01.10.2026
_art_full.jpg)
Guilty on all charges
Man City systematically inflated revenues and reduced costs to hide the owner spending some £830 million to buy success on the field. What does this say about top-flight football? Carl Collins gives some compelling answers
When news broke that Manchester City had been found guilty on all charges relating to the Premier League's financial rules, I received a message from an Everton fan: “Man City found guilty. Everton deducted 10 points.” The joke refers to Everton’s 10-point deduction (reduced to six on appeal) in November 2023, after the club was found to have breached the ‘profitability and sustainability’ rules.
The cases are not identical - Everton admitted its single breach, while Man City denies the multiple violations, covering multiple seasons and multiple regulations. The most striking contrast - which leads to the joke - is that Everton’s case was concluded and punished within months, while City’s has taken years with no official judgment or sanctions to date. Whatever the eventual outcome, the comparison raises questions about the consistency, speed and credibility of football’s regulatory system.
Suspicion over the fairness and legality of Man City’s ownership and spending has clouded football for years. In 2015, Portuguese football fan and whistleblower Rui Pinto - the hacker behind the website, Football Leaks - began releasing documents obtained from clubs, agents and players, exposing what he described as the “hidden side of football”.1 The German magazine Der Spiegel subsequently worked with Pinto to produce a series of exposures. Pinto was arrested in Hungary in 2019 and extradited to Portugal, where he was subsequently convicted of attempted extortion, unlawful access to data and breach of correspondence. A separate French case concerned leaks about Paris Saint-Germain FC, while a new Portuguese trial began in January 2026, involving around 200 alleged hacking offences.
The reports brought unprecedented attention to the opaque financial arrangements surrounding football. It was against this backdrop that UEFA opened an investigation into Man City in 2019 over ‘financial fair play’ violations.2 In February 2020, they found Man City had overstated sponsorship revenue in accounts and break-even information submitted between 2012 and 2016, and had failed to cooperate with the investigation. It imposed a two-season exclusion from UEFA competitions and a €30 million fine. However, the Court of Arbitration for Sport subsequently overturned the competition ban and reduced the fine, finding insufficient evidence for some of UEFA’s conclusions and ruling that a number of alleged breaches were time-barred.
In February 2023, the Premier League brought its own 115 charges. They included the failure to provide accurate financial information and failure to cooperate with its investigation: in short, we are now told that Manchester City systematically broke the rules by inflating its revenues and reducing its costs in order to hide the owner spending some £830 million on the club.
Unless there is a successful appeal, possible sanctions include points deductions, suspension, expulsion, player-registration restrictions and financial penalties. As there are no fixed sanctions for financial breaches, the eventual penalty is uncertain, fuelling all manner of conspiracy theories.
Ownership
Football fans have become accustomed to hugely wealthy individuals and corporations taking over clubs. There are numerous historical examples of local benefactors financing success. One is the romanticised story of local Blackburn Rovers fan-turned-billionaire Jack Walker, who bankrolled the club to the 1994-95 Premier League title, including breaking the British transfer record to sign Alan Shearer.3
This long preceded the cynical Roman Abramovich, who purchased Chelsea FC a decade later and is widely viewed as pioneering the modern era of mega-rich overseas owners. Following Abramovich came former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who purchased Man City in 2007.4 Somewhat foreshadowing the current verdicts, and possibly highlighting the character of such owners, Thaksin was enveloped in corruption allegations linked to the 2006 military coup that ended his premiership. The Thai government froze around £900 million of his assets, leaving him unable to continue financing the club. The next year, Man City was bought by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan through the state-backed Abu Dhabi United Group.
A dark-humoured chant by Man City fans at the time of Thaksin’s tenure went: “City’s going down with a billion in the bank”. Behind the humour of this chant, which is likely to return to the terraces, lays an acceptance - conscious or otherwise - about the current ownership structures and financing, but also governance within football. In analysing this, we need to look beyond particular charges and ask what football clubs now represent within society.
It is certainly a mistake to view ownership of a football club as simply being about profit. It isn’t.5 Using Marx’s distinction between exchange-value and use-value, it is clear that many mega-rich owners put the latter above the former. Exchange-value can be measured in financial returns (ticket sales, commercial income and eventually the value of the asset itself, etc). But the use-value can be prestige, international visibility and the status that comes with the club winning silverware.
City illustrates this particularly clearly. Since Sheikh Mansour acquired the club in 2008, it has been transformed into one of football’s dominant forces. The club’s success has enhanced the prestige of Mansour and with it that of Abu Dhabi. Critics, including Amnesty International, have rightly described the use of City’s success and global profile as a form of “sports-washing” - football is used to deflect attention from Abu Dhabi’s complete lack of democracy and horrendous human rights record.6
Abu Dhabi is, of course, an integral part of the United Arab Emirates, and that confederation of thoroughly corrupt petty kingdoms matters for Britain economically, politically and strategically. Oil and gas rich, the UAE is awash with petrodollars. Bilateral trade is worth around £25 billion a year, while a sovereign investment partnership has generated some £30 billion in UAE investment commitments. Successive British governments have therefore bent over backwards, flattered, bowed and scraped … and turned a blind eye. All in the hope of attracting further dirty money.
In light of the guilty verdict against Manchester City, culture secretary Lisa Nandy diplomatically said: “We welcome investment in English football from all over the world”, adding coyly that “the rules of the game are not set by investors”. On becoming prime minister, Andy Burnham spoke to UAE president Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan (Mansour’s brother), thanking him “for his country’s investment”, particularly into Burnham’s beloved Manchester. Now he appears to be urging the Premier League to impose the mildest of punishments (if any).
It would be wrong to reduce ownership of City to nothing more than an arm of UAE foreign policy. It’s authorities insist that the club’s ownership is a private matter. But the close relationship between economics, geopolitics and soft power is as plain as a pikestaff.
Governance
It is in this context that the Premier League’s financial rules become more complicated than a simple question of enforcing an even playing field. The league is regulating capitalist organisations whose value far exceeds what is on the books.
The Premier League, while allegedly acting as a neutral arbitrator, is a money-generating machine. The success of its clubs, their global reach, their marketing deals, their ability to sell hugely lucrative broadcasting rights, depend, at the end of the day, on buying the best players and managers available. And they are expensive. Very expensive.
So, when it comes to punishing Man City, we should expect more delay and nothing swingeing. Some of the other clubs will protest that they have been robbed … not least of silverware. That could well be fought out in the civil courts at huge expense. But the Premier League has to police the behaviour of clubs, while looking after what is, after all, a collective brand. It will certainly not want to put off mega-rich individuals from putting their ill-gotten gains into the game.
Not fair
We should certainly reject the naive notion that financial breaches are a diversion from what is otherwise healthy competition. On match day there are 22 players on the field, but what got them there, what keeps them there, is the ability of clubs to outbid each other in the transfer market. When it comes to top-flight football, money and who wins are closely connected. That does not detract from the fantastic skills on display, the role of chance, the decisions of the manager, the approval or disapproval of fans. So,ß while there are giant killers, at the end of the day money decides on average.
Capitalist competition produces the concentration of capital, big crushes small. Applying this to football, while Manchester City occasionally faces minnows and can come a cropper, its main, its serious opponents are other enormously money-rich organisations, such as Chelsea, Arsenal, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, etc. They compete for players, coaches, supporters, sponsorships, broadcasting audiences, commercial markets … and trophies. The pressure to gain a competitive advantage is not an aberration: it is built into the structure.
Whether that advantage is achieved within the rules established by the governing institutions is complicated by the system within which the clubs sit. The Man City story is not simply a morality tale about a mega-rich individual owner and dodgy executives: the issues are bigger than that. The club may ultimately be heavily punished, or it may get away with the 114 breaches with the equivalent of a slap on the wrist.
But the deeper lesson is not simply that City has flagrantly broken the rules. The whole structure of Premier League football makes it necessary to generate more and more money in order to secure competitive advantage.
-
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2008-09-01/manchester-city-owner-agrees-to-sell-to-abu-dhabi-inqggwiy.↩︎
-
See ‘Not all about profit Weekly Worker September 17: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1601/not-all-about-profit.↩︎
-
www.theguardian.com/law/2018/nov/11/manchester-city-owners-accused-sportswashing-gulf-image.↩︎