Manchester City are responsible, and the statement they put out this week is spin. An independent Premier League Commission, after a hearing that ran from September 2024 into December, found City guilty of all charges relating to serious breaches of the league's financial rules over a nine-season period, plus the majority of the charges that they failed to cooperate. On the cooperation strand, three of the four alleged breaches were upheld and one was not proven. Call it 114 of 115. City's reply was that they are "disappointed and surprised," innocent, and sitting on "a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence."
We've heard this before. Word for word, more or less. When UEFA banned them from Europe in 2020, City said they were "disappointed but not surprised" and pointed to "the comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence in support of its position." When the charges were first laid, they welcomed the review by an independent commission to consider "the comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence that exists in support of its position." That phrase is a reflex now, the thing City reach for the moment trouble shows up, the way other clubs reach for a lawyer. They've been reaching for it, unsuccessfully, for years.
This is the part that should end any debate about whether this is a paperwork quibble. The commission found that City arranged "sham" commercial deals, a disguised funding scheme in which sponsors paid only a slice of the fee and Sheikh Mansour's Abu Dhabi United Group quietly covered the rest. The Premier League put the figure at more than £900 million of inflated revenue and reduced costs. The report concluded that witnesses gave evidence they knew to be untrue.
Compare that to City's own headline claim. They insist they cooperated. The commission upheld three of the four charges that say they didn't, and found that some of the evidence they did offer was deliberately false. You cannot spend eight years claiming to hold knockout proof, produce nothing that survives a twelve-week hearing, and then blame the process. If the evidence were irrefutable, it would have refuted something by now.
City have the right to appeal, and they've said they will, on the basis that the ruling contains "clear material errors." Fine. The verdict isn't the last word, sanctions haven't been set, and a later hearing decides what actually happens to them. Nobody should pretend the punishment is done, because it hasn't started. But a right to appeal isn't a reason to believe them, and "we respected due process" lands badly from a club a commission just described as dishonest under oath. Richard Masters called this "the most significant in Premier League history." He's right, and City's answer to the most significant integrity ruling the English game has produced was to imply the regulator is biased, which is the move you make once the crime is already settled.
Since 2008 this project has delivered eight Premier League titles, a Champions League, four FA Cups and seven League Cups, and as of the international break City sit top of the table again, five wins from five. All of it now carries an asterisk the club wrote itself. They can appeal every avenue they like. What they cannot do is keep telling their own fans, with a straight face, that the evidence clearing them exists and simply keeps failing to show up.
