Sky Sports can't keep selling Manchester City as a normal marquee product. The network is visibly squirming over how to promote them, and that squirm means the people in charge already know something's wrong.
Start with the facts, established in writing by the people whose job it was to weigh them. In February 2023 the Premier League charged City with 115 breaches of its financial rules, covering a nine-year stretch from 2009 to 2018. A three-person independent commission heard the case over ten weeks between September and December 2024. On September 25, 2026 the verdict came out, and on September 29 the Premier League confirmed it: City guilty of 114 of the 115 charges. The one they escaped was a narrow point about failing to cooperate during part of the process. On cooperation generally, they were found guilty too.
The finding goes well beyond a paperwork technicality. The commission ruled that City's owners artificially inflated the club's commercial revenue by £830m between 2009 and 2018. City declared £949.94m in commercial income from Abu Dhabi sponsors across that period; only £119.25m of it was actually paid by sponsors. The rest came from the ownership group and was dressed up as sponsorship money. Premier League chief executive Richard Masters said the ruling showed City "systematically broke Premier League rules for nearly a decade."
Set that next to a broadcast gallery. The honest instinct for a commentary team watching City pass a rival off the park is to reach for words like spirit and quality. Those words were landing on a club an independent panel has just ruled ran a disguised funding scheme for close to a decade. You can't read that finding in one breath and gush about a well-earned dynasty in the next without the viewer noticing the join. The discomfort being reported around how to package City right now is a correct reaction, arriving late.
The strongest defence of City is this: the financial rules were built by the league's established powers to protect their own position. They frame it as fair play, but it caps ambition instead. That argument has real force. The rules were never neutral. But the commission didn't rule that City ambitiously outspent anyone. It ruled they falsified the numbers to hide where the money came from. You can think the rules are rigged and still think lying about your accounts for nine years is a different thing entirely. Both can be true. Only one of them was on trial.
None of this is settled, and that gap is exactly where broadcasters are hiding. City deny everything. Their statement calls them "innocent" and describes the judgement as "opinion" containing "clear material errors, of law, principle and fact," and "unsafe." CEO Ferran Soriano told staff in a video that the case rests on "a single false accusation: that the owner's personal money was somehow and secretly put into the club via some sponsors from Abu Dhabi. This is just not true." City have lodged an appeal that could run into January 2027 or later, no sanction has been decided, and the punishment hearing is a separate process with no date set. UEFA is watching from the touchline and will decide on its own case only once the Premier League's version finishes.
That genuine uncertainty is exactly what gets used as cover. The appeal is live, so the thinking goes, let's not make snap judgements, let's carry on billing them as appointment television and let the lawyers sort it out. That's a choice, and it's a cowardly one. A verdict exists. It is the formal position of the competition these broadcasters pay billions to show. Acknowledging it on air each time City play is just telling subscribers the truth about what they're watching.
Nobody is asking Sky to refuse the biggest draw in the league. City are box office, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. Put them on. But stop introducing them as if the last two years didn't happen. The embarrassment belongs to the people deciding how loudly to cheer. The viewers asking why they're cheering at all have nothing to apologize for.
