matching your rivals is legal. Disguising the spending so the rulebook couldn't see it is what got nine seasons of accounts thrown out.
Even neutrals exhausted by this saga should find this part troubling. Three of four failure-to-cooperate charges, upheld. A club with nothing to hide hands over its documents and lets the investigators get bored. City reportedly spent around £30.6m on lawyers for this fight. That kind of legal spend is what you see from people who know exactly what the paperwork would show if anyone got a clean look at it.
City have appealed, no sanction exists, and treating a punishment as already decided is getting ahead of the process. That's fair. But "nothing has been proven" stopped being an accurate sentence on September 29. A commission did the proving. The price is unresolved. The fact isn't.
Rodri didn't do this. Nor did the academy. The people who built a structure designed to outspend Europe while reporting something tidier to the league did: the ownership and the executives who made the calls and lawyered up when the questions came.
City turned money into a continental superpower and then spent a fortune making sure nobody could prove how. The commission just did it for free.
